Topographies of Taste: American Cities and Gustatory Hierarchies

Through the twentieth century restaurant critics and commentators in New York and New Orleans constructed two different maps of taste, ethnicity, regionality and nation. Based on newspaper coverage in publications such as the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Picayune and the Times-Picayune over their whole print run (from about 1850 to today), and recent evaluations in Zagat and Michelin, this paper shows how different kinds of diacritically marked restaurants have been historically evaluated in the long-twentieth century, both in terms of popularity and prestige.

Typically American taste-makers have framed their appropriation of culinary cultures in two divergent ways: first, as high-status foreign foods, initially limited to Continental and French cuisines, eventually consecrating Italian and Japanese cookery at the end of the twentieth century; second, as the low-status product of the habitual work and implicit knowledge of the urban, immigrant poor classified as ethnic fare. There is a two-fold ethnic succession here: one in the ethnicity of the labor force; and the other in the sphere of food served.  The two are shaped by each other in counter-intuitive ways. Louisiana cuisine – as Francophone and rural yet crystallizing in New Orleans -- strikes a distinctly dissonant note in the construction of a normative American gastronomic hierarchy. This paper maps the discordant topographies of taste centered on two American cities in the twentieth century.