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Photos: "Cookies 'n Milk" dessert at Otom Restaurant, Chicago, December 2008. Chef: Daryl Nash.

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VISUAL CULTURE CAUCUS SESSION: FOOD AESTHETICS

Ninety-eighth Annual Meeting of the College Art Association, Chicago, Illiniois, February 10-13, 2010

Session Chair: Dr. Alison Pearlman, Associate Professor of Art History, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, apearlman@csupomona.edu.

While social scientists and culinary historians have long examined the cultures of food production and consumption, only in recent years has interest surged among historians and critics of visual art and design. None too soon! Given the importance of aesthetic considerations to food production and consumption--in food selection, preparation, presentation, dining, food-related media, and food-related architecture, packaging, and graphic design--the contributions of visual studies to this subject matter are well overdue.

For the "Food Aesthetics" session, the Visual Culture Caucus is seeking original, unpublished papers to be presented as 15-20-minute talks. Panelists' papers may explore the social significance of any aspect of the visual and/or spatial aesthetics of food production or consumption of any culture or period. Papers may address such topics as food sourcing and selection, culinary styles, food styling, food imagery (including the infamous "food porn"), the designed spaces of food (restaurants, markets), as well as the aesthetics of performance in dining or food offering.

Submissions are welcome from art, design, and cultural-studies scholars, critics, and journalists; artists and designers; and those in food-related industries. To submit a proposal, please e-mail the session chair with a statement of your interest and expertise in your topic and attach the following documents: your resume or curriculum vitae (including reliable contact information for the summer months) and a maximum-250-word abstract of your proposal that includes and is headed by your name and institutional affiliation. 

Please note that your submission represents a commitment to travel to Chicago to present your paper at the CAA conference if your proposal is accepted. DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: July 9, 2009.

BLOG-READY BURGERS

It goes without saying that the burger you order in a restaurant should arrive ready to be eaten. But should it come ready to be photographed, too? With the proliferation of food blogs published by amateur, unannounced, and anonymous restaurant-goers, we may have entered an era when they do.

Consider my photographs from last week's dinner at Umami Burger, a Los-Angeles newcomer to the sophisticated-burger scene. There is nothing special about the photos. I do not have photographic skill. It is the burgers that are extraordinary--albeit in a way easily overlooked because we are used to seeing the effect in question in food-magazine photography. Look again.

Notice the perfectly even sheen on the top bun? From my entire personal history of consuming restaurant hamburgers, I do not recall being presented with a burger so artfully shellacked. Having enjoyed many tasty burgers in my time, including "gourmet" burgers, I conclude that such a feature is unnecessary for taste or as a byproduct of cooking methods.

Of course, I've known shiny streaks and spots and smears--accidental grease. The unintended traces of a fast-moving cook. But at Umami Burger there was such complete coverage, and consistent, too, on every burger carried out of the kitchen. I should mention that the glossiness did not detract from taste. Our burgers did not taste oily, but delectable. So I believe these burgers were deliberately dressed to impress--the eye and the lens, not the taste buds. Put in terms of food porn, our burgers were "fluffed."

More than that, they were prepared to compensate for my unprofessional food photography, my lack of food-stylist help and expertise, and that of all the other food bloggers snapping flashless photos between courses. Our amateur photography cannot be relied upon for public relations to the restaurant's advantage. Perhaps we should see blog-ready food as a tactic in restaurant media defense. Through it, a restaurant can reclaim some of the control over its visual representation that it lost in the proliferation of amateur reportage. 

Copyright 2009 Alison Pearlman. All rights reserved.  

THE RESTAURANT WEBSITE: FROM ANTECHAMBER TO COMMUNITY CENTER

Since the circa 2001 advent of the restaurant website, you could say that every restaurant that created one gained a new--and a new kind of--front room. The restaurant website is certainly a space of anticipation. Any decent antechamber is. It offers prospective diners a peek into the restaurant environment and its cuisine. It goes further than your average waiting room, allowing you to inspect the other guests' plates in close-up and for as long as needed. It may tell you something about the restaurant's staff members' professional histories and, if the site is set to share, their personal passions. Importantly, it gives us would-be diners the chance to opt out if we're not interested--we've made no commitments at that juncture--without embarrassing anyone involved.

Above all, the restaurant website tends to make the restaurant-going experience more egalitarian. It removes the social awkwardness or intimidation that used to come from staring through dark glass or hoping to find a menu posted outside. Restaurant reviews have always had a unique role to play in informing consumers. But the restaurant website allows the restaurant to present itself as it would like to be seen. Restaurant-goers have a way of independently gauging what the restaurant itself wants from its consumers straight from the source. Does it insist on a prix-fixe menu? Can you expect large portions?

In pajamas-on comfort, one can open as many restaurant doors as one can stand to, peek around, often at close range, inspect the decor and dishes, and decide if one would like to physically trek to any. The restaurant website offers unprecedented accessibility and a way of educating the consumer.

Of course, there is a range in the richness and the content of restaurant websites. So their actual effects vary greatly. And not everything about restaurant websites has been positive. So much pre-viewing of the restaurant's cuisine can lead to a loss of surprise. It can hold the restaurant experience captive to comparison with photography-induced expectations. This effect was once described by the still-relevant theorist of photography and culture, Walter Benjamin, as a loss of the uniqueness of time-and-place experience. In a famous 1936 essay entitled "The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility," he argued this was the effect photography had on works of art. It applies here as well. The trade off of for this unique physical experience, as Benjamin too would admit, is social egalitarianism. Photography may have damaged what Benjamin called the "aura" of painting, but it also made it accessible.

More recently, some restaurant websites have added on a still further structure--the social-networking site. What was an antechamber has, with blogs and Twitter, stretched into a community center. In the case of the renowned Chicago restaurant Alinea, those who bought the Alinea book can join www.alineamosaic.com and carry on discussions with the other enthusiasts as well as the staff of Alinea, who answer questions and give insight into the cuisine and the backstage life of the restaurant. Another noteworthy phenomenon is the Kogi BBQ taco truck in Los Angeles (see pictures). It built a following through the application of a media-savvy team to a taco truck business that combines the Mexican formats of tacos and burritos with the Korean flavors of kimchi, spiced meats and tofu. Their web team uses Twitter to keep fans constantly apprised of their two Kogi trucks' locations. People catch up with the truck, add their own tweets, and stand in line for as much as two hours to dig into their street-friendly, ethnic-fusion munchies.

Thus we have arrived at Restaurant Websites 2.0 (Community Building). This phase in restaurant website design helps to cultivate sub-cultural communities, which transcend, as all websites do, particular places and times. And yet, it does so in a way that creates anticipatory community. For, when finally meeting at the particular restaurant, or taco truck location, the online socializing results in reinforcing and compounding those social bonds. It literally cashes it in--in the case of Kogi, for scrumptious tacos and the swell sight of people who followed the truck as you did standing in line trading knowing smiles and chatting.

Benjamin could never have anticipated that the loss of uniqueness of experience in space and time created by mass media could come full circle and become an actual generator of it.

Copyright Alison Pearlman 2009. All rights reserved.

CONTEMPORARY ROCOCO

Let's try to explain the micro-trend of contemporary restaurant (though by no means only restaurant) interiors of combining the clean, simple lines and surfaces of modernism with the charmingly ornate profusions of a sort of Rococo style. We'll call this combination "contemporary Rococo." Although he is not alone working in this manner, the designer who most consistently does, and has done in restaurants, is Philippe Starck. The photo above shows the graphic design of a candy-counter takeout container from The Bazaar by Jose Andres at the SLS hotel in Beverly Hills, one of Starck's 2008 restaurant designs. Photos of the interior are not allowed, so this container will have to do for now to convey a sense of the basic elements of contemporary Rococo.

It would be easy to dismiss this combination of industrial and old-world, serious and kitsch, as just another, even belated, manifestation of a familiar formula of postmodernism in design, that penchant for eclectic mixtures of old and new styles and highbrow and lowbrow cultural references that embrace an omnivorous as well as campy approach to culture. Starck's penchant for antlers and chandeliers against monochromatic backgrounds, as in the outdoor lounge area at SLS, is fiendishly playful in the postmodernist style indeed.

Contemporary Rococo is certainly that. But there's something more specific going on in this particular stylistic mixture. 

In Starck's restaurants, for example, as at the smaller-scale but perfectly on-trend LA Mill Coffee designed by Rubbish Interiors, also in Los Angeles, there is a pattern in the relationship between modernism and Rococo. Modernism becomes a flat-surface backdrop for the Rococo elements of chandeliers or flourishes on chairs, which, owing to the modernist elements' flatness and monochrome and its playing a background role, allows the Rococo to become, above all, a GRAPHIC effect. The modernism serves to flatten the Rococo into graphic pattern. Even though these restaurants are three-dimensional--arguably, four-dimensional--spaces, this aspect of their design seems to aspire to the condition of two dimensions.

It is the case that contemporary architecture is, as never before, collaborative with graphic design. Is what we are seeing with the contemporary Rococo not only a manifestation of postmodernism but also a symptom of the contemporary influence of graphic design on environmental space?

Copyright 2009 Alison Pearlman. All rights reserved.

THE (WESTERN) RESTAURANT = THE CITY + THE HOME

The evolution of the restaurant, at least in the West, is inextricable from two related developments: the growth of cities and the increasing need or desire to replace the homemade meal. I would argue that, since the restaurant's inception in the late eighteenth century, these twin drivers, the city and the home, have had a lasting influence on the physical design and typology of restaurants.

The territories of the city and the home have always been opposites. Urbanism involves being among strangers, of sharing pathways and landmarks but only optionally words or glances, and of reveling in the totality of commercial or public spectacle. The home, by contrast, is the sphere of aesthetic and social intimacy, where secrets may be shared in cozy proximity with family, friends, and furniture.

The opposing influences of city and home have manifested themselves throughout the history of restaurant design. If there has been one constant theme, one persistent preoccupation of restaurant architects and interior designers throughout the restaurant's history, it is how to balance the promotion of strangers' conviviality or communalism and the accommodation of diners' privacy--in other words, how to balance its dual, and potentially conflicting, DNA strands of public street and private home.

Restaurant designers and historians have constantly spoken of designers' efforts to make the diner feel "comfortable." By this they mean at ease eating, and sharing once-domestic rituals, amid strangers and courtesy of the kitchen of strangers. Establishing trust has always been the first task of any restaurant design.

Because reconciling communalism and privacy, the city and the home, has been a central historic challenge of restaurant design, it is possible to understand any restaurant as occupying some point along the spectrum of "home" and "city." All restaurants are some combination of the two types. You can tell which way they lean by what they emphasize in their design.

"City" elements in restaurants include spectacular design features that can be seen throughout the restaurant--a large sculptural installation, an open kitchen, a water feature in the center. These are like landmarks, the Times-Square-billboard-and-skyscraper effects of urbanism brought into interiors. They cultivate communal experience, serving as common points of reference. Long communal tables, as in some gastro-pubs, or counter seating, as in many diners, also offer a sense of urban communalism but without the spectacle of a centralized figure.

"Home" features in restaurant design include strong design distinctions and more space between the zones occupied by private tables. They also may include relatively lengthy or aesthetically transitional thresholds. One may be between the entrance door and where the seating begins. Others may be found between groups of tables. The more "home" the restaurant is, the more it is divided into several smaller dining zones, each with a distinct character and shielded from the others by literal or optical barriers, aesthetic differences, and/or sound buffering. "Home" style cultivates distance and offers transitions between tables or groups of tables, thus fostering intimacy and privacy among people of individual parties.

So long as the restaurant is the functional result of urbanism and home replacement, it will manifest the tensions and points of harmony between the city and the home in its design.

Copyright Alison Pearlman 2009. All rights reserved.