Eat Here Now! Why the Anthropology of Restaurants Matters

ABSTRACT In the last few decades, anthropologists have focused an increasing amount of attention on restaurants. The study of restaurants is not unique to anthropology, and anthropologists arrived relatively late to a field that has been largely dominated by historians, economists, sociologists, and others. What distinct insights has anthropology brought to the study of restaurants? How has that research contributed to the transformation of the anthropology of food? Drawing on my research on New Orleans restaurants, along with comparative work by anthropologists elsewhere, I review some of the key questions that make the anthropology of restaurants distinctive.