Traces the evolution of American dining away from home, emphasizing how the restaurant's form, its fare and its location reflect the country's diverse economy and cultural life. This book also examines the growth of the new eating environments which have replaced the traditional American diner.

This history of the White Castle chain tells a "truly American success story (of) luck and hard work working behind one man to create an industry so pervasive that today it's an integral part of American pop culture" ("Publishers Weekly"). 23 illustrations.

Eating Out, first published in 2000, is a fascinating study of the consumption of food outside the home, based on extensive original research carried out in England in the 1990s. Reflecting the explosion of interest in food, ranging from food scares to the national obsession with celebrity chefs, the practice of eating out has increased dramatically over recent years. Through surveys and intensive interviews, the authors have collected a wealth of information into people's attitudes towards, and expectations of, eating out as a form of entertainment and an expression of taste and status. Amongst other topics they examine social inequalities in access to eating out, social distinction, interactions between customers and staff, and the economic and social implications of the practice. Eating Out will be a valuable resource to academics, advanced students and practitioners in the sociology of consumption, cultural studies, social anthropology, tourism and hospitality, home economics, marketing, and the general reader.

The authors contemplate the origins, architecture and commercial growth of wayside eateries in the US over the past 100 years. Fast Food examines the impact of the automobile on the restaurant business and offers an account of roadside dining.

From the hamburger haven to the temple of gastronomy, the restaurant is a fixture of modern life. But why is that so? What needs has the restaurant come to satisfy, and what needs has it come to impose upon the experience of the modern world? In Dishing It Out, Robert Appelbaum travels around America and Europe and through the annals of literature and history to explore the social meaning of the restaurant—and to discover what we ought to be asking of the restaurant experience today. Since its founding in pre-Revolutionary France, the restaurant has always inspired contradictory feelings and served contradictory purposes. It has stood for a kind of liberation: the embrace of pleasure and sociability for their own sake. But it has also encouraged narcissistic consumerism at the cost of the exploitation of restaurant workers, and the self-deception of restaurant-goers. Drawing on the work of such writers as Grimod de la Reynière, Jean-Paul Sartre, Isak Dinesen and M.F.K. Fisher, and sampling fare from macaroni cheese in workaday London to oysters and sausages in seaside France, Appelbaum argues that though restaurants are inherently problematic as social institutions, they are characteristic of who and what we are. They are expressions of what we need as human beings. And for that reason, though they contribute to inequality they can also be used to promote the interests of cultural democracy. A unique rethinking of the restaurant experience, at once entertaining and learned, Dishing it Out is an important contribution to our knowledge of food, literature, history and society.

In Creole Italian, Justin A. Nystrom explores the influence Sicilian immigrants have had on New Orleans foodways. His culinary journey follows these immigrants from their first impressions on Louisiana food culture in the mid-1830s and along their path until the 1970s. Each chapter touches on events that involved Sicilian immigrants and the relevancy of their lives and impact on New Orleans. Sicilian immigrants cut sugarcane, sold groceries, ran truck farms, operated bars and restaurants, and manufactured pasta. Citing these cultural confluences, Nystrom posits that the significance of Sicilian influence on New Orleans foodways traditionally has been undervalued and instead should be included, along with African, French, and Spanish cuisine, in the broad definition of "creole." Creole Italian chronicles how the business of food, broadly conceived, dictated the reasoning, means, and outcomes for a large portion of the nearly forty thousand Sicilian immigrants who entered America through the port of New Orleans in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries and how their actions and those of their descendants helped shape the food town we know today.