Smart Casual
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€21.99
Regular price
€22.99
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Sale price
€21.99
In Smart Casual, Alison Pearlman investigates what she identifies as the increasing informality in the design of contemporary American restaurants. Pearlman takes us hungrily inside the kitchens and dining rooms of restaurants coast to coast - from David Chang's Momofuku Noodle Bar in New York to the seasonal, French-inspired cuisine of Alice Waters and Thomas Keller in California to the deconstructed comfort food of Homaro Cantu's Moto in Chicago - to explore the different forms and flavors this casualization is taking. Smart Casual examines the assumed correlation between taste and social status, and argues that recent aspects to these distinctions have given rise to a new idea of sophistication, one that champions the omnivorous. The boundaries between high and low have been made flexible because of our desire to eat everything, try everything, and do so in a convivial setting.
Alison Pearlman is a Los Angeles-based art historian and cultural critic who blogs under the name the Eye in Dining. She teaches modern and contemporary art and design history at Cal Poly Pomona and is the author of Unpackaging Art of the 1980s, also published by the University of Chicago Press.