"Restaurants, diners, and cafes dot every metropolis and whistle-stop in America, employing roughly 4.1 million chefs, cooks, and food preparation workers. In this commercially competitive, yet creative world of cooking, what does it take for a cook to "make it"? Making It: Success in the Kitchen explores how success, averageness, and failure in the blue-collar culinary industry hinges on the accumulation of kitchen capital, a cultural asset that displays a person's grasp of workplace culture, ability tocook, and their spot within the kitchen pecking order. Using interviews and ethnographic observations, Making It shows how chefs and cooks strive to amass kitchen capital through education, learning how to physically embody expertise, their emotions, andexerting power over others' space and person. And as they do so, how kitchen workers' personal ideas of what it means to succeed and achieve evolve and reform"--
The restaurant industry is one of the few places in America where workers from lower-class backgrounds can rise to positions of power and prestige. Yet with over four million cooks and food-preparation workers employed in America’s restaurants, not everyone makes it to the high-status position of chef. What factors determine who rises the ranks in this fiercely competitive pressure-cooker environment?
Making It explores how the career path of restaurant workers depends on their accumulation of kitchen capital, a cultural asset based not only on their ability to cook but also on how well they can fit into the workplace culture and negotiate its hierarchical structures. After spending 120 hours working in a restaurant kitchen and interviewing fifty chefs and cooks from fine-dining establishments and greasy-spoon diners across the country, sociologist Ellen Meiser discovers many strategies for accumulating kitchen capital. For some, it involves education and the performance of expertise; others climb the ranks by controlling their own emotions or exerting control over coworkers. Making It offers a close and personal look at how knowledge, power, and interpersonal skills come together to determine who succeeds and who fails in the high-pressure world of the restaurant kitchen.
The restaurant industry is one of the few places in America where workers from lower-class backgrounds can rise to positions of power and prestige. But what determines who succeeds or fails in this pressure-cooker environment? Through extensive interviews and fieldwork, sociologist Ellen Meiser discovers how status in the kitchen is tied to knowledge, interpersonal skills, and emotional labor.
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