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by Vincent Battesti

Restaurants
in Bénédicte Florin, Anna Madœuf, Olivier Sanmartin, Roman Stadnicki & Florence Troin (dirs), Abécédaire de la ville au Maghreb et au Moyen-Orient, Tours, Presses universitaires François-Rabelais, collection Villes & Territoires, 2020, p. 319-321.
ISBN: 978-2-86906-750-9
Publishing house website: https://pufr-editions.fr/produit/ab...
PDF File: https://hal.science/hal-02904910

– In a few words:

Going out to the city to eat is a social and historical modality that implies not only a monetarization of the food product, but also of its preparation. The urban environments of the Maghreb and the Middle East have developed and regulated (Rosenberger, 2014) a varied catering offer. This offer allows access to types of culinary preparations that are sometimes too complex to prepare within the domestic space, or unknown to it (exotic dishes), often more detached from seasonal rhythms than family cooking. Generally speaking, however, these rich urban restaurants offer little culinary innovation and are hardly a platform for experimenting with new foods. Eating away from home, however, creates a form of food individualism and promotes an individual appreciation of taste (relativizing family conformity). Eating out in the city, with friends for leisure, but most often alone or with colleagues because of urban school or professional mobility, does not obviously allow the exercise of family sociability of the shared meal. However, more than competition among food and spaces, there is a complementarity of these types of way to eat (and a certain fluidity from one to the other), and they are strongly gendered: for men, the food of the public space, and for women, the domestic kitchen. (…)

In the same book, see also my contributions:
– Festivals & Celebrations - Cities in the Maghreb and the Middle East,
– Leisure - Cities in the Maghreb and the Middle East.

Urban
Published on - Updated on 5 July 2024