Making It : Success in the Commercial Kitchen

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 Commercial 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 to cook, 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, and exerting 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.

• | Author: Ellen T Meiser
• | Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• | Publication Date: Oct 11, 2024
• | Number of Pages: NA pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 1978840128
• | ISBN-13: 9781978840126