Spatializing Authenticity: The Scaled (Micro-)landscapes in/of Brooklyn Restaurants

Building on work concerning the "scaling of taste" (Silverstein 2016) and the
hierarchical ordering of people, objects, and place (e.g. T rinch and Snajdr 2017), this
paper orients specifically to language materiality and political economy (Cavanaugh
and Shankar 2017), and the social semiotics of luxury (Thurlow and Jaworski 2012).
Against this theoretical backdrop, I am concerned with the discursive production of
status and, specifically, the management of privilege in contemporary dining
practices; in other words, how the "micro-landscapes" (Juffermans 2018) of elite
eating contribute to, and (re)inscribe class hierarchies. To this end, my paper presents
an ethnographic discourse analysis of four renowned restaurants in Brooklyn, New
York, drawing on photographs of building exteriors and interiors, menus, food,
marketing materials, websites, interviews with owners/chefs, and fieldwork
observations. Across the aforementioned genres, modalities and venues, a series of
rhetorical strategies become apparent: historicity, simplicity, pioneer spirit, lowbrow
appreciation, and locality/sustainability - all of which are key to the careful
management and (dis)avowal of distinction/privilege in the discursive production of
elite authenticity (Mapes 2018). In short, my analysis demonstrates not only how
places and landscapes are caught up in a complex movement of bodies, texts, and
materials, but also how these processes of spatialization obfuscate the construction
of eliteness in food discourse. As such, this paper encapsulates the change from
traditional practices of conspicuous consumption (Veblen 2007[1899]) to the postclass
ideologies (Thurlow 2016) and omnivorous consumption (Khan 2014) at the
heart of contemporary class formations.