Kitchens The Culture of Restaurant Work or Kitchen Quickies

Kitchens - The Culture of Restaurant Work

Author: Gary Alan Fin

Kitchens takes us into the robust, overheated, backstage world of the contemporary restaurant. In this rich, often surprising portrait of the real lives of kitchen workers, Gary Alan Fine brings their experiences, challenges, and satisfactions to colorful life. He provides a riveting exploration of how restaurants actually work, both individually and as part of a larger culinary culture. Working conditions, time constraints, market forces, and aesthetic goals all figure into the food served to customers--who often don't know quite what they're getting.
The kitchen is a place of constant compromise, of quirks, approximations, dirty tricks, surprises, and short cuts, as Fine demonstrates in his deft, readable narrative. He brings to life the complicated relationships among kitchen workers--servers, dishwashers, pantry workers, managers, restaurant critics, and customers--and reveals the effects of organizational structure on individual relations.

Library Journal

In contrast to recent behind-the-scenes narratives describing the realities of the restaurant business (e.g., Irene Daria's Lutce: A Day in the Life of America's Greatest Restaurant, LJ 11/15/93), Kitchens is social analysis. Sociologist Fine (Talking Sociology, Allyn & Bacon, 1989) uses the "negotiated order" approach, coupled with a methodology of interviewing and participant observation, to examine how internal and external interrelationships have created the current food industryincluding its workers, organization, economics, and aesthetics. While written in an accessible style with a cogent introduction and helpful summaries at the end of each chapter, this ethnography will probably be most useful to those with a knowledge of or an interest in sociology. Nevertheless, the descriptions of the interplay between the micro and macrokitchen work vs. market demandsmake for fascinating reading and a more critical understanding of this cultural force.Wendy Miller, Lexington P.L., Ky.

Booknews

A guide introducing CD-ROM technology to neophytes and providing more advanced users with standards and trouble shooting information, the text is arranged for simplicity of use, covering basics, tutorials on installation, networking and publishing, and applications. New terminology is defined within the discussions, technical portions are marked off, and the appendix includes a vendor guide for buyers. A CD-ROM sampling MS-DOS/Windows and Macintosh applications is included. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Table of Contents:

	Preface
	Introduction	1
Ch. 1	Living the Kitchen Life	17
Ch. 2	Cooks' Time: Temporal Demands and the Experience of Work	54
Ch. 3	The Kitchen as Place and Space	80
Ch. 4	The Commonwealth of Cuisine	112
Ch. 5	The Economical Cook: Organization as Business	138
Ch. 6	Aesthetic Constraints	177
Ch. 7	The Aesthetics of Kitchen Discourse	199
Ch. 8	The Organization and Aesthetics of Culinary Life	219
	Appendix. Ethnography in the Kitchen: Issues and Cases	233
	Notes	255
	References	267
	Index	293

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Kitchen Quickies: Great Satisfying Meals in Minutes

Author: Marie Caratozzolo

Have you ever left work after a long, hard day feeling totally exhausted, but knowing that the second you arrive home, yet another job awaits--you have to make a meal, fast? Or maybe you've spent the day chasing after your kids or driving them from soccer practice to music lessons to play dates. Now everyone's clamoring for dinner. But is it possible to get a satisfying home-cooked meal on the table before, say, midnight? Absolutely!

The authors of Kitchen Quickies know that in this busy world, you just don't have time for hours of grocery shopping followed by hours of food preparation. Their solution? To begin with, virtually all of their over 170 kitchen-tested recipes--yes, really kitchen tested--call for a maximum of only five main ingredients other than kitchen staples. This makes supermarket shopping easier. Then the dish itself takes at most forty-five minutes to prepare from start to finish. As a bonus, these delicious dishes are actually good for you--low in fat and high in nutrients!

Kitchen Quickies begins by guiding you through the basics of quick-and-easy cooking. You'll learn about the ingredients and the equipment that can make meal preparation both fast and fun. Following this are ten spectacular chapters filled with exciting and imaginative dishes, including sensational soups, satisfying sandwiches, refreshing salads, fabulous pastas, tempting chicken and turkey dishes, sizzling seafood, hearty beef and pork fare, meatless delights, enticing vegetable and grain side dishes, and luscious desserts. In Kitchen Quickies, you'll learn how to make tangy Margarita Chicken, Savory Crab Cakes, saucy Penne From Heaven, and more--all in no time flat!

So the next time you think that there's simply no time to cook a good meal, pick up Kitchen Quickies. Who knows? You may even have time for a few quickies of your own.