ABSTRACT
Authors such as Firat and Venkatesh (1993), and Brown (1995) have noted that postmodernity is prevailing in contemporary consumption. This means that aestheticism, eclecticism, and individualism are becoming more and more important. If we consider that these characterizations of contemporary consumption are true, and that in order to attract new customers or keep their clientele, French chefs have to respond by creating new offers or modifying their existing offer, it can be interesting to study the evolution of this offer system over a period of time. Such an analysis can help us discover how “haute cuisine” has been kept (which is probably the specificity of haute cuisine versus non-haute cuisine) and what has been changed over the years (which is probably the adaptation of the chef’s offer to the sociological change of the society). We will argue that the whole haute cuisine offer system changed a lot over the years but also went more and more back to references coming from the past. Such a situation in which the codes of the present and the past are more and more brought together by the chefs is, with no doubt, an indication of postmodernity. The restaurants of a lot of Michelin threestars chefs are presenting a way of life that no longer exists (the best examples are the restaurants of Alain Ducasse). But whether the way of life is remembered via the interior design and the dishes, or simply imagined via
the linguistic and historical references of the menu, it nevertheless signifies a widely held nostalgia (Holbrook 1990; Rybczinski 1986). The simple fact that the word haute cuisine is used very often, establishing a linguistic parallel with haute couture signifies that the chef is an artist and who is not only doing “cuisine” but something very distinctive that is signified by the adjective “haute.” And like in the artistic system, there is a strong opposition between two visions of the world: the artist has to create something or the artist has to talk about what is created (the product versus the discourse). These two visions coexist in the French haute cuisine system, but what is interesting is that both lead to the fact that the focus is on the experience of the customer on one hand (by stimulating the five senses), and that the past is strongly romanced in order to be a powerful tool of sense making on the other hand. The dominant factor of customer stimulation moved from the supremacy of the gustative dimension to the preeminence of the visual dimension with on overall stimulation of the five senses, and haute cuisine is not only an organoleptic experience but also an intellectual experience (like going to the theater or a museum). Eating becomes a pretext for experiencing something unique: destroying a piece of art through incorporation. This phenomenon of incorporation of the creation means that the customer, through a magical process, gains some power. Only she/he knows it . . . until the experience is described to friends, relatives, and so on. Constructing and maintaining a sense of the past for their customers allows French chefs to give even more consistency to their offer system. Such a perspective with a strong emphasis on the past is not new in analyzing consumption systems (Havlena and Holak 1991; Holak and Havlena 1992) but has not yet been extended to the specific case of haute cuisine. This is our major objective in the present chapter.
