ABSTRACT
Restaurants are seemingly mundane elements of our contemporary landscape. Sometimes they can also appear as mysterious stage sets for elaborate performances. Studying restaurants in the context of teaching anthropology provides another opportunity to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange by getting students to think about, interpret, and analyze a facet of their experience that they may have taken for granted. Thinking about restaurants allows students to develop descriptive skills, make observations, conduct ethnographic interviews, and build an analysis. Although we usually assign individual research projects, restaurants provide considerable potential for collaborative work. Students can work together but focus on different aspects of the same restaurant. one could combine 'inside' and 'outside' perspectives and get students to think about how these issues are interrelated for example, how the sense of kinship or ritual performance created in the space of restaurants also spills out as part of defining neighborhoods, whether in relation to class, race, ethnicity or gender.
