ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the intersections of mobilities, commercial hospitalities and socialities performed in tourist places and suggest that notions of hospitality and place are sensed through individual and group entanglements in the complex flows of people, food and drink-scapes, capital, images, objects and fashions found in eating and drinking venues. Cafs, restaurants and bars are commercial hospitality spaces where tourist places are tasted by visitors and residents. Simultaneously, the hospitalities created in venues communicate messages of style and taste to different communities of consumers. Examining urban cultures created by performances of hospitalities and socialities in eating and drinking venues therefore enables an analysis of some of the consumption and image factors driving global place competition. The chapter highlights the mobilities and practices of the chasers and definers of cultural capital in place, who weave desirable places and covetable eating and drinking activities in place into webs of stories and narratives they produce when constructing their social identities.
