ABSTRACT
An intimate connection seems to link restaurants and travel, voyaging and eating, whether one thinks of "Diners Club" or recalls that Michelin makes tires in addition to awarding stars. On one level, there is of course the simple fact that people away from their places of residence still need to eat and that if "eating out" is something done only from necessity, it will primarily be travelers who do so (though it will also be the case that the homeless always "eat out"). In addition, however, there is a sense in which eating-especially, though not necessarily-in a restaurant has come to be a stand-in for travel, or an enticement to it. Avowedly "ethnic" restaurants are often decorated with posters that might just as well grace a travel agency's walls. The rebranding of British identity may be effected, in part, by offering tasty samples of "new British cuisine" to arriving international passengers at airports and ferry landings. During the mass tourism boom of the 1960s and early 1970s, several airlines participated actively in the publication of cookbooks and restaurant reviews.s
In all of these examples, restaurants are privileged locations for the experience of global variety and are sites where it is possible to overcome physical distance and cultural difference in order to experience a "taste of the Orient" or "olde Englishe fayre." If, as many studies have asserted, food and diet are among the more striking markers of cultural identity, then a visit to a restaurant is one of the easiest ways to encounter the Other. In a restaurant, as in the themed environments of the "Viking" Jorvik Centre or Disneyland's "Bear Country," difference is "locationally and perceptually convenient."6 So understood, restaurants offer the framework for a comparative study of cooking and cuisines. The comparison may take the form of Patricia Wells naming the ten finest restaurants in the world; or it may allow someone else to decide that he does, or does not, like Thai (or Cajun or Portuguese) food.l In both cases, the public fare of restaurants is taken as the standard unit of comparison.
