New Nordic upmarket bistros and the practical configurations of artful dining

ABSTRACT

This paper analyzes the blurring boundaries between food and art in the West by examining the contemporary field of upmarket dining. The study adopts a practice theoretical view, conceptualizes artful dining as a large-scale cultural formation (“teleoaffective formation”), and explores the configurations of artful dining in the context of New Nordic Upmarket Bistros (NNUBs). Based on blog texts, chef interview and participant observation at a Finnish NNUB, the study demonstrates how the local restaurant enthusiasts adopted and adjusted artful dining in a specific, “everyday” context of upmarket dining. The study presents dining at NNUBs as one of the many practices that have substantially expanded the art-oriented dining ideals beyond modernist cuisine. It discusses artful dining within the contemporary (gourmet) food culture and encourages further diversification of approaches in studies examining artful dining and the intersection of food and art.

KEYWORDS:

• Eating out
• upmarket dining
• food consumption
• foodie culture
• practice theory
• teleoaffective formation
• modernist cuisine
• New Nordic Cuisine

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Professor Minna Autio for commenting on the preliminary versions of the manuscript, Sasu Laukkonen for his time and openness during the project, and the reviewers for their thorough comments which greatly helped us to improve the text.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Modernist cuisine may be today understood as a wide-reaching, scientific culinary movement (see e.g., Borkenhagen 2017), yet in this paper we use the term in a specific sense, referring to the “modernist” restaurant revolution that associates famously with the restaurant elBulli and its head chef Ferran Adrià (see e.g., Opazo 2016; Raviv 2017). At the beginning of the twenty-first century, elBulli rose to a highly influential position and inspired numerous other restaurants across the culinary globe (see Opazo 2016). The influence of elBulli is not necessarily restricted to high-end restaurants and the modernist movement aims at creating cooking techniques etc. to be adopted at multiple types of venues and culinary contexts, yet in this paper, the “practice of modernist dining” refers to the high-end, clearly elBulli-inspired restaurants, such as Noma in Denmark and Alinea in the US. However, we do acknowledge there is a certain artificiality in such classifications. For example, although Tresidder (2015) defines Noma as a “terroir restaurant” and does not deploy modernist terminology, and although Raviv (2017) discusses New Nordic Cuisine (and e.g., Noma) as a potential step “beyond modernist cuisine”, Kaufman (2016) studies Noma (and Alinea) under the umbrella of “modernist cuisine”.

2. New Nordic Cuisine was a large-scale Nordic food political and identity project (see Leer 2016), yet in this paper we use the term in a narrower sense to refer to restaurants that take on New Nordic Cuisine ideals. Restaurants such as Maaemo (Norway), Geranium (Denmark) and Fäviken (Sweden) have succeeded well in various restaurant rankings and competitions and are prominent examples of high-end New Nordic restaurants.

3. For example, in Helsinki, New Nordic Upmarket Bistros have charged approximately 40–100 euros for a tasting menu (excluding drinks), depending on the length of the menu. This is by no means inexpensive, yet for a middle-class restaurant enthusiast in Finland, the price (as well as the availability of tables) enables frequent (e.g., monthly) visits.

4. As Evans (2018) notes, one of the main exponents of practice theory among the scholarship on consumption, Alan Warde, never distanced the “cultural” viewpoints from practice theory. Warde (2016, see also Neuman 2019) does promote putting more emphasis on the mundane aspects of eating, yet simultaneously demonstrates the deployment of practice theory in the context of culturally expressive dining out.

5. Arsel and Bean’s (2013) study on “soft modernism” as a guiding principle of home design illustrates such bridging neatly. Inspired by Hennion (2007), the authors conceptualize taste, a key concept of the culturally oriented analyses of consumption, as a social practice. They utilize practice theoretical vocabulary and the elements of practices as empirical tools to analyze the situated, practice-level configurations of the wide-spread cultural, esthetic ideal of soft modernism.

6. Due to the “extremely fast transformation” (Lane 2014) and rapid diversification of fine or upmarket dining, we avoid conceptualizing upmarket/fine dining as a practice with a single teleoaffective structure (although in some empirical cases this might suffice). Rather, we understand the contemporary field of upmarket dining as consisting of various kinds of (sub-)practices that each possess their own (although in part overlapping) teleoaffective structure.

7. Other Finnish examples include Grön, Ask, and Spis, and internationally speaking we consider the Danish Relae as one of the best-known examples of such restaurants (not surprisingly, C&S’s tiny book collection next to the window included the Relae cookbook), even though e.g., Relae is not dogmatically Nordic (see Leer 2016). Indeed, by NNUB we do not refer to any strict “Nordic” approach (as for e.g., ingredients) but to a practice that “embraces a lot of central ideas of the New Nordic Cuisine”, as Leer (2016) depicts Relae’s food. As Leer aptly shows, the second wave New Nordic chefs may refuse the label of New Nordic to establish one’s own creative position in the foodie world.

8. In August 2017, C&S was reborn in the same location as Ora, the concept of which resembles that of C&S’s yet offers the experience in a slightly more refined and expensive form (in February 2019, menu prices start from 89 euros).

9. Texts were searched via both Google and Bing with various search queries such as “Chef & Sommelier and blogi” (blog in Finnish). Each text published in food and/or restaurant blogs was included in the data, except for one case in which a blogger had published several texts about C&S. In this case, we chose only the text that appeared first in the search results and that also appeared most in the form of a restaurant review. Eventually, the substantial saturation that occurred over the analysis convinced us of the sufficient amount of texts.

10. Various and partly overlapping versions of these elements exist (see Arsel and Bean 2013). Our choice does not attempt to comment the differences between the versions but is rather a practical solution that nevertheless includes “general understandings” due to their central role in the concept of a teleoaffective formation.

11. Instead of speaking of some sort of extreme or extremely stylish form of food/restaurant consumption, “enthusiasts” refer here to the rather large and diverse group of amateurs or professionals who are “esthetically” interested in eating out, and who might be referred to as foodies. Notable differences between the level of enthusiasm and connoisseurship of e.g., bloggers surely exist. A few bloggers had clearly established a relationship with C&S at the time of writing.

12. Often one of the “best restaurants” in the World’s 50 best competition. Colagreco (who is also mentioned in blog texts) and Laukkonen have cooked in each other’s restaurants.

13. Laukkonen defines art in rather extreme terms and asserts that proper artists should be totally freed from the need to please anyone (so that s/he could e.g., “serve the customers with the tables turned upside down”), something that he as a chef must do to some extent to keep the business running.

14. Perhaps to exemplify (and rebel against) this, Finnish culinary audience has recently witnessed the emergence of the figure of Kozeen Shiwan (a former chef at an NNUB in Helsinki), who forcefully positions himself as an artist.

15. Another example of the interweavement of upmarket bistro food and art may be found in France, where the Le Fooding movement and gastronomic guide emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century as a form of “culinary futurism” and a reaction against the rule-based Nouvelle Cuisine (see Gopnik 2012, 262). As one of Gopnik’s informants and an exponent of Le Fooding puts it, “a good meal is a rich experience, of any sort”.

16. Although Opazo’s (2016, 172–173) “raw measure” of the global dispersal of elBulli-staff excludes Finnish chefs, e.g., restaurant Ask’s (one Michelin star, NNUB) head chef/owner Filip Langhoff has worked at elBulli. Furthermore, in the Finnish dining scene “the Adrià-effect” has been recently mediated through Noma. For example, from the late 2016 on (including one of the observation visits), Kim Mikkola, previously a sous-chef at Noma, worked a few months at C&S as a “co-head chef”.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Foundation for Economic Education [under Grant 10-5614].

Notes on contributors

Sami Koponen

Sami Koponen, MSc, is Doctoral Researcher at the University of Helsinki. This article is part of his on-going PhD study that explores the aestheticization and/or artification of food culture in the context of restaurant consumption. In addition to eating out, food-art interplay, and the foodie culture, his broader research interests revolve around the intersection of practice theory, consumer culture, and eating.

Mari Niva

Mari Niva, PhD, is Professor of Food Culture (2018–2021) at the University of Helsinki. Her field of expertise lies in the study of food culture, food choices and the social and cultural aspects of eating. In international and national projects, she has studied eating patterns in the Nordic countries, sustainable food consumption, the consumption and future prospects of meat and plant-based proteins, weight management as a practice, and consumer acceptance on food-related innovations. She has wide experience in using both qualitative and quantitative methods. She has authored and coauthored in total 33 refereed scientific articles in journals and books.