Paper short abstract:

This paper is concerned with the discursive production of class status and, specifically, the management of distinction/privilege in contemporary, “high-end” dining practices: the mediatization, marketing, preparation, staging, and eating of – and talking about – food at restaurants in Brooklyn, NY.

Paper long abstract:

Grounded in Bourdieu's (1984) classic perspective on the cultural production of taste, this paper orients to recent work on scale-making and second-order indexicality (Silverstein, 2016), language materiality and political economy (Shankar & Cavanaugh, 2012), and elite discourse and the social semiotics of luxury (Thurlow & Jaworski, 2012). Against this backdrop, I am concerned with the discursive production of class status and, specifically, the management of distinction/privilege in contemporary, "high-end" dining practices: the mediatization, marketing, preparation, staging, and eating of - and talking about - food. My paper presents a multimodal discourse analysis of four restaurants in Brooklyn, New York, drawing on interviews with owners/chefs, marketing materials, newspaper reviews and my own fieldwork observations. These four restaurants typify a current fashion for "up-market low-brow" eating, which is itself indicative of the way the borough as a whole is styled or branded. Documenting a range of semiotic tactics (e.g. words, images, sounds, spaces, corporeal actions), my analysis examines the key inter-dependent frames by which these particular dining experiences are organized and understood. Across the aforementioned genres, modalities and venues, a series of rhetorical strategies become apparent: historicity, simplicity, entrepreneurial spirit, and low-brow appreciation. In this way we see how the material-symbolic economy of these Brooklyn restaurants hinges on the careful management and (dis)avowal of distinction/ privilege in the discursive production of what I call elite authenticity (c.f. Cavanaugh & Shankar, 2014); all of which encapsulates and expresses the post-class ideologies (Thurlow, 2016) and omnivorous consumption (Khan, 2014) at the heart of contemporary class formations.