Discriminating Palates: Evaluation and Ethnoracial Inequality in American Fine Dining

Elite cultural fields are often not diverse. Existing studies have examined how marginalized cultural producers are actively discriminated against or excluded from positions of prestige, but less is known about how ethnoracial inequality affects the evaluative processes used to assess products in fields of cultural production. This article analyzes 120 in-depth interviews with critically-recognized chefs in New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area and 1,380 Michelin restaurant reviews to uncover the system of insidious racial inequality that shapes evaluation in the American fine dining field. I find that there are three logics of evaluation—of (1) technique, (2) creativity, and (3) authenticity—that are differentially enacted for distinct ethnoracial categories of restaurants in the field. I show how these different, racialized evaluative processes result in the systematic devaluation of culinary products categorically associated with non-whiteness, what I call Ethnic restaurants, and disproportionate consecration of products associated with whiteness, which I term Classic and Flexible restaurants. I bring the race/ethnicity and sociology of culture literatures together to illuminate the ways in which inequality infiltrates the logics that organize systems of value in fields of cultural production.