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Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Former restaurant critic Brian Duff examines the restaurant at a critical moment. In the last few decades restaurants and food culture have achieved extraordinary cultural purchase. A well-executed appetizer or entree became important achievements, chefs became heroes and thought leaders, dining out became theater, plating became art, and the supertaster became the savant. But in recent years the restaurant has faced crisis upon crisis: revelations of sexism and harassment, racism and low pay, unsafe and unfair conditions of labor, and Covid. Having taken a pandemic era break from our habits of eating out, might we return to the table with a new awareness, and a forgetfulness regarding old habits? Restaurant takes a deep dive into the drives, desires, and anxieties associated with dining out and suggests that, because of the meaning we find in good food, the restaurant offers unique opportunities to change the quality of our engagement with others and create shared meaning across the table.>
About the author
Brian Duff is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of New England, USA. He is the author of The Parent as Citizen. His writing about restaurants, food and wine has appeared in the Portland Phoenix, the Boston Phoenix and the New Yorker.Christopher Schaberg is Director of the Program in Public Scholarship at Washington University in St. Louis, USA, and the author of The Textual Life of Airports (2012), The End of Airports (2015), Airportness (2017), The Work of Literature in an Age of Post-Truth (2018), Searching for the Anthropocene (2019), Pedagogy of the Depressed (2021), and Adventure: An Argument for Limits (2023), all published by Bloomsbury. He is also the founding co-editor (with Ian Bogost) of Bloomsbury's Object Lessons book series.Ian Bogost is an author and an award-winning game designer. He is Barbara and David Thomas Distinguished Professor in Arts & Sciences, Director of Film & Media Studies, and Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. Bogost is also Founding Partner at Persuasive Games LLC, an independent game studio, and a Contributing Editor at The Atlantic. Bogost is author or co-author of ten books, including Alien Phenomenology (2012)and Play Anything (2016).
