Search results for ""author alison pearlman""

We’ve all ordered from a restaurant menu. But have you ever wondered to what extent the menu is ordering you? In this fascinating new book, art historian and food lover Alison Pearlman takes an inquiring look at the design of physical restaurant menus—their content, size, scope, material, and more—to explore how they influence our dining experiences and choices (if they do at all). After years of collecting menus and studying their cultural significance through the lens of art history, Pearlman realized they were also profoundly important sales tools, affecting everything from a restaurant’s operations and profits to a diner’s expectations and behavior. There was just one problem: she wasn’t exactly convinced that any menu had ever swayed her own choices. So she set off on a mission to understand if, how, and when menus work in appealing to us diners, visiting and meticulously documenting more than 60 restaurants of all stripes in the greater Los Angeles area. In May We Suggest, Pearlman combines her own dining experiences with research from a broad range of disciplines, from experience design to behavioral economics. What emerges is a captivating, thought-provoking study of one of the most often read but rarely analyzed narrative works around: the humble menu.

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In Smart Casual, Alison Pearlman investigates what she identifies as the increasing informality in the design of contemporary American restaurants. Pearlman takes us hungrily inside the kitchens and dining rooms of restaurants coast to coast - from David Chang's Momofuku Noodle Bar in New York to the seasonal, French-inspired cuisine of Alice Waters and Thomas Keller in California to the deconstructed comfort food of Homaro Cantu's Moto in Chicago - to explore the different forms and flavors this casualization is taking. Smart Casual examines the assumed correlation between taste and social status, and argues that recent aspects to these distinctions have given rise to a new idea of sophistication, one that champions the omnivorous. The boundaries between high and low have been made flexible because of our desire to eat everything, try everything, and do so in a convivial setting.

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