Pod Academy

Between 1975 and 2010 the style of gourmet dining, in America and beyond, was transformed. Increasingly, restaurants of ‘fine’ dining incorporated food, décor, and other elements previously limited to the ‘casual’ dining experience.  The celebrity chef, working in an open kitchen, took over from the Maitre D as the most important player, and in many places starched white tablecloths gave way to scrubbed wooden tables.  Innovation, experiment and diversity (rather than the long established rules of French cuisine) have become the order of the day. In this podcast Eric Lemay talks to Alison Pearlman, author of Smart Casual: The Transformation of Gourmet Restaurant Style in America (University of Chicago, 2013). It first aired on the New Books in Food channel of the New Books Network . The gourmet experience, of our imagination - an elegant restaurant with a single candle flickering at the center of a luminous white tablecloth,  a quartet playing somewhere in the background, a waiter slipping a perfectly plated