Sound and the City: Noise in Restaurant Critics’ Reviews

Sound and the CityNOISE IN RESTAURANT CRITICS’ REVIEWS

John T. LangOccidental College

AbstractAre expert aesthetic judgments of restaurants shaped by sound and music? Althoughsound is an important design element in built spaces devoted to consumerism, such asrestaurants, it is a typically overlooked aesthetic structure. This project analyzes howwidely read and influential food writing help the general public define the acceptablerepertoire of music and sound in restaurants. I draw on a sample of restaurant reviewsthat appear in the LexisNexis archives of the San Francisco Chronicle and the New YorkTimes from January 1, 1998, until December 31, 2010. Specifically, I examine 1,208reviews written by thirteen reviewers in the San Francisco Chronicle and 598 reviewswritten by four reviewers in the New York Times. I connect critics’ evaluations of soundin fine-dining establishments to the emplacement of those practices within New York Cityand San Francisco. By doing so, this project explores how place-based backgroundaesthetics mediate expert opinion and facilitate consumption in the city.Keywords: aesthetics, consumers and consumption, New York City, San Francisco,restaurant reviewers, sound

IntroductionGastronomy is created and recreated through a discursive process, where variousactors shape the processes of food production and consumption that constituteculinary customs and standards. The food scene and culinary taste community thatresult from this fluid discourse help define the key elements of “fine dining.”Discourse around fine dining has touched on a wide range of these elements, butthe importance of sound in fine-dining establishments has yet to be fully explored.How do aesthetic elements like sound and music in a restaurant and criticaljudgments shape one another? This article analyzes how widely read and influentialfood writing help the general public define what is acceptable in restaurants. Iconnect critics’ sensory evaluations in fine-dining establishments to the

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emplacement of those practices within New York City and San Francisco. By doingso, I explore how place-based background aesthetics mediate expert opinion andfacilitate consumption in the city. The preferences and practices of restaurantpatrons, professional critics and fine-dining chefs reveal the extent to which placeand contextual aesthetics are as much a part of the restaurant life as food taste.

In particular, I combine an understanding of aesthetics as a mode of socialinteraction with the concept of critical expertise. I extend these concepts throughan exploration of place to help account for the differences in outcomes in differentcities. I want to bring various bodies of work into conversation with one another tostimulate the building of more cumulative theory around the critical evaluation ofrestaurants. I accomplish this by focusing on (a) the evaluative process ofrestaurant reviewing, (b) the aesthetic experiences of dining, with special emphasison the role of sound, and (c) the role of place. This means I explore howsociocultural context is essential to understanding the influence of sound in arestaurant setting. This article speaks to the collective construction andcontestation of taste, the congruency of aesthetic preferences, and provides asystematic analysis of an array of restaurant reviews and their social implications.

What Do Critics Notice?Restaurant reviewing consists of a routine series of interactions, known to everyonetaking part as the way things are done. At least that has been true since May 8,1962, when Craig Claiborne endeavored to recommend restaurants “on the basisof varying merits” every Friday in the New York Times. His work at the New YorkTimes created the template for objective, transparent, and professional foodcriticism. The key to a professional restaurant review is getting readers closer tounderstanding how a restaurant is, as well as what a restaurant is. Thus, reviewersmust do more than simply list the adjectives that might describe a restaurant tohelp readers recognize its character. Reviewers look for those qualities that havebecome most salient and account for how and why those qualities matter. Eachreview tells a story; the emphasis may shift from the food, to the chef, to theservice, to the atmosphere, and back to the food again. These relatively shortnarratives help readers understand what is appealing, or not, about a particularrestaurant. For readers who are pressed for time or who simply want anabbreviated recommendation, key characteristics such as the address, overall starrating, and average price are all generally summarized at the end. So too is a ratingor a note about the noise level in the restaurant.

Considering their training and the reverence given to chefs, it would be easy toassume the food—the work that is most directly controlled by the chef—is ofparamount importance. But what of the other elements? If we take the eater’s mealas the final work of art, what is happening in a restaurant that affects the result isa fundamentally important question. Moreover, what makes a restaurant experiencea “real” work of art? By looking at the other aspects that are thought to be lessimportant, I explore the forms of cooperation that make the art possible. As such,the present research serves as a practical example of the relationship betweenaesthetics and social order (DeNora 2000).

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It might be easy to dismiss the importance of sound in restaurant reviews basedon the lack of previous scholarly attention. But as an experiment, think about whatwould happen if we removed sound and music from a restaurant. Some evidencepoints to food being perceived as blander, like on an airplane (Stuckey 2012). Nowlet us consider the opposite, where the sound and music in a restaurant areintolerably loud. The server would not be able to read the specials to us; we wouldnot be able to tell the server what we want to eat anyway. We could not converse withour dinner companions. We might get a headache. The threat of hearing loss couldnow be considered an occupational hazard for those who dine out for a living (Platt2013). While service problems are consistently ranked as the top irritant, patronssurveyed by Zagat consistently cite noise as their second most frequent complaint.

The tracking of sound levels in restaurant reviews began in earnest in 1990,when the San Francisco Chronicle included “sound level” as one of the categoriesin its summary table reviews. The New York Times followed suit in 1998. Somerestaurant critics carry decibel meters with them for their reviews; RobertSietsema, formerly of the Village Voice, uses two of them (Platt 2013). Moreover,there is a spate of recent writing about the din in restaurants and its impact ondining (e.g. Bauer 2013; Buckley 2012; Hallock 2012; Hsu 2012; Platt 2013; Ulla2012). Though likely not paramount except in extreme settings, especially comparedwith the quality of food or even the level of service, how the sound level inrestaurants contributes to produce a dining experience worthy of a restaurantreview becomes an intriguing question.

Thinking about sound in restaurant reviews presents a number of challenges,such as theorizing the origins and spread of aesthetics ideals within specificcommunities, the evaluation of sound, and the intersection of sound with traditionalvariables in restaurant evaluations like food quality and service. In this article, Ioffer directions for research on sound in restaurants, an important andunderstudied social force. I suggest that restaurant culture has largely, and perhapsnecessarily, been operating in a restricted fashion by addressing an audiencealready disposed to believe that the chef matters most. I set accounts of soundalongside more traditional explanations of restaurant success like food and servicequality to see where this expanded aesthetic approach modifies, complements orsupersedes existing understandings in the literature. I map the elements of soundin restaurants and the interrelations to show how aesthetic elements constituteand interact with material factors to jointly influence critical opinion. I attempt tounderstand the reviewer’s articulation of dining, including taste and other aestheticfactors that influence their evaluation. In particular, I contend that sound level isnoteworthy and, in fact, one of the defining elements of a dining scene.

Restaurant Critics—Taste MakingProfessional restaurant critics fulfill several roles for the American public. Theyfilter the interests and agendas of diverse cuisines through a profession, a cultureand a discipline of reviewing. The ethical and procedural tenants Craig Claiborneestablished—such as visiting a restaurant multiple times, sampling a wide rangeof menu items, paying for meals, remaining anonymous while dining, waiting for a

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new restaurant to stabilize before publishing a review—became the model forprofessional food critics. Moreover, critics want to review restaurants thatpotentially drive trends, take risks, or encapsulate the highest level of skill and art.Being worthy of review is, in itself, an accomplishment. Restaurateurs, reviewersand readers all take these behaviors for granted and are upset when others do notbehave as expected. Some of these expectations were made visible in the swift,negative reactions to Pete Wells’s review of Guy Fieri’s Times Square restaurant(Bennett 2012; Lowder 2012; Wells 2012).

Reactions to this perceived breach of reviewer etiquette were swift because, inpractice, what most people think about restaurants is shaped by what they readabout them. Restaurant critics mediate the relationships between restaurateur, chefand consumer. Lacking a shared culinary tradition, Americans have learned muchof what they know about food and taste through restaurant reviews (Davis 2009).Although most will never eat in all of the restaurants they read about, knowingabout restaurants and chefs has become part of a modern, sophisticated, urbanidentity (Johnston and Baumann 2010). In this sense, restaurant reviews helpreaders navigate “a stream of discourse that defines the cultural hierarchy” andenrich our cultural capital (Shrum 1996: 10). Critical aesthetic judgments move thepublic toward consensus by reflecting and refracting tastes and trends (Davis 2009).Professional reviews identify certain foods as worthy as well as contextualize themeanings and motivations underlying food trends (Johnston and Baumann 2007).As such, restaurant criticism provides a literary and rhetorical foundation forgastronomy (Rao et al. 2005).

Restaurant reviewing as practiced in prominent outlets like the New York Timesand the San Francisco Chronicle establishes the authority of the reviewers and, indoing so, positions them as arbiters of culinary capital (Naccarato and LeBesco2012). Their position of restaurant reviewer and food critic helps to justify theirauthority to critique and recommend. As such, these restaurant reviewers, alongwith the publications that disseminate their expert opinions, mediate thetransmission of culinary norms and expectations. Take, for example, the very ideaof restaurant fine dining. This idea is not inherent in any arrangement of space ortype of food, but is rather an ongoing practical and discursive production (Fine1995; Leschziner 2007). Much like consensus of taste that emerged in nineteenth-century gastronomic writings to produce what we now consider French cuisine,modern American restaurant critics critically shape our understanding of thecontemporary gourmet foodscape (Ferguson 1998). The finished restaurants thatwe see, inhabit and visit are as much the consequence of decisions made byprofessional critics as the wishes of the patrons upon whom they depend for theirlivelihood (Gieryn 2000). Food writing is the making of a restaurant; it is also thenegotiation, translation and alignment of economic interests, technical skills andimperatives, and aesthetic judgments.

The Din of DiningSound in restaurants comes from a variety of sources, including the variety of hardsurfaces, the conversations and cell phones of patrons, as well as the clanging of

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silverware, plates and glasses. Everything from open display kitchens to bustlingbar scenes and the pervasive use of music has upped the noise level in places withhard surfaces for floors, walls and tables. Even seating arrangements, likecommunal tables, that encourage conviviality can intensify perceptions of noise.Trying to hold a conversation over the noise only increases the overall din.

Ambient music and purposefully programmed sound is such a taken-for-grantedelement of a built space that consumers notice it only when they enter a music-free environment. Yet sound connects us to and reflects social and historicmeanings (Feld 2012). So although consumers typically overlook it as an aestheticstructure, sound is an important design element of any built space devoted toconsumerism (Sterne 1997). In addition to using sound to interpret physical objectsand surfaces, the aural attributes of a physical space changes influence how peopleexperience and interact within that space (Blesser and Salter 2009; Shafer 1993).That soundscape encompasses the physical environment as well as the culturalinterpretation of that world (Thompson 2004). Even if consumers are notconsciously aware of the sensory stimulus from the soundscape, they react to it,altering their mood and associations (Blesser and Salter 2009; Shafer 1993). Thisis why some practitioners argue for a greater emphasis on sound and aurality aselements of modern architectural design (Sheridan and Van Lengen 2003).Restaurateurs can use purposeful noise, like background music, to shape publicperceptions of the space. The idea that music contributes to the atmosphere in adining room can be found as far back as the mid-sixteenth century tradition ofmusic played at feasts and banquets known as Taflemusik (literally “table-music”).The tradition continued in the form of jukeboxes and wallboxes, popular from themid-1940s to 1960s, providing individually-controlled music for many diners. Today,restaurants use their employees’ iPods and mp3 players, consult with DJs, and turnto multi-sensory branding companies like Mood Media or PlayNetwork who sellplentiful pre-programmed and tailor-made playlists to a wide-range of businesses,including restaurants.

From a business and hospitality perspective, we understand that restaurateursuse background music and prepared soundscapes to mask undesirable noise andsounds in their environment and to enhance the aesthetic appeal of their business(Milliman 1986). Auditory cues can, and do, modulate many different aspects ofperception and behavior in restaurants. For example, people move slower inenvironments featuring slow tempo or quiet music (Oakes and North 2008). Assuch, restaurants often use slower, softer music to encourage customers to linger.However, people eat and drink faster, and increase the total amount they consume,when music is louder and when the beats-per-minute are higher (North et al. 2003).This means that bars and restaurants can finely tune their music not only to createthe desired atmosphere but also to increase sales.

Though the academic study of this phenomenon is sparse, several prominentrestaurateurs are explicit in coupling sound with their food. One notable pairing isthe collaboration between the neuroscientist Charles Spence from Oxford Universityand Heston Blumenthal, chef-proprietor of the three-star Michelin restaurant, TheFat Duck (Spence et al. 2011). For one famous dish in a tasting menu entitled Sound

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of the Sea, Blumenthal composed a mixture of tapioca, fried breadcrumbs, crushedfried baby eels, cod liver oil and langoustine oil topped with abalone, razor clams,shrimps and oysters and three kinds of edible seaweed, served with an iPod so thatdiners could listen to the sound of the sea while they ate. In another instance,Charles Spence and his colleagues (2011) conducted an experiment to examine therelationship between sound and taste. The authors served diners two samples ofbacon and egg flavored ice cream. One sample was accompanied by the sound ofbacon sizzling in a pan, and the other sample was accompanied by the sound ofclucking farmyard chicken. People reported that they perceived the ice cream asmore “bacony” when they heard the bacon sound even though both samples werefrom the same batch of ice cream.

Aside from music choices, architectural and design choices may also influencethe consumer’s sound and sensory experience. This is a critical issue in regards torestaurants’ sound because these choices are made with specific intentions abouttheir effects on the overall din within fine-dining establishments. Hard surfaces andthe use of materials with low sound absorption coefficients are not picked atrandom, but instead the result of conscious design decisions to emphasize visualaesthetics and perception over, or at the expense of, other sensory parameters.These design choices influence the experience of taste, both as an aesthetic andcultural form of production and a physiological and sensorial production.

Individual experience, controlled laboratory experiments, and field studies alldemonstrate that what diners hear—whether purposeful music, restaurantinfrastructure and equipment, other diners, or the food itself—can have an oftenunacknowledged but profound effect on their dining behaviors and experience offlavor (Spence 2012). Sound and noise can provide a powerful set of aesthetic andcommercial cues for restaurateurs. As sensory studies demonstrate the influence ofa host of aesthetic and social factors that influence perceptions of dining, it ispossible that a number of elements contribute to critics’ formulations of restaurants.It is interesting because the link between tastes and sounds is not always obvious.

Cities: Constructing a Distinctive Sense of PlaceA sociological understanding of congruence helps explain how culinary fieldsemerge and evolve in particular cities. Conceptually, my model of sociologicalcongruence draws upon a longstanding social science concept suggesting that weevaluate certain objects like restaurants according to the cues and characteristicsthat exist in the context of that restaurant. The greater the consistency betweenthe restaurant’s characteristics and the diner’s understanding of the aestheticcontext, including the city where the restaurant is located, the more the restaurantwill flourish. Diners tend to think of certain types of restaurants as affiliated withparticular locales. Thus, the more sociologically congruent a restaurant is, thegreater its success as a cultural object. In other words, the aesthetics and locationof successful restaurants match diners’ imagined expectations. Moreover,“sociological congruence can affect the salience of cultural objects, as well as instillthem with meaning and value,” and thereby influence the field (Phillips 2013: 6). Inthis light, restaurant aesthetics affect the creation, maintenance, contestation and

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dissolution of culinary fields. The power of sociological congruence is in theimplications that a drive toward congruity between restaurants and their citiesshapes restaurant aesthetics. The congruence between a city and cuisine, like SanFrancisco and its Mission-style burrito (Trillin 2003), influences everything fromthe restaurateur’s strategy when opening a new location to how the restaurant iscritically reviewed immediately and over time. In New York, the preference forquieter dining rooms would have a similar effect. In both examples, the drive forcongruence will continue to influence the subsequent evolution and social orderingof other restaurants in each city.

In many ways, this is consonant with the complex concept of terroir thatdistinguishes regional foodstuffs with a distinctive identity created through theknowledge and practices of successive generations rooted to a particular locale(Santlofer 2009). Although often understood as reflecting the taste of food from aparticular place, the concept is also suffused with ideas about culture, identity,tradition and heritage (Trubeck 2008). Santlofer (2009) extends the concept ofterroir into an urban setting, and coins the term “asphalt terroir” to acknowledgethe integration of people and place as being essentially intertwined in New YorkCity food manufacturing history. So, although the taste of place is often interpretedas literally belonging to the soil of a geographic location, and has been extended toembrace urban food manufacturing, I use it to refer to the idea that restaurants indifferent cities practice differing forms of aesthetics. As Zukin (1995) notes,restaurant design contributes to the production of a city’s visual style, adaptingglobal trends in architecture and interior design; adapting restaurant trends to localstyles. Embracing the broad cultural conception of terroir and the urban focus ofasphalt terroir, I use the term concrete terroir to denote the unique combination ofelements and aesthetics that combine and endure to reflect the forms of aestheticspreferred in the local culture, identity, tradition and heritage of a locale.

For example, geographic location impacts restaurants in a number of ways.When thinking about restaurants, we are often concerned about distance and ourown physical proximity. But the characteristics of a place help identifyunderstandings associated with specific location and the social reality that providethe base for these understandings (Paulsen 2004). Moreover, from a practicalstandpoint, a restaurant’s location influences a chef’s access to ingredients as wellas customers’ inclinations and expectations (Leschziner 2010). Producers and chefsoften use geographic specificity to signal authenticity (Johnston and Baumann2007). The sense of place, however, acts as more than a signal. Restaurants existas cultural artifacts in particular spaces, across geographic hierarchies includingnations, regions, cities and neighborhoods.

It is not unreasonable to think that each of these hierarchies, from nation toneighborhood, has a unique aesthetic. For example, research on music scenesgenerally explores whether particular places help spawn specific aural styles (Royand Dowd 2010). For example, scholars have critically examined the interplay ofChicago and blues music, implicating musicians, tourists, locals and the city itselfin the production of Chicago-style blues (Grazian 2007). The combination ofelements, and the salience and meaning that locals and outsiders give them,

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characterizes a particular place (Paulsen 2004). Each physical locale presents aunique combination of elements and aesthetics that combine and endure (Reinke2007). In some ways, the concrete terroir can be thought of as similar to the diningscene or style of a particular city or country (DeSoucey 2010; Lane 2011). There arealso similarities to be found in some explorations of how authenticity is constructedin fine dining (Carroll and Wheaton 2009). Rather than emphasizing patterns ofcuisine diffusion, the development of cooking styles and craft, and politics thatprivilege particular understanding of food, concrete terroir shifts attention to localaesthetic elements.

MethodsEach of the cities represented in this study—New York City and San Francisco—havedistinct culinary reputations in American culture. Among other accounts, AndrewSmith’s (2014) food biography of New York City, and Erica Peter’s (2013) foodbiography of San Francisco explain the urban infrastructure, neighborhoods, naturalresources, signature dishes and the historic restaurants that reflect each city’s uniquegastronomic makeup. Placing reviews from the two cities side by side lets us see howthe same phenomena take different forms in different places, what those differencesdepend on, and how their results differ. The process also represents—by means ofcomparison and contrast—a research strategy to uncover differences in aestheticjudgments. Moreover, both cities have longstanding reputations for fine dining and canbe considered two of the most prestigious restaurant cities in the United States(Leschziner 2007). I am most interested in how critics’ reviews are shaped by thecharacteristics of a restaurant, and the city with which the restaurant is associated.In this sense, I am using critics’ accounts of sound in their reviews as a means toadvance our understanding of situated social action.

This project analyzes how widely read and influential food writers, particularlyin New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle restaurant reviews written from1998 to 2010 help the general public define the acceptable repertoire of music andsound in restaurants. I link ordered categories of sound ratings evident in reviewsto standard quantitative measures to help gain insights that will be useful in futureinvestigation. I use a quantitative approach to address this research objectivebecause statistical analysis allows for an empirical measurement of the degree towhich sound influences food critics’ restaurant reviews, which by and large shapethe public’s perceptions of fine dining and the food scene’s culinary expectations.By doing so, this project builds on the burgeoning popularity of sociologicalscholarship about food and dining. More importantly, however, the results point tothe divergent ways that critics use noise, music and sound ratings to definesuccessful cultural production in the realm of fine dining.

SampleThe tracking of sound levels in restaurant reviews began in earnest in 1990, whenthe San Francisco Chronicle included “sound level” as one of the categories in itsreview summary tables. The New York Times followed suit in 1998. To explore arange of aesthetic differences between cities over time, I draw on a sample of major

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restaurant reviews that appear in the LexisNexis archives of the San FranciscoChronicle and the New York Times from January 1, 1998, until December 31, 2010.If a restaurant was reviewed more than once, only the earliest review was includedfor analysis.

For the Chronicle, I searched for restaurant reviews that appeared in the “DiningOut” section of the paper, which contained the word “bell” in the body of the article.After eliminating reviews that did not include a sound rating measured in bells, asis standard for the newspaper’s featured reviews, I was left with 1,321 reviewswritten by twenty-five reviewers. I reduced the dataset to reviewers whocontributed at least twenty restaurant reviews from 1998 to 2010, yielding a finalsample of 1,208 reviews by thirteen reviewers from 1998 to 2010.

For the Times, I concentrated my search on the four major restaurant criticswho wrote for the newspaper from 1998 to 2010: Ruth Reichl, William Grimes,Frank Bruni and Sam Sifton (Davis 2009). Because the format, placement and indexfor the reviews changed slightly over time, I conducted separate search terms foreach critic. In addition to including the critic’s last name in a byline search, I addedthe following terms for each critic. For Ruth Reichl, I searched for articles with“restaurant review” as a subject as well as “sound level” and “star” in the body

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Table 1: Number of Reviews by Reviewer, 1998–2010

Number PercentageNewspaper Reviewer of reviews of reviews

San Francisco Chronicle Amanda Berne 33 2.7Amanda Gold 52 4.3Ben Marks 26 2.2Bill Addison 27 2.2Bill Daley 29 2.4Bill Staggs 95 7.9Karola Craib-Saekel* 31 2.6Kim Severson 80 6.6Laura Rieley 20 1.7Michael Bauer 551 45.6Michele Anna Jordan 48 4.0Miriam Morgan 66 5.5Robin Davis 150 12.4Total 1,208 100.0

New York Times Frank Bruni 259 43.3Ruth Reichl 57 9.5Sam Sifton 53 8.9William Grimes 229 38.3Total 598 100.0

*Includes reviews written as Karola Craib and Karola Saekel


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text. For William Grimes and Frank Bruni, I searched for articles with “sound level”and “star” in the body text. For Sam Sifton, I searched for articles in the “restaurantreview” section. I excluded brief restaurant mentions, business news, duplicatereviews and republished summaries, yielding a final Times sample of 598 reviewswritten by four reviewers from 1998 to 2010.

OperationalizationThe summary table at the end of reviews in the Chronicle provides some easilyquantifiable information. Ratings for food, service, atmosphere and the overallrestaurant rating are on a scale of zero (“poor”) to four stars (“extraordinary”), inhalf-star increments. One star is deemed “fair,” two stars is termed “good,” andthree stars is considered “excellent.” Noise is measured on a scale of one to fivebells, in one-bell increments. One bell (under 65 decibels) is characterized as“pleasantly quiet,” two bells (65–70 decibels) denotes being able to “talk easily,”three bells (70–75 decibels) means that “talking in a normal voice gets difficult,”four bells (75–80 decibels) means that you “have to raise your voice to talk,” andfive bells (in excess of 80 decibels), also known as “bomb,” means that “normalconversation is very difficult.”

The summary table at the end of reviews in the Times provides more of a codingchallenge. The overall restaurant rating is rated on a scale of zero (lowest) to fourstars (highest), in one-star increments. Ratings for food, service and atmosphereare descriptive, with no standard language used. Noise ratings are similarlydescriptive and present a challenge to quantify. Given a desire to compare ratingsacross cities, I devised coding guidelines that attempted to mimic the ratingsprovided by the Chronicle. One bell is characterized as “quiet or hushed,” two bellsdenotes a “not loud” or “conversational” environment, three bells indicates a“moderately/somewhat loud” restaurant where “conversation is not easy butpossible,” four bells indicates a “high or very high noise level” where you “must raiseyour voice” to be heard, and five bells is an “overwhelming” or “unpleasantly loud”restaurant. I met with two coders several times to discuss the coding scheme andto go over several samples that served as test cases for us all to discuss. If thereview presented contradictions in timing (e.g. loud sometimes and not loud at othertimes) or contradictions in location (e.g. loud in one part of the restaurant, but quietin another), coders were asked to pick the most typical time (i.e. meal times, not off-hours) and most typical dining location (i.e. the dining room, not the bar area).

Spearman’s Rho, also known as Spearman’s rank correlation, is a statisticalmeasure of the strength of association between two ranked variables. Coderagreement was very strong, with a Spearman’s Rho of 0.864. Even though the inter-rater reliability was high, I independently coded the restaurants where there wasnot an exact agreement on the sound rating to improve upon the coding. BecauseSpearman’s Rho is not an appropriate statistic to use for three coders, I used amacro for SPSS that computes the Krippendorff ’s alpha reliability estimate forsubjective judgments made at any level of measurement by any number of judges(Hayes and Krippendorf 2007). The resulting reliability of the three coders’ ratingswas 0.907 and should be considered highly reliable.

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ResultsOn average, the Times published forty-eight restaurant reviews each year, from1998 to 2010, with a high of fifty-three reviews appearing in 2003 and a low ofthirty reviews appearing in 2004. On average, the Chronicle published 72 restaurant

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Table 2: Number of Reviews in San Francisco Chronicle and New York Times, 1998–2010

Year Chronicle Times

1998 101 471999 182 432000 186 522001 166 502002 61 412003 73 532004 72 302005 56 512006 97 502007 61 502008 51 482009 55 382010 47 45Total 1,208 598Mean 93 46Median 72 48

Table 3: Star Ratings by Newspaper

Star Rating Chronicle Times

0.0 1 380.5 11.0 23 2521.5 1202.0 429 2252.5 4233.0 175 713.5 304.0 1 11Total 1,203 597Mean 2.28 1.60Median 2.50 2.00


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reviews each year, from 1998 to 2010, with a high of 186 reviews in 2000 and a lowof forty-seven reviews in 2010. The overall computed mean star rating forrestaurants was 2.28 (SD = 0.51) in San Francisco and 2.0 (SD = 0.85) in NewYork. The median noise rating in both cities was 3.0; the overall computed meannoise rating for restaurants was 3.14 (SD = 0.98) in San Francisco and 2.82 (SD= 1.19) in New York.

I used ordinary least squares regression to learn more about the relationshipbetween overall restaurant star ratings and food, service, atmosphere and noiseratings. Although regression helps establish a relationship between the variables,it does not assume or establish causality. In Table 5, I use regression to help answerwhich variable is the best predictor of critic’s overall star rating. Examining a simpleordinary least squares regression is instructive, helping establish the relationshipsbetween variables. Specifically, it lets us test whether the relationship betweenvariables can be described as a straight line, which is the simplest and mostcommonly used form. The greater the regression coefficient, the more influencethe independent variable has on the dependent variable. For the Times, a basicregression including only noise ratings yields a significant effect, though one thatexplains less than 5 percent of the variation in the overall star rating of a restaurant.Similarly, for the Chronicle, a basic regression including only noise ratings yields asignificant effect, though in this case one that explains less than 2 percent of thevariation in the overall star rating of a restaurant.

The striking difference is that the direction of effects is different. That is, in theTimes, as noise increases, restaurant ratings decrease; while in the Chronicle, asnoise increases, so do restaurant ratings. Noise and sound act in opposite directionsin each city. For New York, there is an inverse relationship between noise andrestaurant ratings. For San Francisco, there is a direct relationship between noiseand restaurant ratings.

In the Chronicle food, service, and atmosphere ratings are also quantified,allowing for a relatively more robust model. When including these variables, alongwith noise, the model explains 88.9 percent of the variance in overall star rating.

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Table 4: Noise Ratings by Newspaper

Times ChronicleRater1 Rater2 Referee Reviewer

1 Bell 105 81 90 382 Bells 149 156 166 3003 Bells 135 180 147 4304 Bells 156 144 147 338Bomb 52 36 47 100Total 597 597 597 1,206Mean 2.83 2.83 2.82 3.14Median 3.00 3.00 3.00 3.00


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The rating for food has twice the impact that the service rating does; atmospherehas three-quarters the impact of service. Noise remains a significant predictor ofthe overall restaurant star rating, though it is diminished in effect.

Discussion and ConclusionIt is not unusual to view cities as having a distinctive character or culture. Thepresent article resonates with that common view, but goes well beyond it byexamining and explaining how such distinctiveness is constructed. Within thesecities is a striking array of phenomena. Through a combination of factors, each cityand neighborhood develops a unique restaurant culture that I term concrete terroir.

In most gastronomic accounts, the focus is placed on individual actors likegenius chefs or talented restaurateurs. Restaurants draw together a diverseconstituency including critics, patrons and culinary professionals. In this manner,we can think of restaurants as art worlds, filled with networks of culturalproduction, distribution and consumption. Art worlds include technologies orartistic materials (e.g. flattop grills, refrigeration); regulatory systems (e.g. healthcodes); distribution systems and physical locations (e.g. dining rooms, mobile foodtrucks); reward systems (e.g. sales, awards); organizations (e.g. hospitalitycompanies, restaurant groups); systems of appreciation and criticism (e.g. theMichelin Guide); gatekeepers (e.g. newspaper critics), and audiences (e.g. diners)(Lena 2012). By attributing credit to single individuals, we have a fragile explanationfor the very complex worlds in which restaurant professionals work. Individualisticaccounts suggest that restaurant success and culinary creativity operate devoid ofsocietal influence and social interaction. But as scholars and practical experiencehave shown time and time again, great art is produced by collaborative linksbetween skilled practitioners. This insight means that these individuals, even thegeniuses, depend upon the social systems in which they create their magic.

In the elite world of fine dining, reviews in newspapers like the New York Timesand the San Francisco Chronicle help legitimate which restaurants deserve publicattention and aesthetic praise. By documenting and understanding the attributes ofcritically evaluated fine-dining restaurants, this article offers a broad and

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Table 5: Predicting Overall Restaurant Ratings, 1998–2010

Times Chronicle Chroniclen = 596 n = 1,201 n = 1,097

Food – – 0.688***Service – – 0.259***Atmosphere – – 0.191***Noise –0.220*** 0.120*** 0.021*F 30.236*** 17.477*** 2,184.86***Adjusted R2 0.047 0.014 0.889

Standardized Coefficients. Significance level: p ≤ 0.05, ** p ≤ 0.01, ***p ≤ 0.001.


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empirically-based account of restaurant success. In looking across communitiesand reviewers, we can discover something that is rarely offered in restaurantcriticism: an analysis of how restaurant aesthetics in general operate. Thesepatterns are part of the grammar that allows us to understand the cultural languageof fine dining. Ultimately, my goal has been to use the study of shared attributesacross restaurant communities to provide an exploratory model of place-basedaesthetics. The particular questions asked in this research called for quantitativeanalysis. Based on prior accounts, it has been logical and conceptually appropriateto infer that sound and noise in a restaurant matter for diners, and by extensionwould also matter for professional restaurant critics. Quantifying sound ratingshas allowed me to make the statistical inference that sound and noise do matter forcritic’s evaluations. Moreover, New York Times critics associate lower sound levelswith higher-rated restaurants and San Francisco Chronicle critics associate highersound level with higher-rated restaurants. This empirical observation invites futurequantitative and qualitative explorations of how sound influences reviewingpractices and how restaurateurs use design to influence dining.

By definition, empirical models are simplifications and abstractions of realityand often leave us with thin accounts of reality. Gastronomy is particularly in needof more complex, comprehensive, and empirical accounts that bring more depth tothe field of study. As such, this article offers the start of a conversation about theinfluence of aesthetics and place and introduces more complex dynamics than thosewe find in prior accounts. In particular, I present a case where aesthetics functionas a local, rather than generalized, phenomenon. As such, this work advancescultural sociology and food studies into fertile territory, in which an enormousamount can be learned about cities, restaurants, and the role of aesthetics in critics’reviews.

Fine dining locates food as something beyond a banal necessity and insteadappreciates, critiques and admires food through aesthetic terms (Bourdieu 1987;Cairns et al. 2010; Johnston and Baumann 2007). Through this lens, food critics’reviews create a discourse about the appropriate aesthetics of dining. Though thereis a plurality of resources that critics can bring to bear on the evaluation of arestaurant, most of the time they, understandably, focus on taste. However, the criticalresponse and representation of appropriate sound levels, for example, in restaurantsactually helps to define what is acceptable. When critics review loud restaurantspositively, they arguably fuel the din of dining. This process is recursive. The degreeto which a city conjures widely recognized meanings helps it to attract individualsand their talents, reinforcing the reputations those places hold; in turn, those attractedby particular characteristics of a locale act in ways that reproduce that character(Molotch et al. 2000). In this sense, distinctive urban cultures are both top-down andbottom-up; they may emerge spontaneously, but private and public actors also try toproduce them intentionally (Silver et al. 2010). Regardless of the direction of influence,these urban cultures are all about local construction of meaning.

Definitively asserting that the differences between cities are due to critical andaesthetic preferences or a preferred expression of status-signaling tastes andconsumption is hazardous because the observed differences may be due to any

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number of other factors. As such, this article raises several questions for futureresearch. As multi-sensory studies demonstrate the influence of a host of aestheticand social factors that influence perceptions of dining, there must be a number ofelements that contribute to critics’ formulations of a restaurant. A claim thataesthetics including sound is one of the only, or even the most important, factoraccounting for the difference in outcomes in these reviews would not do justice toother possible conditioning factors such as particular neighborhood characteristics,cuisine type, and restaurant size. Given the empirical demonstration of theimportance of sound in this article, it would be sensible for future research to lookfor other intervening or reasonable explanations. One could imagine that futureresearch could productively explore the historical, economic, demographic andsocial trends of each city to see if they are reflected in critics’ evaluations. Similarly,because of my focus on fine dining, I cannot be certain that these factors would besimilarly relevant for other restaurant styles like fast-casual dining. Moreover,although this article uses the city as the appropriate scale, that choice is partlymade out of methodological pragmatism. We should treat spatial scale as an openresearch question as the different linkages and processes may direct attention tosomewhat different factors, processes and relationships (Logan 2012).

As previously noted, the sociological scene literature offers some clues as tohow food scholars might productively think about space. A scene refers to theaesthetic or ambient character of a place. This means that the physical elementsof a restaurant including the space, the front of the house and back of the housestaff all contribute to a scene. The distinct aesthetic energy generated by numerousactivities like communal tables with shared meals, dynamic background music,energetic bar patrons, or lively street-side tables all also contribute to the scene.From a diner’s perspective, these are all amenities to be aesthetically evaluated. Ifsuccessful, they generate buzz and communicate the type of self-expression,transgression, glamour, authenticity and so forth that one might experience there(Silver and Clark 2013). In other words, they also help define the concrete terroirof a city’s restaurant scene.

In sum, this study elaborates how restaurant reviewers, aesthetics, and cityinteract. From the analysis, we can see that aesthetics have a significant impact onreviewers. While aspects of this argument are more suggestive than conclusive,the ways in which critical judgments of restaurants are shaped by aestheticproclivities appear rich and analytically intriguing. Moreover, critics’ aestheticjudgments are shaped by sound and music in different ways, depending on the city.This leads to some intriguing insights when we consider the placeness of aestheticattributes. For example, given that the role of aesthetics varies across cities likeNew York City and San Francisco, it becomes more difficult to understandrestaurant fine dining absent an analysis of that city’s concrete terroir. Specifically,the results point to a connection between reviewer practices and the emplacementof those practices inside a particular city’s environment. Individual differences incritics do not primarily explain the impact of sound in the evaluation of restaurants;instead, its contribution to restaurant ratings differs given the varying city-contextand that city’s culturally formed patterns. This is relevant for other issues related

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to critical evaluation and aesthetics. The reviews during this period are not simplyof idiosyncratic interest to those concerned with food in New York City and SanFrancisco. Rather, they shed light on how aesthetics might influence expert opinion,providing an example of gastronomy as a fluid discursive field where the legitimacyof food production and consumption methods are recursively negotiated andcreated in a culinary taste community.

AcknowledgmentsAn earlier version of this paper was presented at the joint annual meetings of theAgriculture, Food, and Human Values Society; Association for the Study of Food andSociety; and Society for Anthropology of Food and Nutrition in New York City, NY. Ithank Jan Lin, Elana Muldavin, and Larissa Saco for their valuable comments onearlier drafts. I also want to thank Margaret de Larios and Sidney Matthews fortheir research assistance.

John T. Lang is an assistant professor of sociology at Occidental College in Los Angeles,California. He has a PhD in sociology from Rutgers University. His major research interestis the sociological study of food as a lens for investigating questions that lie at theintersection of multiple areas like consumption, culture, risk, trust and the environment.Dr. Lang’s work has been published in journals such as Food Policy, Gastronomica, TheInternational Journal of Public Opinion Research, Risk Analysis and AgBioForum.Department of Sociology, M-26, Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA 90041, USA([email protected]).

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Sound and the City: Noise in Restaurant Critics’ Reviews

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