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Restaurant

Object Lessons

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Restaurant

By: Brian Duff
Narrated by: Chris Gaines
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Bloomsbury presents Restaurant by Brian Duff, read by Chris Gaines

Object Lessons is a series of short books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

In the last few decades, restaurants and food culture have achieved extraordinary cultural presence. Chefs are heroes and thought leaders, well-executed entrées go viral, dining out has become theater, plating has become art and ubiquitous Instagram content. But in recent years restaurants have faced crisis upon crisis.

Restaurant takes a deep dive into the drives, desires, and anxieties we bring to dining out at this time of uncertainty. It explores the meaning we find in good food and warm hospitality. It shows why the restaurant offers unique opportunities to change the quality of our engagement with others and to create shared meaning across the table©2025 Brian Duff (P)2025 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Aesthetics Art of Storytelling Entertainment & Performing Arts Literary History & Criticism Philosophy Social Sciences
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Critic reviews

A lyrical meditation on nourishment, conversation, and our fantasies that are all the more vital for being inevitably disappointed.
This wonderful book ventures into the belly of the beast: post-pandemic America's reckoning with its appetites. Duff artfully exposes the question of the restaurant's future to be one of the pressing problems of our time."
A smart and engaging account of what it means to eat in a restaurant today, what it doesn't mean, and what it can mean if we are careful and thoughtful enough.
Duff draws on his extracurricular experience as a restaurant worker and local restaurant critic to provide a sweeping meditation on the restaurant as a phenomenon in this slim volume ... He does so with humor, profundity, and writerly ease.
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