Authenticated Spaces

Introduction

Mass media have played an enormous role in maximizing the display of cuisines in cities around the world. Along with city guides, travel, and gastronomic journalism and gourmet writings, another narrative form has emerged to discuss, evaluate, or promote eating places—food blog writing. Food blogs provide a venue for people to imagine, represent, and discuss taste and to delineate the differences between each other in the city. As seen in the literature, despite their popularity, food blogs are the least studied, even by those who study cultures of consumption. This article considers food bloggers to be a consumerist group and shows how specific consumers produce the authenticity and exoticism of a specific type of restaurant.

This study examines the intersection of space, body, and performance within the narratives of food bloggers in London. Restaurants are spaces where performances of cooking and serving are as significant and visible as food. Turkish grill (ocakbaşı) restaurants in particular can be regarded as vivid performance spaces. This study seeks to understand the performances of space and body and the ways that they create fantasies of the familiar and strange in the bloggers’ experiences of walking in Dalston and sitting in its restaurants. It discusses the process of authentication and its connection to the production of “the local” in the city.

The ocakbaşı style is a relatively new trend in London that emerged in the mid-1990s and gained popularity in the 2000s. Ocakbaşı literary means “fireside” or “side of the stove.” In London’s restaurant scene, it is translated as “charcoal grill,” “Turkish grill,” or “Turkish barbeque.” Ocakbaşı restaurants are concentrated in Dalston, Hackney, in North East London, which is one of the largest neighborhoods of Turkish-speaking people (Greater London Authority, 2009).

This study analyzes 37 food blogs within the period 2005-2011 that are owned by food enthusiasts who write about their dining experiences and their trips to the restaurants. I chose the blogs that have at least one entry on Turkish grill restaurants in Dalston. These blogs were identified through a search engine on the Internet. By jumping from blog to blog, I searched the entries on Turkish grill places in Dalston. While analyzing these texts, I walked on the streets of Dalston and dined in its grill restaurants to gain a sense of how bloggers feel, fear, and take pleasure in these spaces. In the first part of this article, I discuss food blogs in relation to the concepts of adventurous travel writing, commodification of difference, and authenticity. I seek to understand whether the bloggers should be positioned as Londoners (locals) or adventurous travelers and whether they should be framed as producers or consumers of “difference” and “distance.” In the second part, I analyze the sensual production of “distance” around the restaurant space (the neighborhood). I look at the images that are fixed onto Dalston and their impact on the production and performance of authenticity and exoticism. In the third part, I question the ways that “distance” is produced in the bloggers’ portrayals of restaurant spaces. I examine sensual constructions of restaurant spaces and elaborate on the bodies of the grill masters as they are narrated. Here, more specifically, I reconsider the production of authenticity and exoticism in relation to the images of class and gender as well as of ethnicity.

Food Blogs

As Lucy M. Long (2010) writes, bloggers “can be whoever they want to be, focusing their identity on their relationship to food and their ability to write about it in an engaging way” (p. 96). Despite differences in their specific interests, backgrounds, social status, class, gender, and nationality, food bloggers have one major commonality. They are passionate about eating and about finding new places, foods, and tastes. Food becomes a significant part of the bloggers’ identity, even though most food bloggers are not professionally engaged with it. A food blogger can be anyone who collects cookbooks, who writes about his or her cooking experiences, who distribute his or her recipes, or who reviews restaurants (McGaughey, 2010, p. 72). In this study, I focus on a specific type of food blogger, one who reviews restaurants and more specifically has reviewed Turkish grill restaurants in Dalston. Unlike gourmets, food bloggers provide the reader with personal narratives of the trip to the restaurant space. Nalin Sharda and Mohan Ponnada (2008) define blogs as “virtual diaries created by individuals and stored on the web for anyone to access” (p. 159). Blogs are personal commentaries and online diaries/journals. They “are about expressing the inner experiences of” the bloggers (Volo, 2010, p. 299). Food bloggers have a less authoritative voice than professional food writers (columnists for newspapers and magazines) since blogs are described as conveying extremely personal and sensual narratives. Food bloggers’ performance of identity depends on their experiences, subjectivity, and creative self-expressive narrative (Watson, Morgan, & Hemmington, 2008, p. 299). They reveal detailed sensual experiences, concerns, anxieties, fears, excitements, and joy about space and food, a characteristic of blogs that is particularly important in the production of “difference” and “distance.” According to statistics published by Technorati Media in 2011, the majority of the bloggers in the United States and Europe are in the 25- to 44-year age-group and are college graduates, and many do have a graduate degree. Most of the bloggers report that their annual income is $50,000 or more (Technorati Media, 2011). This means that the average food blogger is relatively wealthy and educated and has the time and money to devote to blogging (McGaughey, 2010, p. 72).

Thinking Beyond “Commodification of Difference”

Studies that deal with the consumption of foreign food most often refer to the phenomenon of “eating the other” and its expressions of power and privilege (Cook, Crang, & Thorpe, 1999; Hage, 1997; Heldke, 2003; May, 1996b; Molz, 2007). The notion of “eating the other” is rooted in bell hooks’s (1998) classic statement about the ways that ethnicity becomes spice or seasoning for the mainstream white culture. Perceived from a single perspective of power that privileges white consumers, “eating the other” has contributed to the emergence of the concepts of the “consuming/eating cosmo-multicultural subject,” “consumer cannibalism,” the “adventurous food colonialist,” the “new flâneur,” “adventurous travelers,” and the “tourist gaze” (Duruz, 2010; Hage, 1997; Heldke, 2003; May, 1996a; Probyn, 2000; Urry, 2002). These concepts refer to consumerist groups in search of novelty, difference, and excitement. More specifically, consumerists are adventurous and passionate about food and are eager to try out new places. According to Jon May (1996a), the hunting ground of the new flâneur is the ethnically diverse inner city (p. 208). The new flâneur is the new tourist of the city, notable for seeking ever more difference on its multicultural streets.

However, the argument that such consumers are “eating the other” has not gone uncriticized. According to Peter Jackson (2002), rather than taking this argument for granted, we should “examine more closely the complexities of the production process, the politics of representation and the practices of consumption” to grasp the shifting power relations of each specific case (p. 16). Criticizing dualistic thinking, Ian Cook (2008) sees the “eating the other” argument and the concepts associated with it as problematic since they draw a fundamental line between the white consuming mainstream and the ethnic other (p. 831). Along the same line, Jean Duruz provides us with a useful analysis for problematizing these conventional identity categories and their attachments to place. She argues that we should be able to talk about “floating food,” multiple attachments, shifting locations, new places, memories, and different or new forms of identity realignment that problematize fixed identity categories, including the mainstream (2005, p. 68; 2010, p. 48). After all, consumer groups are not necessarily homogeneous. There is no automatically taken-for-granted, other-eating White personality. Rather, this personality is already fragile since people have heterogeneous biographies and everyday lives.

These criticisms are very much relevant for food bloggers in London. Food bloggers in London are a multicultural group of people with diverse interests, which makes it significantly simplistic to reduce them to one dimension of commodification of difference. For example, Helen Yuet Ling Pang (2008) of World Foodie Guide is English-born, has Hong Kong Chinese parents, grew up in Germany, lived in Beijing and New York, and is married to a vegetarian. The writer of Bellaphon (2010) is from Kuala Lumpur and resides in London. Buzzar Food (n.d.) is written by a “Sydney born Chinese girl who moved to London in 2009.” Luscious Temptations (Foong, 2010) is written by a “Malaysian foodie at heart.” The writer of An American in London (2008) moved to London in 2005. The writer of Passport Delicious (2009), who is “an American girl in London,” indicates that she is an amateur and does not work in the food industry but that she created the blog to spread her love of food and travel. Simon Majumdar of Dos Hermanos (2010) is a professional food writer and broadcaster. Mzungu (2010) of I Live to Eat and Eat to Live is a travel agent, but he calls himself an unemployed chef. Joshua Armstrong (2008) of Cooking the Books calls himself “Dalston’s premier food-based weblog writer.” Conor wMills (2011) of Hidden Palette is a freelance journalist and “sommelier” who searches for the best cheap eats and new places. The World in 202 Meals (n.d.) is written by “a small group of food lovers, whose passion [is] for pinpointing London’s most exotic post-work eateries.” Diversities of nationality, gender, profession, interest, and cultural background are highly evident among the food bloggers of London, which makes it problematic to talk about a homogeneous group.

Josée Johnston and Shyon Baumann (2007) claim that a “decline of the legitimacy of snobbism” has encouraged “an inclusive cultural ethos” characterized by openness to multiple ethnic and class cuisines (p. 169). Instead of reproducing “old metanarratives of social status, class and ethnicity,” food writers—including food bloggers—are democratizing content creation and criticism (p. 200). Food no longer acts as a marker of social status but is an indication “of the individual quest for creative self-expression and identity” (Watson et al., 2008, p. 299). However, this optimistic view of the democratization of the culinary field is also discredited at the consumption level by Johnston and Baumann (2007). The food knowledge possessed by food bloggers is cultural capital that serves as a form of cultural distinction, making them “a relatively privileged class of food consumers” (Cairns, Johnston, & Baumann, 2010, pp. 606, 594). Their knowledge of food, the authority they possess, and their middle-class professions (journalists, chefs, travel agents, writers, freelancers, etc.) are the basis of their privileged consumer positions.

Considering this argument, I want to shift the perspective from the moment of “actual” consumption to the moment of imagination and representation in food blog writing. Ian Cook et al. (1999) view culinary culture as “a form of identity practice within which cultural differences are constructed and used” (p. 226). They use the term “cultural differentiation” instead of “cultural diversity” (pp. 226, 227). Similarly, according to Claire Dwyer and Phil Crang (2002), “commodification is not something done to pre-existing ethnicities and ethnic subjects, but is a process through which ethnicities are reproduced” (p. 412). Since difference is a social and political construction, its production—how it is created and imagined (the process of differentiation)—is as significant as its consumption. Here, I consider how a particular space is symbolically produced by the experiences of food bloggers in and around their consumption process. I seek to understand the ways that not only images of ethnicity, but also those of class and gender, are reproduced in the process of production of difference in food blogs. In this case, ethnicity is not the only “spice” or “seasoning” for the consumer.

The Authentic Local and Existential Authenticity

Authenticity has been extensively studied in relation to tourism, food, and consumer culture. One of the most well-known theoretical debates in the study of tourism revolves around the argument that the motivation of tourism is the desire to find the authentic and to encounter the “real” thing (Wearing, Stevenson, & Young, 2010, p. 27). As local sights, ethnic restaurants have been exposed to the tourist gaze, and dining in restaurants has become a tourist activity (Molz, 2004, p. 54). Food bloggers travel to mysterious neighborhoods, walk on their streets, and dine in their restaurants. And perhaps more important, just like tourists, bloggers search for authenticity. As Jennie Germann Molz (2004) claims, authenticity exists primarily in the mindset of the tourist, and the ethnic restaurant can be regarded as a symbolic stage where concepts of authenticity and exoticism are refigured and reproduced for the tourist gaze (pp. 54, 61).

Food bloggers seek to construct and meet the authentic local. In adventurous travel writing, authenticity is most often fixed onto local places and local people (Duruz, 2004; Molz, 2007). Even though the local is produced by global and foreign resources, it is equated with authenticity (in contrast to the global, which is presumed to be inauthentic; Bell & Hollows, 2007, pp. 23, 30). As David Bell and Joanne Hollows (2007) argue, local culinary practices are celebrated as sites of tradition and authenticity in a globalized world. So what and who is “fixed in place” (p. 23)? In this study, the concept of the local exists within the city, where we can imagine the most intense global flows. “The local,” Dalston in this case, is produced by immigration flows. But mobility of this kind might also create immobility and fixation. In cities, “little towns” such as Chinatown, Little Italy, and Little Turkey redefine and refigure the city as global, cosmopolitan, and multicultural while also producing a strong sense of localness and authenticity as ghettoized locations. The “cosmo-multicultural” residents of the city discover ethnically diverse places while moving like tourists in and between these little towns. They embody movement, whereas immigrant “locals” embody fixity and authenticity. The authentic local is imagined to result from the production of a mobile self (bloggers) and immobile “others” (Turkish-speaking bodies) in the city. However, rather than taking this as a dualism, we should perhaps consider the following questions: How is the local—Dalston—reconfigured in the gaze of food bloggers? Whose local is it? Is there a “distance” produced between the locals and the bloggers? Or is the local space bloggers’ space as well?

Authenticity is not only object related, as seen in “authentic food” or “authentic places,” but also experience related. Ning Wang (2000) talks about existential authenticity, which is seen in personalized narratives and involves self-creation (p. 49). To escape from monotonous everyday routines, the individual seeks adventures. While one is overcoming these adventures, a new self is made (p. 68). More specifically, existential authenticity is about experiencing other cultures and, while doing so, defining and creating oneself. Since I deal with food bloggers’ experiences of walking in and around Dalston and eating in its Turkish grill restaurants, the concept of existential authenticity is useful for providing a deeper understanding of these experiences and of bloggers’ identities. Since existential authenticity is more about bloggers themselves than about others, it takes their sensual pleasures, feelings, anxieties, and fears into consideration (Wang, 2000, p. 67). In other words, body constitutes a major role in the construction of authenticity. Therefore, this study is original for the ways that it looks at the sensual production of authenticity in specific spaces as well as at the experiences and bodies of specific consumers. It provides a balanced analysis of bloggers’ identities and belonging in the city and of the images assigned to the ocakbaşı restaurant space that they fantasize.

Walking in Dalston

Dalston has been an immigrant neighborhood for at least 60 years and has a mixture of Afro-Caribbean, Indian, Vietnamese, Turkish, and Kurdish communities. The multicultural side of Dalston has often been emphasized in the media. BBC Home (2001) has described it as an “incredible mix of races,” and the anchor of the London Guardian’s (2009) radio podcast has expressed a similar excitement and joy about Dalston. But the image of Dalston in the media has also been negative, “based around its rubbish, poverty, crime, drug dealers, prostitution, street people, vagrants, squatters and alcoholics” (Hart, 2003, p. 238). In 2006, Channel 4 (2007) ranked Hackney (the borough in which Dalston is located) as the fourth worst place to live in the United Kingdom because of its high crime rate. The dual image of Dalston as poor, dirty, and dangerous, on the one hand, and as vibrant, exciting and full of culture, on the other hand, can be traced in food bloggers’ experiences of ocakbaşı restaurants. In blog writings, the adventure starts not in the restaurant but on the way to the local neighborhood. For example, the writer of Bellaphon (2010) sees going to Dalston as an “epic trip,” and the writer of Tom Eats, Jen Cooks (2010) describes it as an “odd food adventure.”

The dual image of Dalston as both dangerous and exciting is constantly reproduced in blog narratives in sensual ways. The most well-known and rewarded ocakbaşı restaurant is Mangal 1, on Arcola Street, a side street off of Stoke Newington High Street. It was ranked 23rd among London’s best restaurants in 2011 (Time Out London, 2011). For Conor Mills (2011) of Hidden palette, Mangal 1 is a cult restaurant: “One of the first Turkish Ocakbasi restaurants to open in London’s east end back in 1990, Mangal number 1 has earned itself a cult status in the world of grilled meats.” The mystery of Mangal 1 derives from its hidden location. Peter and the Italian (2010) of Lumpy Mash tell us how they first came to Mangal 1: “We turned into this anonymous little side street and ten yards away was a smallish looking non-descript place with a backlit sign in the window—Mangal.” Here, feelings of adventure and excitement are reflected in the phrases “anonymous little side street,” “non-descript place,” and “a backlit sign.” This description indicates that it is not easy to reach a truly authentic local place without feeling any uneasiness or insecurity. Bloggers need an authentic experience in order to taste the authentic local. Reproducing the dual image of Dalston, Tim Chester (2010a, 2010b) of Thirtyoneseventyfive expresses his feelings about visiting the neighborhood:

So what is this mecca of diced meat really like?

Nestled down a side street between (on our visit at least) a stabbing and some other undisclosed gang dispute, it [Mangal 1] can safely call itself tucked away.

For Tim Chester, going to Dalston and Mangal 1 generates fear and anxiety, and also excitement and joy, as seen in his comments about the “impressive” performance in the restaurant. This means that bloggers go there not in spite of but because of the uneasy conditions of the neighborhood (see Johnston & Baumann, 2010, p. 181), which produce strong feelings of excitement. Bloggers seek existential authenticity while looking for “true” experiences and adventures. The strong feelings to which their bodies are exposed and by which they define themselves construct the authentic.

Reproducing mainstream representations and feeding on consumers’ anxieties, food bloggers often present Dalston as tatty, scruffy, dark, and dangerous. In most cases, these attributes are associated with masculinity and lower-class spaces (see David Grazian’s [2004] analysis of the authentication of blues music in Chicago). In the blog We Love Local, in a short comment titled “Only Went Because I Was Taken,” E. Mathew (2007) admits that he would never have gone to Stone Cave Turkish Restaurant unless someone had recommended it to him. But for him, it is the “charm” of the place that makes the experience authentic: “It’s somewhere I’d take Will rather than Denise!” Referring to the dark image of Dalston, W. Mathew recommends that readers take a male friend (Will) instead of a female friend (Denise) since for him, Dalston is not safe and clean enough for women. In both Tim Chester’s and W. Mathew’s narratives, Dalston is gendered as masculine either through stabbings and gang disputes or through the figure of Will. Dalston is also represented at the level of class with reference to neighborhood crime. The “charm” is in a way hidden in the lower-class identity of the neighborhood, which makes it an example of the “real authentic local.” Therefore, the exotic and the authentic are produced as a result of the portrayals of the space as lower-class and masculine.

Similarly, the noncommercialized image of the local is emphasized in contrast to the highly commercialized upper-middle-class image of the global city. The writer of An American in London (2008) says about Mangal 1, “It’s a Turkish grill house . . . in scruffy Dalston, and in the fine tradition of divey restos in scruffy neighbourhoods, it’s BYOB [bring your own bottle] with no corkage charge.” Instead of stabbings or gangs, for her, the authentic local (“scruffy neighborhood”) is to be found in its noncommercialized character (“BYOB with no corkage charge”). Therefore, the authenticity of the local is defined by honesty and sincerity.

Dalston is portrayed as distant, but in a contradictory way, it gives the feelings of proximity and belonging. Constructed as local, Dalston is also a place in which perhaps to live for the food blogger seeking “an authentic urban experience” (Zukin, 2008, p. 727). A symbolically distant place literally becomes the local of the blogger. For Krista (2009) of Passport Delicious, Dalston is a great neighborhood, which she often visits and even considers moving to: “I need to hang out in Dalston more often . . . In fact, the whole field trip had me looking at property in Dalston for days afterwards.” Sharon Zukin (2008) rightly argues that new residents of some neighborhoods consume “an idea of authenticity” that is stuck onto the place (p. 728). Artists and intellectuals have long had an interest in “the slums” “because of their reservoir of danger and decay as well as their tolerance of—or unwillingness to police—cultural diversity” (p. 729). Krista’s observations could be discussed in relation to Zukin’s idea of consuming an imagined authenticity. However, there are also personal cases in which the role of memory in one’s decision making is more influential than the imagined authenticity of the neighborhood. For example, Erin Spens’s (2010) feelings of familiarity and connectedness with Dalston have to do with personal memory. Dalston reminds her of the times she lived in Istanbul: “I felt right at home in Dalston because it’s PACKED with Turkishness.” Moreover, she talks about the “scruffy” side of Dalston but in an explicitly positive way that suggests she feels alive there:

The streets are pretty grimy and there’s only an overground train so it’s in an odd location but something about it tugged at me . . . I do love some rough edges (and I’m talking about real rough edges – —not just the ones they paint around to retain it’s [sic] ruggedness like, ahem, Shoreditch as much as I love it . . .) and I need to hear more than just posh English spoken on the streets and I didn’t once have a £1000 baby buggy rammed into my heels. It was refreshing. I liked it. I liked it a lot. (Spens, 2010)

Here again, localness and authenticity are associated with lower-class elements (Bell & Hollows, 2007, p. 35). For Erin Spens, Dalston is local, real, honest, true and authentic. She searches for authenticity in “real rough edges” rather than in “posh” streets or in fake “ruggedness.” She finds the lower-class character of Dalston “refreshing” and “real.” Here, images of class and poverty contribute to the symbolic production of distance and authenticity (Johnston & Baumann, 2010, pp. 180-183; see also Grazian, 2004).

However, the blog Dos Hermanos (2010) unsettles the association between authenticity and Dalston by claiming that restaurants in Dalston are a bit “whitified,” which implies that they are commercialized and rendered mainstream for white, Western consumers: “Some were poor or merely disappointing like the popular Mangals 1 and 2 in Stoke Newington which have always seemed a bit whitebread to us.” Instead, the writers of this blog look for an authentic experience in an authentic and “real” ocakbaşı in New Cross, South East London. Apparently, the search for authenticity never ends for bloggers since it is a primary component of their identity.

There is more than one way to imagine Dalston in sensual narratives. However, most often Dalston’s “difference” is produced and fixed through reference to its dual image. Dalston’s culinary scene generates senses of fear, uneasiness, and anxiety in most of the blog narratives, which tend to animate both the fears and fantasies of the middle classes. Existential authenticity is achieved by bloggers via their “true” experiences while walking in and around the neighborhood, which includes exploiting the images of working-class neighborhoods and the symbols of danger, dirt, disorderliness, and insecurity. The authentic local is achieved by the relocalization of Dalston as real, true, and not yet commercialized.

Restaurant Performances and Turkish/Kurdish Bodies

There is a god in this world and he’s called Ocakbasi. (Mzungu, 2010)

In most blogs, Dalston becomes a site of authenticity where Turkish-speaking bodies are fixed and where authenticity is most often measured by the number of Turkish-speaking customers in the restaurant. Expressions that appear in blog posts, such as “loads of local Turkish people in the restaurant,” “already so popular with locals,” “one of the best-reputed local restaurants,” and “clued-up locals,” are signs of authenticity. Most of the food bloggers do not favor outsiders (non-Turkish-speaking bodies) in ocakbaşı places since outsiders “spoil” the authenticity of these places. However, they themselves (also as outsiders) want access to these places (but not as tourist bodies; Duruz, 2004, p. 432; Hage, 1997, pp. 138-144). According to Duruz (2004), this is a paradoxical performance of absence and presence (p. 432). I argue that this is also a paradoxical performance of distance and proximity since bloggers develop a sense of competence and sophistication in the encounter with the culinary other (Molz, 2004, p. 68) and a sense of ownership of and belonging to the city and its neighborhoods. For example, Chris Pople (2010) of the blog Cheese and Biscuits makes a rather significant distinction between regular tourist consumers and food adventurer consumers. He criticizes the way that some ocakbaşı restaurants display particular foods in their windows, as though to deter regular passersby, but suspects that this might deliberately be done to attract food adventurers like himself:

At the risk of sounding patronising, I can’t help feeling they often only have themselves to blame—I’ve known many a very impressive ocakbasi grill (characterised by their huge extractor hoods) hiding towards the back of the restaurant, while pride of place in the shop window goes to two columns of sweaty doner meat and a tray of deep-fried chicken. It’s hardly the best way to attract passing trade, but then again, perhaps it’s all deliberate, meaning only those with an insatiable desire for food adventure, or sufficiently clued-up locals, are deemed suitable to sample the proper food.

Pople feels that only locals and adventurous, competent, sophisticated, individuals like himself deserve to “sample the proper food,” since they alone are not deceived by the display. Therefore, he does not see himself as a complete outsider, and he negotiates “distance” and “proximity” to be able to taste local authenticity. On this account, the dualism between locals and outsiders (cosmopolitans?) seems to be blurred.

As Joshua Armstrong describes in the blog Cooking the Books, ocakbaşı restaurants make simple food. Simplicity provides evidence of an honest, authentic and straightforward eating experience (Johnston & Baumann, 2010, p. 84). However, rather than through simplicity, the authenticity of the ocakbaşı is produced by the sensual mise-en-scene of the restaurant space (Highmore, 2009, p. 178). In blog narratives, the mise-en-scene is rendered sensual by the ways that smell, smoke, sweating bodies, heat, and fire are presented as the dominant components of the restaurant space. Douglas Blyde (2008), in a blog post titled “Thrill from the Grill,” provides a sensual description of ocakbaşı restaurants (Figure 1) as “joyously dangerous”:

Bags of charcoal were backed up against the wall, fodder for the joyously dangerous Ocakbasi (sweltering open grill) complete with ringside seats . . . The industrial extractor above the adjacent bath of red hot coals switched to turbo as our staved game birds were given a light char.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

A scene from Mangal I, (2012).

The title “Thrill from the Grill” and the phrase “joyously dangerous” imply two feelings: anxiety and excitement. The existence of the latter is dependent on the existence of the former. In this case, overcoming the danger produces a “true” and authentic bodily experience for the food blogger.

Most food bloggers write about the performance of grilling in ocakbaşı restaurants as a total sensual experience. The performance is all about cooking the meat in front of the customers on an open charcoal grill. Joshua Armstrong (2008) describes “a big fire pit in the middle of the restaurant where a seated Turkish man sits sweating and cooking skewer after skewer of meat, fish, and offal.” In both Blyde’s and Armstrong’s narratives, difference is fixed onto the performance of grilling, bags of charcoal, smoke, and the sweating bodies of Turkish/Kurdish men. Mzungu (2010) of Live to Eat and Eat to Live calls the man who grills, “A master of the grill.” And Justine Foong (2010) of Luscious Temptations refers to the grill work as “magic”:

As we waited we watched the man behind the grill work his magic—meat on, wait, turn meat, wait, turn meat, wait, meat off the grill—all this behind a huge plume of smoke. I take my hat off to him. He must go home stinking of grilled meat at the end of the night.

In these bloggers’ narratives, the bodies of Turkish/Kurdish men (“masters of the grill”) and their “magic” work are not only aestheticized but also authenticated. It is as though only the bodies of those men who can grill properly are deemed to be “magic,” which means that authenticity is fixed onto the sweating male bodies. What, then, would make these bodies specifically authentic for grilling? Studies on gender and food have claimed that there is a confirmed association between masculinity and meat based mainly on the presumption that eating meat gives masculine strength (Adams, 1990; Inness, 2006, p. 153). This link is also seen in cooking practices. For example, in most places around the world, the common perception is that men grill meat outside in places such as the garden, backyard, and parks, and that women cook food inside the home. In this perception, women are once again domesticated since they are assigned to the kitchen, whereas men are assigned “tough” jobs like playing with the fire and cooking meat (Neuhaus, 2003, p. 194). Therefore, the masculine body has long been fixed as the grilling body. Reproducing this well-established association between masculinity and the grilling of meat, food bloggers immediately authenticate grilling bodies as Turkish/Kurdish male bodies in ocakbaşı spaces and relocalize them in Dalston, a lower-class neighborhood with “real rough edges.”

Together with the “magic” male bodies of the “master” grillers, the sensual experiences of smell and smoke are part of the performance, as seen in Fergus Jackson’s (2009) description of his astonishment when he enters an ocakbaşı restaurant: “You immediately get hit by the heat and smell of grilling meat from the massive open barbecue style grill that is slap bang in the middle of the restaurant.” The writer of An American in London (2008) mentions her anxiety due to smoke in ocakbaşı spaces: “your meats of choice are grilled on an enormous charcoal grill (thank goodness for powerful hoods over the grill or else the smoke would be unbelievable).” Within this highly sensual performance, smell is noted by bloggers to be a source of uneasiness as well as of desire and curiosity. In contrast to modern odorless restaurants, ocakbaşı spaces, with their heavy smell and smoke, perhaps represent the primitive and therefore the authentic. The smell of meat in ocakbaşı restaurants is presented as part of the ocakbaşı experience. Fernandez and Leluu (2010) “warn” their readers about the restaurant Beyti: “It's not a pretty restaurant . . . expect to come out smelling like you have been in a Turkish Barbeque Sauna.” Here, difference is fixed onto the performance of the smoke and smell of the ocakbaşı, and the consumer self can possess the difference in her or his body through the olfactory sense.

Here, difference is fixed onto the performance of the smoke and smell of the ocakbaşı, and the consumer self can possess the difference in her or his body through the olfactory sense. Fernandez and Leluu (2010) “warn” their readers about the restaurant Beyti: “It’s not a pretty restaurant . . . expect to come out smelling like you have been in a Turkish Barbeque Sauna.” This sensual description of the ocakbaşı space points not only to fascination but also to worry and anxiety. The Turkish, sweating male body in this case is fixed into a sauna (hamam), and this fixing unfixes the consumer self as not belonging to this space, but one can possess the ocakbaşı restaurant’s “difference” anytime by experiencing the smell. Such a bodily, sensual experience is constructed as an existential, authentic experience for bloggers.

The restaurant space, the body, the connections of both to images of class (lower class) and gender (masculine bodies), and the experiences of bloggers are all crucial in the production of authenticity and exoticism. However, there are always moments of unsettling or “not fixing” in the multiple narratives of bloggers. For example, whereas most of the bloggers find grill masters’ male bodies to be aesthetic, authentic, and exotic, Helen Yuet Ling Pang (2008) does not see any charm or aesthetic value in them: “I didn’t envy the man who had to operate it [the ocakbaşı], as he looked very hot and bothered, and it’s such a tough job that they do it in shifts.” Nonetheless, Pang does fix the performance of the barbeque in terms of difference and exoticism, noting the “interesting and atmospheric” location of the restaurant space where the grilling takes place: “the front of the restaurant [where the ocakbaşı is located] is far more interesting and atmospheric.”

Finally, in personal and sensational narratives of food bloggers, the restaurant space and the grilling bodies are generally constructed as authentic and exotic. As well as ethnicity, I argue that images of gender (masculine neighborhood and masculine grilling bodies) and class (lower-class spaces) play significant roles in the authentication of bodies and spaces. The authenticity of Turkish-speaking bodies, of lower-class images, of smoky and smelly spaces, and of the male bodies of the grill masters is fixed in the local—in the midst of Dalston.

Concluding Remarks

Along with the exoticism of food, restaurant spaces are characterized by exoticized mobile bodies, performances, and consumer experiences. This study has tried to analyze a particular restaurant space where exoticism and authenticity are imagined and represented not necessarily by means of food but by spatial and bodily performances and consumer experiences. Three main concluding remarks can be made here. First, to analyze the representations of space in blog writings, we need to pay attention to senses. Personal narratives introduce us to a sensual world of representations. The production of the authenticity and exoticism of the neighborhood space is closely connected to the authentic experiences of food bloggers, particularly their sensations of fear and anxiety, joy and excitement. Moreover, the performance of the ocakbaşı is highly sensual as seen through the lens of food bloggers’ bodies. The sensual production of the authenticity and exoticism of the ocakbaşı takes us to the world of smell, smoke, and sweating bodies. The authentic, then, is produced as a result of sensual experiences in the neighborhood and its restaurant spaces.

Second, I agree with Johnston and Baumann (2007) that there is an emerging democratization in the culinary field, which can be defined as an openness to multiple ethnic and class cuisines. The popularity of ocakbaşı restaurants is one of the consequences of this development. At the same time, in terms of the moment of consumption, the idea of the democratization of the culinary field has been discredited. People need specific cultural and economic capital to be able to consume “different” and authentic foods (Johnston & Baumann, 2007). Here, I argue that democratization can be discredited not only at the level of consumption (who gets to eat what) but also at the level of symbolic production and representation (how difference is produced by bloggers). In the production of “difference” and “distance,” not only ethnicity but also class and gender distinctions are reproduced instead of being discarded in food blog writings. The “real” authenticity of the local lies in its masculine and lower-class associations. As a result of the link between authenticity and lower-class elements, the authentic is reproduced as noncommercial and therefore as honest, sincere, and true. In the same way, the authenticity of the restaurant space is constituted by the aestheticization of masculine grilling bodies. In this case, without neglecting inequality at the level of consumption, I argue that inequality is also reproduced at the level of representation, where stereotypical images of class and gender are highly valuable.

Third, London food bloggers act as adventurous travelers looking for new places and new tastes in the city. From their middle-class positions, most bloggers reproduce the dual image of Dalston as, on the one hand, dark, rubbish-strewn, poor, and dangerous and, on the other hand, exciting and fascinating. The purpose of this study is neither to question nor to reproduce this duality between the locals and the cosmopolitans. Instead, I argue that it is always problematic to claim a stable and single position for consumer subjects since consumer bloggers are individuals who inhabit a multiplicity of personal narratives. Some bloggers produce distance between themselves and the spaces they are visiting, whereas others feel familiarity with and proximity to these spaces as a result of their personal histories (e.g., Spens, 2010). There are also cases where bloggers deauthenticate what has already been authenticated as local by instead searching for authenticity elsewhere (e.g., Dos Hermanos, 2010). Whereas most of the bloggers discussed here fantasize, authenticate, and aestheticize the male grilling masters’ bodies, some unsettle the body and its associations (e.g., Pang, 2008). The difference or familiarity that these various bloggers fix onto the place of ocakbaşı restaurants and onto themselves and others is changeable. Therefore, we should not only consider the complexities and multiplicities of their personal narratives but should also acknowledge that, while searching for authenticity, they collectively reproduce (and never once question) the gender and class distinctions that already exist.