Geography of Taste: Mapping “Ethnic” Restaurants in Boston from 1850 to 2020

Ran Mei, New York University

As one of the most direct ways in which urban spaces are experienced and expressed, restaurants have played an integral role in shaping urban identities. More specifically, “ethnic” restaurants—a category popularized by American food journalism in the 1950s to frame difference without invoking the contentious rhetoric of race—have acted as powerful agents in defining urban neighborhoods by signifying a certain group identity through their architecture and interiors, the language of their menus and signage, the appearance and attire of their workers, the tones of conversations over the tables, and, of course, the ingredients and flavors of their dishes and the prices on the bill. However, despite serious efforts by urban historians who have examined restaurants not only as places of cultural production and consumption but also as vital infrastructure that makes and sustains communities by serving as means of economic survival and sites of political mobilization, restaurants remain marginal in historical urban geography and underutilized in GIS spatial analysis. Using Boston as a case study, this paper traces the changing geography of taste by mapping the locations, architecture, and food of restaurants in the city over the past 170 years. Combining GIS methods with computational text analysis, it examines every restaurant recorded in Boston’s City Directories and the Yellow Pages from 1850 to 2020 in relation to demographic shifts in their corresponding neighborhoods based on U.S. census records, as well as their representation in menus, advertisements, newspaper articles, and restaurant reviews. Situated in the broader discussion about the spatial politics in American urban history, the study not only demonstrates how “ethnic” identities are constructed and contested both physically and culturally through food and space, but also highlights the roles that restaurant owners and workers, disproportionally immigrants, have played in shaping the taste and identities of the city.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 128. Spatializing Race