For the sociological and general reader

The other review here (published Oct 10, 2018, on audible.com) has some strong views and I hope to balance them a bit in this review.

The other reviewer has some struggles with something that is directly discussed in this book: the degree of autonomy of cultural fields—or, said in another way, the degree to which artistic products (like this book, or a chef’s dishes) make sense to people who are outside of the field (the field in this case is sociology, or social science). So the “socio-babble” the other reviewer talks about is just how people in sociology make sense of complex phenomena. Sociologists and other academics in all fields (natural and social science, and humanities) make vocabularies not to be confusing but to be consistent across different cases (e.g., to be able to talk about the world of chefs and the world of comedy in the same language, even though the specific vocabulary for each case is different).

The "new" part of this book isn't necessarily the details chefs divulge about their profession but a set of theoretical contributions to social science. In terms of the print version, one of these is on p.119, or the audio version, chapter 5. It is about the “three paths of action”. Leschziner says that scholarly work before this tended to say that action could either be conscious/deliberative or subconscious/automatic. For example, people consciously thinking through a problem at work, or someone cooking a dish they’ve cooked many times before and can proceed without thinking consciously about what they’re doing. So she says that these processes are not actually separated in practice, and that there is a third type of action, where people experience the action as consciously motivated but can’t really put into words how it happened (it is intuitive). This is one of the parts intended to be new, and is of interest to sociologists, social scientists, and philosophers. But this particular contribution is quite specific to people inside these scholarly fields. If you’re interested only in chefs, this particular contribution isn’t going to excite you. There are another set of theoretical contributions in the contribution, to field theory.

So for the reader who is not in these scholarly fields (sociology and other social sciences like organizational analysis), is there any reason to read this book? One nice thing about sociology is that the author takes an analytical view of the situation, meaning they just analyze it without trying to convince you of anything as an underlying motive. They try to take a balanced and thought through view of everything they write about. So in this book you will definitely learn about many of the elements of creativity at elite restaurants. You will learn about the different elements that chefs try to put into their cooking, such as the balance of flavours and textures, the balance between flavour and innovation, and the balance between traditional and more innovative food. The point is to show how creativity happens in practice, and there is a lot there as well, and you’re not going to find another book that has so many different chefs in different positions in the field analyzed by an outside observer (i.e., not another chef who sees everything from their own point of view in the field). A chef at an elite restaurant is going to think differently, for example, than a chef at a middle-status restaurant, and they are all included here and the implications of their different positions in the field are also discussed.

So you can learn a lot via the “socio-babble” the other reviewer worries about, or you can just let that part pass over and focus on the empirical descriptions of how chefs create new dishes and manage the various pressures they are under, and how their different field positions matter for how they think and act. Leschziner does give definitions for the sociological terminology that she uses (such as “disposition”, “field”, “sens pratique”). If you’re willing to put in the work to understand those terms, you will learn new things about the social world. If you don’t want to do that, that’s fine, you will still learn other new things (more specific to chefs and elite restaurants). There are a lot of detailed descriptions of what chefs do and how they do it.

But the second half of the conclusion will probably only make sense to humanities and social science scholars, so I'd skip that chapter if you're not in those fields.

As I said at the start of this review, Leschziner is writing this book with her colleagues in mind—they are the people who evaluate the book professionally and are the people who matter most for her position in her own field. So the book has to have sociological terminology—which is indeed a language a bit specific to sociology, social science, and liberal arts in general. But that is part of the nature of social fields. Sociology is a relatively autonomous field (meaning it is not that dependent on what the general person thinks about it, unlike, for example, the world of filmmaking), and so as an author one needs to have specialized terminology in it. There are definitions for most of the specialized terms (something that is not available in even more specialized publications such as journal articles in sociology) and there is a lot of discussions of what chefs do from a wide range of chefs. I still think this can be interesting for people who aren’t professional sociologists or social scientists. One word that isn’t really defined, as the other reviewer also says, is “phenomenology”. What she means here is that people experience something as some way, even if it isn’t “really” that way (although it may also "really" be that way—the point is how something is experienced by someone). For example, I might experience something as a choice when it really isn’t a choice, but it doesn’t matter much because that is how I experience it. In any case, I hope this review makes a bit clearer where the author is coming from and what people who aren’t professional sociologists can get from the book.

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