Una cucina originale : un’indagine qualitativa sulla “cucina di territorio” nel caso di una città del Nord Italia

Culinary cultures are often presented and offered throughout public commercial spaces, showing in this way a clear example of culinary commodification and expressing at least a kind of simulation of a certain geographical identity. Otherwise, again for that reason, in a globalizing context such as the contemporary one, food represents more and more one of the main channel to spread, among popular culture, almost some images of different national identities. This kind of interpretation of food inside these sort of venues working along the “tradition” issue, allows to analyze the eating out culture as a complex way to reproduce different forms of cultural identity, especially the one build on the geographical belonging. The aim of this analysis is to show how these narratives of belonging are mainly constructed through the gathering of different spatial meanings particularly linked to food, especially in a globalizing context such as the urban one, where near and far, presence and absence, are mixed in every consumption place. To suggest a possible answer, this study invite to consider food as an object at the border-line between art and commodity – as much as an object of the material culture – starting from the analysis of the work of some urban chefs. Drawing critically on both the work of Becker and Bourdieu, and in so much, considering the restaurant world one as an “artworld”, the intention is to show how the creativity and innovation that lead their activity could be a peculiar vehicle in the social definition of “quality food”. Drawing on the empirical material from in-depth interviews, participant observation and secondary statistical datas this study deal with a research conducted in a Northern Italian city, suggesting the restaurant as a sort of artistic-place and the chefs as cultural intermediaries in the contemporary urban foodscape.