How restaurants shape national identity in a culturally diverse city

In twenty-first-century global North cities, immigrant-dominated neighborhoods are more socially varied than ever before. These novel settlement configurations thus prompt renewed questions about how identity is constructed in the everyday. This paper, therefore, examines how ordinary people articulate who they are and who they are not in habitual places. As ubiquitous third spaces, restaurants are particularly salient sites for understanding how they shape people’s feelings and moods, which in turn influence the boundaries between “self” and “non-self.” Drawing on analyses of material culture, observations, and interviews in Queens, New York, I show that identity narratives in and around restaurants are at once vague and precise, indifferent and deeply felt. And despite such descriptive and emotive variation, identity narratives consistently attach to nationhoods, a pattern that emerges because restaurants’ representations and atmospheres orient people’s sensibilities toward the nation. I call the emotions and moods generated in restaurants national affects. And while the national affects traced in this study may seem benign, I show how they are constitutive with violent practices of nationalism. By revealing these connections, the paper argues that restaurants are not merely cultural infrastructures to satisfy hunger, but are central sites where identity is forged and where nationalism asserts itself daily in urban life.