Why do many restaurants and cafes around the world all look the same? Why they all seem to display similar upcycled materials, mismatched chairs, blackboards, plants, and menus that at times require some effort to interpret – let alone enjoy? Welcome to Global Brooklyn!
with Mateusz Halawa
We have launched a research project about the emergent cultural formation around eating and drinking that we call Global Brooklyn. It is a recurring, vaguely codified set of material objects, environments, practices, and discourses which materialize in cities throughout the world in coffee places, restaurants, and food halls. The article Eating and Drinking in Global Brooklyn, of which this blog post is an excerpt, has been published in the journal Food Culture and Society. In the article, taking an ideal type approach, we describe: (1) the designed materialities of rugged postindustrial settings; (2) a shift in taste judgements; (3) the role of digital and visual communication in creating and sharing experiences and values; (4) a knowledge-intensive aspect of practices and strategies of actors; and (5) appeals to an ethos of authenticity and craft that celebrates manual labor. Around the article we are developing an edited volume, which will be published by Bloomsbury, in which contributors from all over the world, from Rio de Janeiro to Mumbai, from Tel Aviv to Bogotá (without forgetting Europe and North America) will reflect on how the Global Brooklyn phenomenon is taking shape in their location, what it means, and who is involved in it. The book working title is Global Brooklyn: How Instagram and Post-Industrial Design are Shaping How We Eat. If you see pictures of Global Brooklyn where you leave, please send them to parasecoli.website@gmail.com and we will be happy to share them on this blog
To give you a taste of what’s coming, here’s a little vignette we wrote last summer in Warsaw.
It is an August morning in Warsaw. We are waiting for our coffee order in Relaks, a cafe in the long-prestigious neighborhood of Stary Mokotów, now going through a new wave of postsocialist gentrification. To the right of the entrance young, tattooed and studded baristas work in front of the blackboard-painted wall listing in deliberate but quirky white chalk lettering the requisite kinds of coffee, including the drip, the chemex, the flat white, the cascara, as well as particular sources and regions of the beans. In the main space on the left, people socialize, write on their laptops, and take work meetings.
Relaks cafe in Warsaw – sitting area
Designed by local architects for an owner who is a designer himself, this coffee place makes good use of old 1970s wood paneling, the newly chic 1960s socialist designer wood tables, and some cheap IKEA couches. Relaks is recognizably cosmopolitan, with all the paraphernalia of the global coffee cult – the Hario V60 drip and filters, La Marzocco coffee machine, and an extensive collection of pieces from the Polish poster school. The cafe is also deeply local, a significant point for the identity of the neighborhood as it is experienced by its younger inhabitants, often children of the city intelligentsia. Relaks is both a center of community life and a node connecting Warsaw to Berlin, with its much appreciated roastery, The Barn, and to Brooklyn, which exemplifies many of the urban trends that can be observed here. A MacBook third space outside of the home and the office, Relaks is carefully designed to be distinctive – and while the brand and its baristas sometimes make an appearance in events around the city, it is not a concept that would lend itself to scaling up or turning into a franchise. The aesthetics speak of uniqueness, even idiosyncrasy, as it does in similar places that increasingly populate the world.
The roasting and the brewing, which are a spectacle in themselves, embrace the organoleptic characteristics of Third Wave coffee, with its focus on provenance, its preference for acidity and light roasts, and its interest in respecting and even high- lighting the fruity and floral notes of the beans. As baristas participate in tastings, or “cuppings,” they proliferate complex vocabularies describing taste profiles that are appreciated by the connoisseurs but not the popular palate. “I’ll have the Ethiopian,” goes a typical order. The flavors themselves may be puzzling to many who grew up appreciating arabica-heavy dark roasts. Brews described as “bright” may taste down- right funky and, in the words of one San Francisco-based artisan roaster, be admittedly “tough to drink,” but nevertheless “really interesting” (Deseran 2013). These young coffee enthusiasts talk taste with the sophistication and a sense of belonging which the Western bourgeoisie have historically reserved for wine. There exists also an unarticu- lated list of no-nos, which makes an appearance when someone uninitiated shows up: no espresso in a paper to-go cup; no americano, but drip instead; no syrups or whipped creams. It is the anti-Starbucks: choices are limited and well curated, while the flavor and the preparation are more barista-centric than consumer-centric. It is a service economy with a Puritan streak: communicating what should not be done here.
Before renovation, the cafe was connected to a bike shop and the fixed-gear crowd still often makes an appearance. While very different, bike repair and coffee making are connected not just by the figure of the drip-drinking fixie-riding hipster (an image that circulates in Warsaw as well), but by a new appreciation for craft, from bike mechanics to coffee brewing, in these dematerialized and digital times. While much of the knowledge, lifestyle, and communication around Relaks are mediated by social media like Instagram, the bike shop-cum-coffee place celebrates manual labor and allows the guests, largely employed in postindustrial, creative economy sectors, to fantasize of the life of making. The figure of the barista is exemplary here: her decidedly manual labor does not remain unseen and unexamined like it would some years ago. To the contrary, through training, self-teaching, competitions, and storytelling, it becomes publicly visible as a valuable and fashionable practice. Her craft is also celebrated and sought after as a form of knowledge and expertise, a spectacle to be watched and worth the wait.
Global Brooklyn in a renovated market hall in Warsaw
This vignette from Warsaw is quite likely to generate a sense of déjà vu among readers who may have observed comparable – and at times strikingly similar – vistas and practices in public spaces for food and drink in Buenos Aires, Paris, or Accra. Regardless of the context, people congregate around and talk about food and drink in ways that have become recognizable as global trends. In this essay, we explore the contours of this transnational aesthetic regime, which we have called “Global Brooklyn”.
We refer to Global Brooklyn as a cultural formation constituted by a recurring, loosely codified set of material objects, constructed environments, practices, and discourses that may or may not appear at the same time, in similar patterns, or even with the same meaning. We have observed it in cafes, restaurants, and stores, and identified it in reports from collaborators in cities worldwide, including New York City, Montreal, Berlin, Warsaw, Rome, Bologna, Rio de Janeiro, Bangalore, Bangkok, and Mumbai. As these dispatches multiplied, we began a more systematic reflection to explain such similarities among establishments in extremely diverse cultural and geo- graphical contexts. Furthermore, once an outline of what we were examining started to clarify, we reached out to researchers and designers around the world, asking for more in-depth information. At the same time, we started using the hashtag #globalbrooklyn on Instagram, involving our collaborators, our students, and whoever else was inter- ested in creating a repository of images that could then be further explored.
This essay is admittedly not an outcome of a structured and long-term research focused on Global Brooklyn itself. It is, rather, an invitation and a provocation written as we poured over field notes, images, and interview transcripts from other research into food cultures and lifestyles in various locales mentioned above. Methodologically, it draws on cultural studies interest in the emergent sensibilities and desires coalescing into a new social formation and uses a strategy of collaborative inductive coding of diverse datapoints in order to reveal patterns and stir up debate. The small, growing repository of #globalbrooklyn images is designed to be a living visual archive allowing the appearance of new research questions