Dining Out

Abstract

Dining out – be it for a lunch break, a business dinner, a romantic meeting, or a solitary resolution – stands as a social daily life ritual filled with significance. Its celebration emerges as a moment of self-exposure where the social limen between public and private, individual and collective identity gets constantly negotiated. Such a socializing practice of daily life reveals its power through aesthetical means: endorsing a determined regime of good manners by choosing who to eat with, how to behave and dress, when and what to eat, and where to dine out results in a sensitive and intrinsically political asset, outcome of specific choices at the hand of the individual.