Themed Restaurants as Cultural Ambassadors

This article is a critical review of Woods & Muñoz’s original research exploring the way in which ‘spaces of consumption’ affect our perceptions and representations of ‘authentic’ culture. The author adopted a multi-stage qualitative research design to investigate this issue. The arguments and evidence provided by the researchers support the case that foreigners’ expectations of ethnic-themed restaurants will tend to have a clichéd or inauthentic because foreigners’ expectations are influenced strongly by the media and not by reality.

The authors present several related arguments in examining the role that media places in the development of our cultural expectations. First, they argue that themed restaurants are important cultural mediators in our everyday life and these restaurants are ‘more than real’ and therefore often inauthentic. Second, they argue that popular media plays an important role in the creation, consumption, and evaluation of ethnic-themed restaurants. On one hand, consumers’ expectations are influenced by what they see in the media especially when they have little or no experience with the country, as is often the case with Australia. These expectations in turn influence consumers’ evaluations. On the other hand, creators of ethnically themed restaurants have to be aware of how a culture is represented in the media so that they can tap into the most salient aspects of the culture for their target audience. Based on these arguments, the researchers expected that foreigners would have expectations that would not match up with those of locals since the former are drawing on inauthentic reference points. And they argue that the extent to which foreigners find these ethnically themed restaurants authentic (when in fact they are narrow representations of the culture) provide support for the thesis that the media affects foreigners’ perceptions.

I agree with the article. First, I think theme restaurants are becoming popular and serve increasingly as cultural ambassadors. This is supported by Brown & Patterson (2000) who note the ‘excessive’ increase in theme parks, pubs, hotels, and restaurants. Second, I believe we implicitly that the images and feelings depicted therein are authentic (Cohen, 1988). But as a consumer visiting a restaurant I am explicitly interested in having a good time. This is supported by Cloke & Perkins (2002) and Smith (2003), who argue that there are often more important issues at stake for the average tourist than authenticity, such as entertainment and enjoyment. Therefore, only if the image is out of step with my own perceptions (however vague) of the culture will I have a problem. This is supported by Boniface & Fowler (1993) who argue that consumers want hyperreality, and that this is more desirable than real life.

Third, it is understandable why more ‘authentic’ images are rejected by consumers who really only have a media-generated image of a country. In that case, if I go to an Australian-themed restaurant, I expect ‘Australian’ music, for example (whatever that might be). I also agree intuitively with the authors’ findings that authenticity is subjective even among locals, since we all have different ideas of what our country means to us and it is generally not fully represented in ‘icons’ (Cloke & Perkins, 2002). On the other hand, foreigners have a less rich experience of our culture and therefore can only draw on the few reference points they have, leading to more consensus among foreigners about what a country ‘is.’ In line with this, it is also not surprising that the restaurant owners would use clichés when constructing their franchises, that is they ‘stage’ authenticity (MacCannell, 1973), since clichés are their customers’ reference points for authenticity. This is in line with Firat et al.’s (1995) central argument that marketing and post-modernity are greatly intertwined and thus consumers are not driven by needs but have needs which are driven by external forces, such as popular culture and the mass media. Overall, this research supports the case that foreigners’ expectations of ethnic-themed restaurants are generally clichéd because of the role of the media in forming these expectations. The article has strong theoretical and empirical bases for making this claim, since ethnically themed restaurants, are becoming more popular, are developed based on narrow representations of cultures presented in the media and that are salient to the target consumers.