Global Brooklyn

Designing Food Experiences in World Cities

Fabio Parasecoli, Mateusz Halawa, Fabio Parasecoli, Mateusz Halawa

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350144484
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Diseño
• Subtopic: Historia y crítica del diseño

What do the fashionable food hot spots of Cape Town, Mumbai, Copenhagen, Rio de Janeiro, and Tel Aviv have in common? Despite all their differences, consumers in each major city are drawn to a similar atmosphere: rough wooden tables in postindustrial interiors lit by edison bulbs. There, they enjoy single-origin coffee, kombucha, and artisanal bread. This is 'Global Brooklyn, ' a new transnational aesthetic regime of urban consumption. It may look shabby and improvised, but it is all carefully designed. It may romance the analog, but is made to be Instagrammed. It often references the New York borough, but is shaped by many networked locations where consumers participate in the global circulation of styles, flavors, practices, and values. This book follows this phenomenon across different world cities, arguing for a stronger appreciation of design and materialities in understanding food cultures. Attentive to local contexts, struggles, and identities, contributors explore the global mobility of aesthetic, ethical, and entrepreneurial projects, and how they materialize in everyday practices on the ground. They describe new connections among eating, drinking, design, and communication in order to give a clearer sense of the contemporary transformations of food cultures around the world.

Part I

Finding Global Brooklyn

Introduction

Global Brooklyn: How Instagram and Postindustrial Design Are Shaping How We Eat

Mateusz Halawa and Fabio Parasecoli

It is an August morning in Warsaw, finally balmy and warm after a few days of rain and grey skies. We are waiting for our coffee order in Relaks, a café 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.

Designed by local architects for an owner who is a designer himself, this coffee place makes good use of the 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 café 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 local 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 arguably originates 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 place and its baristas sometimes make an appearance in events around the city, it is not a concept that would lend itself to corporate-style branding, scaling up, or turning into a franchise. The aesthetics speak of uniqueness, even idiosyncrasy, as it happens in similar places that increasingly populate the world.

The roasting and brewing, which are a spectacle in itself, 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 highlighting the fruity and floral notes of the beans. As baristas participate in tastings, or “cuppings,” they generate 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 downright 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 also exists an unarticulated 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. This is a service economy with a Puritan streak, communicating what should not be done here.

Before renovation some years ago, the café was connected to a bike shop and the fixed-gear crowd still often makes an appearance. Relaks celebrates manual labor and allows the guests, largely employed in postindustrial, creative, and service economy sectors, to fantasize about the life of manufacture. The figure of the barista is exemplary here: her decidedly manual labor does not remain unseen and unexamined like it would some years ago. On 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.

Although not performed directly in front of customers, expert craft is also central to the success of Open Baladin in Rome, a restaurant that was a pioneer when it opened with its focus on artisanal beers, in particular Italian ones. Baladin is among the first craft beer brands in Italy, an offshoot of a pub in Cuneo, Piedmont, that turned in 1996 into a “brewpub” where young brewmasters started experimenting and trying new flavors and techniques. Embracing their motto “taste in evolution,” the brewery has acquired national and international renown, providing a business model for many other craft beer producers in Italy. They consider their production plant a place for research and creativity, embracing collaboration as an opportunity for learning, teaching, and the cross-pollination of ideas, styles, and techniques. The same inspiration informs their restaurant in Rome. Its website tells us that the place “in all its aspects, starting from our beer selection and food menu, the care with which we educate our staff and the look of our bars—is a statement, an ‘open letter’ to all the people who still love good and genuine products coming from the earth and elaborated by human enthusiasm and creativity” (Open Baladin 2019).

Although the environment seems laid back and unpretentious, every detail is clearly carefully designed. The largest space is dominated by a wall with wooden shelves where bottles of craft beers are displayed. Right in front of it, the long counter with many beer taps showcases the variety of what is available. The other walls are decorated by colorful murals and a long blackboard-like black strip on which the names and descriptions of the available beers are written in brightly colored chalk. The furniture is simple, made of light-colored wood, metal, and leather, vaguely alluding to an industrial workspace. Although well-coordinated and custom-designed, the refusal of unnecessary embellishments conveys a sense of straightforwardness. On each table, a square piece of metal holds a small tin bucket that contains paper towels. The lighting fixtures are also minimalistic: naked Edison bulbs over the counter, simple covers on the tables.

The menu presents a mix of Italian dishes (pasta and risotto) and foreign specialties such as burgers and falafel. The common element is the attention to the quality and provenance of the ingredients. The element of craft in the kitchen is central to the identity of the restaurant, as well as its search for authenticity in ingredients and techniques.

The centrality of such themes and concerns is at times not even tied to specific places but lives in the digital space of social media. Browsing our Instagram feed, we may spot an image of a nice café counter with a w himsically written menu, behind which a bearded youth in white shirt, suspenders, and bow tie carefully pours hot water on coffee grinds, against a background of potted monstera and other plants hanging from pipes and prominent structural elements. We can almost smell the aroma of the coffee, unconsciously getting ready to hold the warm cup in our hands and start sipping. All the elements in the picture redundantly convey the same feeling of care, labor-intensive attention to detail, coziness, and comfort, reflecting an approach to food service that does away with formalities and focuses on what counts: the experience of the customers (and, in this case, of the viewer as well). Instagram posts of morning coffee aestheticize the everyday, elevating what was earlier mundane to the status of a sensuous event and at times even art. Except that we may be hard-pressed to figure out where the picture was actually taken, as similar surroundings and scenes could be enjoyed in far-flung locations.

Although it exudes a sense of place and presence, in reality the shot could have been taken anywhere in the world, a sensation that is intensified by the capacity of hashtags like #specialtycoffee to arrange next to each other identically marked and similarly staged images from around the world. Whoever took the photograph may have felt the attraction of this deterritorialization as well, as they inserted themselves into a cosmopolitan flow of styles and sensibilities. We may get more specific information from the geolocation conveniently provided by the application: a name would help us put what we see in context, perhaps even “follow” the place and visit it while we travel. Accidentally, the same information can be scrubbed by algorithms that provide advertisers with useful information about how trends are taking place, who is looking at them, and where. The barista in the picture, the photographer who posted the picture, and those who look at it are all turned into data points with great economic value (Zuboff 2019). We may not really care about all this, though, as we scroll to the next picture, the next scene, the next amazing coffee, wonderfully brewed in cups that are explicitly designed to enhance the complexity and richness of its scent.

Life in Global Brooklyn

The vignettes we provided are quite likely to generate a sense of déjà vu among readers who may have had comparable and at times strikingly similar experiences around food and drink in Buenos Aires, Amsterdam, or Kampala. Regardless of the context, people congregate around and talk about food and drink in ways that have become recognizable as global trends. In this book, we explore the contours of this transnational aesthetic and at times ethical regime, which we have called “Global Brooklyn.” It is 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 meanings (Parasecoli 2016; Halawa and Parasecoli 2019). We have observed it in cafés, restaurants, and stores, and identified it in reports from collaborators in cities worldwide, including New York City, Warsaw, Rio de Janeiro, Chiangmai, and Mumbai, among others.

After examining the emergence of the phenomenon, this introduction will describe Global Brooklyn’s constitutive elements in terms of an ideal type, an approach previously used effectively in assessing food consumption patterns in urban spaces (Irvin 2016). We then compare Global Brooklyn’s worldwide circulation with similar food-related transnational cultural formations—from sushi to Starbucks—to identify what is distinctive. We subsequently discuss the actors involved, suggesting hypotheses about the reasons for the success of Global Brooklyn around the world. Finally, we provide a narrative of how the project came to be and how it developed into a multisited collaboration among scholars and practitioners from very diverse backgrounds, whose contributions will be briefly introduced.

In Madrid, Montreal, or São Paulo, the aesthetics and the sensory landscapes connected with what we call Global Brooklyn are frequently mentioned with reference to the New York borough, which for better or worse has raised to worldwide fame as one of the main epicenters of and models for food-related trends, whether they actually originated there or not. Part of Brooklyn’s visibility is its symbolic role as the anti-Manhattan, a place where immigrants and working-class groups of various ethnicities were able to make a living (LeBesco and Naccarato 2015). If the public perception of Manhattan speaks to an outdated “world-is-flat” imaginary of globalization, contemporary Brooklyn suggests an alter-global, diverse mode of worldliness. Moreover, in the late 1990s and the early 2000s Brooklyn offered comparatively affordable rents to both entrepreneurs and their customers, facilitating the emergence of enclaves where Global Brooklyn-style establishments thrived, often located in abandoned industrial buildings and less than desirable neighborhoods.

Inevitably, Brooklyn’s reputation is built on the global pervasiveness of US media, from TV to cinema, that made the location a recognizable point of reference for popular culture worldwide. It is an imagined territory rather than an actual place; the less savory realities of gentrification, ethnic tensions, unemployment, and urban decay are strategically written out to allow consumers around the world to superimpose their desires, aspirations, and preferences. These are themselves inevitably the result of negotiations between local sociocultural contexts and the circulating imaginaries provided by US media companies. The New Yor...