11/1/2019 Memory has added seasoning Anthropology of food Articles VARIA Memory has added seasoning The legacy of feminist restaurants and cafes in the United-States La mémoire rajoute l'assaisonnement ; l'héritage des restaurants et des cafés féministes aux États-Unis A K Abstracts English Français This article looks at the legacy of the communities created by feminist restaurants and cafés in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. Using a mixed methodology of interviews, archives, and a survey of online forums, including Facebook, I explore how the memory of the feminist restaurants and cafés endures through online communities and a new generation of feminist food businesses. The process of remembering feminist restaurants and cafés has the effect of reproducing and promoting the values enacted by the original owners. First, I briefly discuss the kinds of communities feminist restaurant owners fostered during the years of the restaurants’ operation, giving attention to who was included and excluded. Following an explanation of the factors that led to the closure of these businesses, I examine the resurgence of their communities in online spaces and the other ways their legacy has been preserved. I conclude by highlighting the restaurants’ impact on the current food business landscape. Cet article examine l'héritage des communautés créées par les restaurants et cafés féministes aux États-Unis dans les années 1970 et 1980. Grâce à des entretiens et à une étude des forums en ligne, j'explore comment la mémoire des restaurants et des cafés féministes perdure à travers des communautés en ligne et d'une nouvelle génération d'entreprises féministes. Le processus de souvenir qui concerne les restaurants et cafés féministes a pour effet de reproduire et de promouvoir les valeurs promulguées par leurs propriétaires originaux. Tout d’abord, je discute brièvement les types de communautés que les propriétaires de restaurants ont contribué à former au cours des années de fonctionnement de leurs établissements. Je fais particulièrement attention à qui a été inclus et qui a été exclu. Après avoir expliqué les facteurs qui ont conduit à la fermeture de ces entreprises, j’examine la résurgence de leurs communautés dans les espaces virtuels ainsi que d’autres moyens par lesquels ils ont pu préserver leur héritage. Je conclus en soulignant l’impact de ces restaurants sur le secteur alimentaire actuel. Index terms Mots-clés : restaurant, féminisme, États-Unis, lesbienne, Facebook, féministe Keywords : restaurant, feminism, United-States, lesbian, Facebook, feminist https://journals.openedition.org/aof/9904 1/15 11/1/2019 Memory has added seasoning Full text So… who has the recipe for those home fries? 1 Although The Brick Hut Café of Berkeley, California had closed 16 years earlier in 1997, former patrons continued to crave the restaurant’s home fries. Under the above user’s June 28, 2013 post on the Remembering The Brick Hut Café Facebook group’s page were eleven comments as patrons and former workers pieced together the secret recipe. Maybe this eatery had amazing home fries, but what is more amazing is that people still cared and still talked about them. The Brick Hut Café was one of the hundreds of feminist restaurants, cafés, and coffeehouses in the United States and Canada founded in the 1970s and 1980s.1 For the purposes of this article, in order to not be in a position of policing who can call themselves feminist and to make the project the most manageable, I decided that a restaurant must be identified as feminist in either its title, in flyers, in interviews, or in descriptions in restaurant reviews, magazines, or periodicals. Within these parameters, a central tenet of the restaurant owners’ philosophy was a focus on the needs of women and feminists above all other goals.2 While The Brick Hut Café existed from 1975 to 1997 and Bloodroot Feminist Vegetarian Restaurant of Bridgeport, Connecticut has been in business for over forty years and continues to serve its feminist fare as of 2019, the majority of these spaces lasted only a couple of years. However, the impact of feminist restaurants and cafés has far outlasted the actual lifespan of the spaces themselves. Their legacy extends through the communities they created and lives on in digital forums and through a new generation of feminist businesses. The history of these restaurants is notable beyond their owners’ amalgamation of feminist values with food business; the American feminist restaurants of the 1970s and 1980s are significant because they were always more than restaurants. They were feminist community centers, continuing beyond the lifespan of the businesses themselves. 2 This article examines the importance of feminist restaurants in fostering feminist centered spaces both in the physical and digital realms. Using a mixed methodology of interviews, archives, and a survey of Facebook pages and Facebook groups, I explore how the memory of the feminist restaurants and cafés endures through online communities and a new generation of feminist food businesses. The process of remembering feminist restaurants and cafés has the effect of reproducing and promoting the values enacted by the original owners. First I briefly discuss the kinds of communitiy feminist restaurant owners fostered during the years of the restaurants’ operation, giving attention to who was included and excluded. Following an explanation of the factors that led to the closure of these businesses, I examine the resurgence of their communities in online spaces and the other ways their legacy has been preserved. I conclude by highlighting the restaurants’ impact on the current food business landscape. Methods 3 This article is part of a larger project about feminist restaurants, which relies on archival sources, literature from the period, and oral histories. For this project I assembled materials from nineteen archives around the United States and Canada.3 At these archives I gathered textual sources such as diaries, day planners, notebooks, newspaper and magazine articles, as well as posters, event promotional flyers, surveys, audiotapes, buttons, t-shirts, menus, photographs, napkins, travel guides, advertisements, ephemera, and other paraphernalia. I also relied on feminist literary materials such as feminist and https://journals.openedition.org/aof/9904 2/15 11/1/2019 Memory has added seasoning lesbian periodicals, magazines, and travel guides. In addition, I conducted a series of oral interviews with the founders, staff, and customers of feminist restaurants and cafés in the United States and Canada4. Inspired by Ann Cvetkovich’s drive to document oral histories in An Archive of Feelings: “in forging a collective knowledge built on memory, I hope to produce not only a version of history but also an archive of the emotions” (2003). Even if gender historian Joan Scott rejects the notion that historians can capture experience in the sense of “lived reality” or “raw events,” she concedes, “experience is not a word we can do without” (1991). The women I interviewed spoke about their individual experiences in a particular space. That level of personal reflection is missing in a box of receipts, diagrams of floor plans, and even photographs documenting events that happened at these feminist restaurants, cafés, and coffeehouses. In order to understand the impact of feminist restaurants, I built original databases and maps, which showcase the locations and years of these feminist restaurants and cafés operation. 4 This article relies on two methods, in particular: oral histories and digital ethnographies of the social media website, Facebook. After using online searches to locate Facebook groups and pages associated with feminist restaurants that were founded in the 1970s and 1980s, I identified myself as a researcher to the members of these Facebook pages and groups. I described my research project and asked members if they consented to participating in my research. I then posed questions to the online communities, asked participants if they consented to my quoting them, and also followed up with individuals interested in participating in longer interviews. This method of digital ethnography builds on the work of sociologist Dhiraj Murthy who argues that “balanced combination of physical and digital ethnography not only gives researchers a larger and more exciting array of methods, but also enables them to demarginalize the voice of respondents” (2008). The Making of Community 5 Although less attention has been given to American feminist restaurants, the businesses were part of a larger movement in which feminist activists created women only and women-centered spaces for political organizing, recreational activity, and commerce.5 Each restaurant and café embodied its feminist ideals uniquely, yet all of these feminist restaurants and cafés challenged the status quo of the food service industry, cooking, and consumption. Examining feminist restaurants and cafés provides a new way to understand feminist and lesbian feminist activism during the second half of the twentieth century by prioritizing the role of space. Women studies scholar, Bonnie J. Morris, in The Disappearing L: Erasure of Lesbian Spaces and Culture, expressed her “concern that as we advance further into the twenty-first century, we are witnessing the almost flippant dismissal of recent, late twentieth-century lesbian culture, particularly the loss of physical sites such as women’s bookstores and women’s music festivals and their material legacies