Eating the Other: Understanding Processes of Racialisation in London’s Multicultural Pop-up Restaurant Scene

London is a gourmand’s paradise (Rhys-Taylor 2014), reflecting its status as a superdiverse, global city in terms of the sheer variety of food available. As home to countless different restaurants and food markets, there is an ever burgeoning ‘foodie’ scene which includes food bloggers and pop-up restaurants where keen amateur cooks host ‘supper clubs’. Many supper clubs have sprung up offering what might be described as ‘ethnic’ food. In ‘Eating the Other', bell hooks (1992) suggests that “the commodification of Otherness has been so successful because it is offered as a new delight, more intense, more satisfying than normal ways of doing and feeling”. This paper is based on research which examines the intersectional dynamics of ‘ethnic commodification’ within the pop-up restaurant scene amongst the producers (hosts), and the phenomenon of ‘food adventurers’ (Heldke 2003) amongst the consumers (guests). As in New York, the scene in London is intimately tied to gentrification (Zukin 2014) and multiculturalism plays a significant role in this process. The paper looks at how race, gender and class dynamics play out in the scene and how, despite the veneer and commodification of diversity, these contribute to processes of racialization, othering and ultimately, continue to centre Whiteness.