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Dining out, or eating a main meal away from home, is now a symbolically significant popular activity which provides a complementary source of food and companionship. This chapter introduces a book examining dining out both as customers in commercial venues and as guests of friends and non-resident kin. It describes the outline of a re-study of an activity with considerable cultural and symbolic significance. It also identifies key debates in cultural sociology in the twenty-first century around theories of globalisation, cultural omnivorousness, cultural intermediation and aestheticisation.

This chapter considers what eating out means to people, for what reasons they dine out, and how their orientations towards the activity differ. It draws on in-depth interviews and survey questions about orientations towards dining out. It distinguishes between special meals and impromptu and regularised ordinary meals, identifying popular understandings and the meaning of eating out from the analysis of responses to twenty-five statements included in the survey in both 1995 and 2015. These responses indicate what people like and dislike, hope and fear, think and do. They also give some indication of change over time. The social characteristics which predispose people towards different orientations can be identified. It is concluded that dining out is primarily understood, as it was in 1995, as a substantial meal, paid for in a commercial establishment, eaten with other people, and usually primarily for enjoyment. Basic reasons for wanting to eat out are similar in 2015, but the activity has become more familiar and rather less special. Most meals out now are best considered as ordinary, and occurring in an impromptu or regularised manner which renders them normal.

This chapter shows how dining out has become more familiar to more people over the twenty years since 1995. It examines who visits which types of restaurant and how frequently, showing how often people eat out and who eats out most, on the basis of survey evidence. It reports on how personal orientations affect the frequency of eating in restaurants. It examines exposure of survey respondents to the variety of different types of restaurant in 2015 and compares that with 1995. It concludes that eating out is both necessary and discretionary. There has been a modest increase in the rate of eating out as the tempo has stepped up. Familiarisation with the practice makes dining out less special, so while it is still highly pleasurable, satisfaction with commercially provided meals has declined.

This chapter examines the food eaten at this time in taverns, inns, and public houses. It focuses on how allegiance to either English or French cuisine expresses patriotism and cosmopolitanism respectively. Patriotism and the consumption of large amounts of beef receive particular emphasis. An examination of food consumed nevertheless finds a considerable variety in the types of food enjoyed, as well as noting the quality, particularly of country house cooking. Divergent national identifications, in turn, are related to the class background of diners, as well as to gender identity. Changes in modes of dining out are viewed in their social, economic, and political contexts.

This chapter links the spread of Chinese food to the geographic and socioeconomic expansion of the United States. This connection is best captured by the notion of “empire food,” which was created in the process of America's empire building for the pleasures of its citizens. While many Americans are unwilling or unable to see their country as an empire, the United States is, nonetheless, an empire of consumption characterized by extraordinary material abundance. It is the kind of empire that an American founding father such as Thomas Jefferson aspired to build in order to ensure freedom and liberty. Standing as an important event in the expansion of the American empire, the multiplication of Chinese restaurants expanded the meaning of American freedom and abundance by extending the dining-out experience to the masses.