Three types of drink-oriented restaurants: customers,milieu and drinking

Abstract

From the middle of the 1980s, the Swedish restaurants have increasingly changed from food service to drink service. This study presents three types of restaurants in Stockholm's city center. The restaurants could be characterized as ‘the fashionable bar’, ‘the folksy bar’ and the ‘ethnic bar’. The study is based on participatory observations at the restaurants. The description takes as its starting point Goffman's (1956) concepts regarding ‘performance’, ‘setting’ and ‘personal front’ and how the customers consciously or unconsciously choose different milieus as a way to control the environment's impression of them.

The fashionable bar seemed to be an arena for demonstrating professional and social success. The folksy bar could be used as a form of play, in which colleagues from a company for a moment could set aside differences in status. The ethnic bar's closed room encouraged ‘timeout’: the bar served as a second home but it was also used as a sex market for contact between African men and Nordic women.