Modes of Representation: Restaurant Websites, Menus, Professional Coverage, Review Sites, and Instagram
To get a clear picture of how upscale park restaurants are represented, it is necessary to look from a variety of angles. Concessioners represent restaurants through both their websites and their menus. Sometimes, gatekeepers—whether newspaper columnists, guidebook authors, or even food bloggers—will contribute to the representational enterprise. On the receiving end are the eaters, who have become anything but passive consumers. Global flows of media seed cosmopolitanism, as they allow audiences to position their lives relative to global others (Appadurai 1990). This encourages audience participation in global consumer culture. Eaters increasingly represent restaurants on review sites like Tripadvisor and Yelp as well as through social media, like Instagram, and their reviews reflect and shape the dis-courses I have outlined. National parks increasingly provide visitors with encounters across cultural differences and opportunities to perform cultural competence, particularly regarding food (Figueiredo, Pico Larsen, and Bean 2021). In studying the way that these experiences are narrated by eaters on review sites, I’m mindful of Herman’s investigation of review sites to determine the ways restaurants engage cosmopolitan sensibilities by using language, imagery, and interpretation clues (Herman 2021, 5). Of course, reviews are a not an exhaustive index of responses to a dining experience, but they do constitute an important and influential discursive form.
Websites and menus are the most obvious means for restaurants to represent their identity and commitments to consumers. Jurafsky (2014) contends that menus offer clues about how people think about wealth, status, and food, and that upscale restaurants tend to offer fewer choices than are available at casual eateries and to use few words in general on their menus, but those words are often long and from high-status foreign languages like French. Most restaurants today use their web pages not only to post menus but to extend this framing as part of marketing efforts to impact consumer behavior (Litvin, Blose, and Laird 2005). Restaurant websites are one of the most important information sources for consumers, but for upscale restaurants, they are considered alongside impressions of the restaurant’s reputation, ratings by gatekeepers, and recent reviews in determining where to eat (Yilmaz and Gültekïn 2016).
In the age of mass media, professional food critics—experts with formal train-ing and exclusive experience—were the dominant gatekeepers for knowledge about restaurants. Their reviews in print media sources like newspaper columns, guidebooks, and lifestyle magazines clued readers in to dining experiences deemed worthwhile, relevant, and high status (Johnston and Baumann 2015; Feldman 2021). Many of these media sources have become digitized, and today’s internet offers a bevy of gatekeeper-crafted restaurant coverage. Digitalization has led to a moment where the gatekeeping function of expert cultural intermediaries is eclipsed by the efforts of amateurs, everyday people who register their judgments about food and restaurants in digital spaces—including review sites and social media—with great regularity (Jurafsky et al. 2014; Lupton 2016; Zeamer 2018; Kobez 2020; Lewis 2020; Contois and Kish 2022). Indeed, digital culture “provides the contemporary infrastructure and grammar through which food is increasingly communicated and fought over. Both are mundane technologies of identity making. Both have material dimensions. And both hold structural, symbolic and ideological significance”(Feldman and Goodman 2021, 1227). When they were first created in the 1870s, US national parks were technologies for reproducing nature using the aesthetic forms of landscape representation available then; today, it makes perfect sense that the parks, and the restaurants they house, will remediate nature using the aesthetic forms of digital media (Grusin 2004, 172).
Among amateur cultural intermediaries, the group known as cosmopolitans are particularly influential, especially when mediating spaces like national parks. Bell and Hollows (2007) note that cosmopolitan subjects are allowed choice, mobility, and change, while those who represent the local are static keepers of the “authentic” ways with which cosmopolitans commune. Cosmopolitan travelers, who are contemporary, adventurous, omnivorous, and multicultural, are produced in a culinary tourism imaginary that frames them as distinct from locals, who are thought of as monocultural, exotic, and old-fashioned (Leer 2019). Cosmopolitans, then, thrive on the presence of locals (especially Indigenous people and their foodways) in national parks; as Hannerz writes, “there can be no cosmopolitans without locals” (Hannerz 1996, 11). In Chapter 6, I look more closely at how this particular (and problematic) cosmopolitan desire has surprisingly transformative benefits for recentering Indigenous foodways in the parks; in the meantime, given cosmopolitan concerns with authenticity and open-mindedness, it’s especially instructive to look at how cosmopolitan interests play out in the spaces between professional gatekeeper-produced restaurant coverage and reviews produced by amateurs on re-view sites and in social media. Careful examination of the food discourses in these spaces—how they manifest familiar privileges and anxieties over status (Mapes 2018) signaled by “the classed consumption of racialized products” (Gualtieri 2021, 906)—reveals the ideological underpinnings of social class and ethnoracial formations in a manner that updates the connection between national parks and aesthetic forms.
Jordan Pond House
In the northeastern US, in the state of Maine, Acadia National Park’s Jordan Pond House has existed in some iteration since 1893. Known for its sprawling lawn overlooking both scenic Jordan Pond and the iconic twin mountains known as The Bubbles, as much as for its tradition of popovers and tea, Jordan Pond House is Acadia’s only dining option beyond picnicking. The concession is operated by Dawnland LLC, whose parent company Ortega has concession contracts in at least seven small-to-midsize national parks and many state parks. Like Xanterra in Chapter 4, Ortega/Dawnland promotes popular discourses of sustainability as they emphasize tradition, conservation, and landscape. However, except for landscape, these interests for the most part do not show up in eater representations.
Apart from government regulations and guidelines, one would think that any fine-dining restaurant in a national park would be wise to emphasize sustainability anyhow, as this is a key food discourse for the cosmopolitan visitors who are the target audience and who have the most power to circulate information about the restaurants (Wise and Velayutham 2009). The website of Jordan Pond House high-lights the restaurant’s healthy, local, and sustainable food, and provides navigation to a page on environmental stewardship, including a downloadable “environmental policy.” The Jordan Pond House website mentions Dawnland LLC’s commitment to water preservation, energy reduction, waste management, sustainable purchasing, and preservation and protection of park resources.
Nolan Capital, the private equity firm that took a majority interest in Ortega National Parks, LLC, in 2019, similarly touts the importance of their role as stewards:
ONP has had a long history of service and it is our mission to continue as a responsible steward of our park partner’s assets and resources. We are committed to serving our guests and visitors while respecting the environment and furthering the mission of these great public assets.
(Chairman Peter Nolan, quoted in Repanshek 2019)
For its food recovery efforts in other parks, Ortega National Parks has been recognized by the Environmental Protection Agency. Ortega also touts its commitment to recycling and the use of recycled products.
Beyond its website, the most obvious way a restaurant represents itself is through its menu. The downloadable version of the Jordan Pond House menu pro-vides valuable real estate to a statement titled “Fresh, Local, Sustainable”:
Ingredients retain more flavor and vitamins when they are fresh. Buying ingredients locally means they get to our kitchen and to your plate quickly for the freshest, tastiest meal possible. Local buying also reduces pollutants from long distance shipping. We are proud to include many organic ingredients and to support local farms and fisheries. This menu includes hundreds of sustainable, locally sourced, fresh ingredients.
(Dawnland LLC 2021b)
Health claims do not get the same level of called-out treatment on the menu, per-haps because diners have reported finding health claims unappealing (Turnwald et al. 2017). However, the restaurant’s website devotes a section to healthy eating, emphasizing the degree to which Jordan Pond House provides healthy choices. So, between the website and the menu, corporate managers are trying to make a clear statement about commitments to sustainability, which would seem to be of utmost importance when their food-service enterprises are situated within once-pristine landscapes dedicated to conservation.
The Jordan Pond House menu addresses the sophisticated type of eater who might be expected to visit the Park’s only fine-dining establishment. The much-vaunted popovers, at $8 for 2 in 2021, are among the most affordable options, flanked by appetizers ranging from roughly $14 to $18, a $16.50 bowl of chowder (!), and prix fixe dining at around $39–$45 per person—relatively high prices. As Jurafsky et al. (2016) have found, distinction is framed in menus by language con-noting authenticity and abundance, which assumes educational capital on the part of the reader and yet does not reveal anxiety by oversignaling quality (Liberman 2004), for instance, through overzealous adjective use.
On the Jordan Pond House menu, authenticity is communicated via references to the provenance of the food (e.g., local lobster stew, farmers market vegan stew, field lettuces, cage-free boiled eggs, heirloom tomatoes, Maine wild blueberry sorbet, Pineland Farms smoked cheddar) and tradition (e.g., Acadia Favorite fresh seasonal catch, a Caesar salad with classic preparation). There are also plenty of fancy words that presume a reader with some degree of culinary capital—gastrique and muddled, for instance, are not entirely legible to the typical middle-class American who hasn’t done a stint in culinary school. There is nothing much in the way of menu language signaling generous portions, but there are options aplenty in terms of the sheer number of choices: 29 food options and a startling 44 beverages, with frequent invitations to “add” or “substitute” various elements, emphasizing consumer choice (Jurafsky et al. 2016).
In one way, the Jordan Pond House reveals its own provenance, as the park-based outpost of a growing food-service company as opposed to the domain of, say, a buzzed-about chef: instead of being subtle and secure in its identity, it ap-pears anxious and overhypes its food. The menu creators go completely overboard on all types of adjectives, from the participial (caramelized leek quinoa, blistered corn, roasted tomatoes, candied walnuts) to the extreme positive (Yummy! Amazing! Refreshing!). Liberman’s 2004 work reminds us that this ostentation betrays a concern with status that would not be there in a fine-dining establishment secure in its identity.
The website for Jordan Pond House beckons with a hero image of tables on a lawn with flowers in the foreground and the Bubbles in the distance as it announces, “Tea and Popovers on the Lawn—Learn More” (Dawnland LLC 2021a). The site’s narrative proclaims the restaurant’s long tradition in Acadia and emphasizes the “beautiful lawn” and “amazing views” as it recommends partaking in afternoon tea with popovers.
Unlike the Metate Room in Mesa Verde (discussed later in this chapter), Jordan Pond House fails to reference local Indigenous cultures either in its food offerings or in its décor; instead, the emphasis is on the local post settler contact, as lobster, blueberries, and Maine draught beers are called out. This absence is intriguing, considering Dawnland LLC’s laudable arts-related Tribal initiatives, including funding for Tribal partnership events and programs, Tribal art scholarships, and startup costs for Maine Tribal artists (Levin 2014).
Messaging from the outside community about health and sustainability at Jordan Pond House has been mixed. Despite its public-facing stance as deeply committed to healthy and sustainable food options, New Mexico-based Ortega came under fire for shortcomings in these areas in 2013 when it won the $6 million annual, ten-year concession contract for Acadia National Park out from under local favorites The Acadia Corp., which had held the contracts for over 80 years. Snubbed, The Acadia Corp. maintained that some of Ortega’s menu items were “not obtainable or illegal in Maine or New England,” including “roe from a threatened or endangered fish,” thus rendering them antithetical to sustainability (Repanshek 2019). However, Ortega’s subsidiary, Dawnland LLC, also received positive coverage of its promises to source all its dairy, cheese, and seafood from Maine within ten years and to radically increase the percentage of its meat and produce sourced in Maine and New England (Levin 2014).
One seemingly ironic question is whether smaller companies that lack the industrial scale of larger multi-park concessioners can deliver on the promise of sustainability. The President of the Acadia Corporation testified to a congressional subcommittee in 2015 about the challenges facing small, single-park concessioners like his own company: “Absent congressional action, national park concessions are destined to be left to companies large enough to have personnel dedicated to proposal development and centralized management offering a homogenous, mediocre service lacking the distinctiveness befitting America’s unique national parks” (Woodside 2015, 2).
Users of restaurant review sites tend to act on the information they find there (Parikh et al. 2014), suggesting that the content there wields significant influence. Likewise, social media are used to communicate about food in ways that are con-sequential for society and individuals (Cross 2020). Thus, these spaces of food mediation bear close examination. Beyond how Jordan Pond House curates its own meanings around health and sustainability, and how those are debated in professional media, I am interested in how the experiences of everyday eaters at Jordan Pond House are represented in social media and review sites. Let me start with review sites: I looked at TripAdvisor’s 2,851 reviews, with an overall rating of 4.0/5, with 4.0 for food and service, 3.5 for value, and 4.5 for atmosphere, as well as Yelp, with 680 reviews and an overall rating of 3.5/5, and Google, with 1,441 re-views, with an overall rating of 4.1/5. Across all of the review sites, common concerns emerge: Reviewers say that when reservations were accepted pre-COVID, it was hard to get anyone to answer the phone or to get a reservation at a peak time; during COVID, with no reservations, the wait is too long. Always, they say, the restaurant is crowded, with wildly inadequate parking, and service is too rushed.
Reviewers for the most part rave over the view and the landscape, but many suggest that the food comes up short. TripAdvisor’s Patricia G. says, “With our meal we each ordered a popover and these are a must if you are visiting this restaurant. They are served hot, with butter and strawberry jam. They are to die for!” (June 21, 2021). But for every Patricia G., there are others lamenting the blandness, temperature, high prices, portion size, and general lack of quality. Tim B. on Yelp, for instance, went into gory detail about poor flavors and scrawny servings before concluding, “This isn’t a restaurant – it’s a profit maximization factory serving up junk food. Don’t waste your time or money” (July 2021). Another recent Tripadvisor review, by 826bonnies, titled “Overhyped and Mediocre,” sums up many of the feelings present on review sites:
It’s a head scratcher why this place is considered iconic and a must-do on an Acadia itinerary. The wait times are long and the food was quite mediocre. The fabled popovers were cold and chewy, served with paltry amounts of jam and butter. The building itself is unremarkable for National Park architecture, having a shabby 1980s summer camp in the Berkshires aesthetic. The views from the lakeshore are stunning and the reason worth stopping. Do yourself a favor and bring a boxed lunch from town to have a great picnic and avoid the restaurant letdown.
(826bonnies, Tripadvisor, June 2, 2021)
This theme, of landscape over foodscape, exists in social media as well. Jordan Pond House Facebook posts over the last several years say little to nothing about the food; pre-COVID, it’s all about the park’s physical beauty, except for a rare popover closeup. Summer 2018 is the last time there were a few consecutive posts featuring the restaurant’s food. Recent posts are all landscape, tables on the lawn, and Yo-Yo Ma’s surprise visit (“paying tribute to the Wabanaki tribes in Maine in advance of Interior Secretary Deb Haaland’s visit to the park on Friday”).
In contrast to the review sites, on social media, there is little criticism of the restaurant or its food; instead, there is the replication of visual iconography. On Instagram, a recent search for the geotag “Jordan Pond House” revealed, among its top 12 posts, 5 popover photos, including the iconic Excalibur-style popover sundae with a knife sticking out. The similar geotag “Jordan Pond House” with a road address included revealed more popover shots and just as many pics of the iconic great lawn/outdoor dining setup; beyond the top posts, the others are mostly of scenery, not food. Generally, among those who use Instagram hashtags or geotags to indicate Jordan Pond House location, there is little criticism of the food or the popovers. One might get eating with Ziggy, who says “The famous Jordan Pond popovers. Not as thrilling as I remember, but quite good” alongside beauty shots of popovers and jam, but mostly, commentary is along the lines of “this is a popover!” Beyond popovers, eaters tend not to use social media to represent the rest of the food the restaurant offers, instead focusing on the scenery. Most posts that use Jordan Pond House hashtags or geotags depict the landscape and views from the restaurant, rather than the food. Many, many posts show popovers foregrounded against Jordan Pond itself. There is little commentary on the food at all, other than to clarify that the Instagrammer is participating in the ritual consumption of the iconic Jordan Pond House popover.
In my analysis of review sites and social media posts, which indicate how eat-ers are responding to their experiences at Jordan Pond House, there is little to no mention of sustainability, showing perhaps a misalignment of eater concerns with NPS and concessioner concerns. In this misalignment, I hear the continued drum-beat of the Romantic critique of industrialism: Eaters want hassle-free aestheticized experiences—beautiful food in beautiful settings, and although the concessioner gestures toward authenticity and distinction, reviewer critiques suggest that the industrial food service model cannot deliver on this promise. Digital media play a role in overriding critiques of the industrial food system, as the “profit maximization factory serving up junk food” in the parks, mentioned by one Yelp reviewer, becomes eclipsed by the toothless vocabulary of visual iconography that is present in social media. The social media fetishization of popover and landscape iconography harkens back to the Romantic concern for aestheticized experience, as the preoccupation with distinction manifests differently in a visually mediated reality.