Those who hunt for that elusive beast Modern British cuisine often seek its lair in the gastropub. Itself a modern invention, the gastropub was first sighted in 1991 by food writer Charles Campion while reviewing a Clerkenwell pub that had begun serving fashionable, local foods by the restaurateurs David Eyre and Mike Belben. The institution proliferated over the next two decades to the point that food writer Elizabeth Carter compared it to an invasive hermit crab: “a restaurant occupying the dead shell of a pub” (p. 3). The gastropub thus became a flashpoint at the intersection of two central tropes of British nationalism: food and the pub. In this book, sociologist Christel Lane situates the modern gastropub in a long historical lineage of taverns, inns, and public houses. The gastropub thus represented simply the latest incarnation of British public hospitality, more gender inclusive than the taverns of Samuel Johnson, but no less elitist.

Lane adopts a theoretical framework of organizational identity to examine expressions of gender, class, and nation within taverns, inns, and public houses. The first half of the book, surveying the historical evolution of public dining and drinking in Britain, is based largely on secondary sources. To analyze the contemporary gastropub, in the second half of the book, she interviewed forty chefs, owners, and managers of English pubs. Some of the central factors that shaped these organizational identities include the class positions of owners and customers, regulatory regimes intended to preserve order and collect taxes, and more recently, the growing tendency for consumers to eat out and the prevalence of mass-produced, commissary foods in pubs and restaurants alike.

While fears of the demise of the traditional pub—which is often seen as a foundation of British social life—have given rise to a consumer movement, the Campaign for Real Ale, the sociability of the pub is itself something of a myth, as Lane shows. Popular alehouses and more exclusive inns both served alcohol in the Middle Ages but in largely segregated spaces. Because inns served only travelers, taverns appeared in the sixteenth century as a space for respectable men to drink outside the home. Inns and taverns flourished in the eighteenth century, responding to the growth of coach travel and literary societies, but declined a hundred years later with competition from railroads and private clubs. The medieval alehouse acquired the new name of “public house” in the seventeenth century and gained respectability in the eighteenth century, but the nineteenth century became its golden age as a center of working-class recreation. In the final decades of the century, the brewing industry invested in a so-called “pub improvement movement,” but the institution was already in decline as a result of suburbanization, and its collapse was hastened by postwar deindustrialization. At times, these spaces had been sites of social mixing, between the rural gentry and the rising middle class in the eighteenth-century tavern, and the elite and middle-class slumming in nineteenth-century pubs, but Lane summarizes the literature as suggesting the superficial nature of this cross-class sociality.

Lane provides a careful analysis of the gendering of gastropubs and their forerunners. The position of women within public drinking spaces has fluctuated significantly over time and across classes, although with a common thread of women being treated as “guests in a male world” (p. 51). Women ran the earliest alehouses, and plebeian women continued to occupy these spaces throughout the early modern era, while more respectable ladies withdrew to the private realm. Nineteenth-century pubs created a culture of working-class, masculine exclusivity through crude language and songs, aggressive pint drinking, and physical violence by men against wives who were perceived as challenging their authority. Pub improvements at the end of the century opened separate spaces for women to drink, and the decline of drunkenness during World War I also encouraged female customers. Gastropublicans went even further in soliciting a female clientele with clean toilets, wines by the glass, and lighter dishes. But even today, spatial and temporal segregation continues, as men crowd into the bar spaces on Friday nights while women frequent the dining rooms for weekday lunches and Saturday evenings.

Public dining has also been an important site for defining national identity. The opposition between simple English cooking and fancy French cuisine provided a long-running theme, and an “English ‘proper’ Sunday lunch” with roasts and trimmings remains essential to any gastropub's financial success (p. 154). Localism, in both produce and specialties, offered another important anchor for gastropubs’ identities. Nevertheless, by the twentieth century, Britons had become more welcoming of foreign cuisine and produce, and weekday meals provided chefs with opportunities for more inventive cooking. Lane also emphasizes that gastropubs appealed to an element of national identity by seeking to preserve the communal feel of the traditional pub and by keeping the bar open to locals, even as the dining rooms became more exclusive. The biggest blind spot in Lane's analysis is in the racial identity of that nation. Social frictions arose as postcolonial migrations brought people of color into the white preserve of the pub, but the menu is the only site of diversity in her account of the gastropub.

Throughout centuries of change in public eating and drinking, Lane finds continuity in “the provision of a very informal and flexible sociality, widely viewed as a very British particularity” (p. 209). Although historians may be put off by the sociologist's repetitiveness and chronological leaps, From Taverns to Gastropubs provides a valuable addition to the growing scholarly literature on the hospitality industry.