Social science focuses on shifting human behaviors and processes in both complex and multi-causal environments. People’s life patterns, habits, identities, and behaviors are shaped by the society in which they live. The culture of individuals comprises of customs, habits, language, historical stories, and self-understanding. There has been a great transition from agile social cultures to the modern day life patterns. A good relationship between people in a given social setting provides the participants with essential knowledge for comprehending the environment in both cultural and economic terms (Boella, 2017, p. 88). One of the fascinating social sites in my life has been a social restaurant. Restaurants have been playing significant roles in the social life of this thriving social world. Major life events are celebrated in restaurants. This essay explores peoples’ everyday social life within a restaurant, how they express themselves, and how social life in a restaurant contributes to shaping the society.
Today, restaurants are more famous than ever and lie at the heart of the 21st-century worldwide life. The nature of social life within a restaurant has been shaped by globalization, urbanization, and digitization. Historically, restaurants offer food and drink, and this has been fulfilling the human desire for developing social relations. Restaurants provide a fundamental social life interaction setting for people who tour and visit different restaurants in the world (Gibson, 2016, p. 109). My social life has been significantly affected by visiting different restaurants for this is where I have gotten chances to interact with people from different cultures. Imagining myself within a restaurant has been very fascinating. I always imagine of what influences my eating behavior, why people eat differently when they attend restaurants as a group as compared to when they go to eat alone.
The appropriate eating norms and habits of people are set by other people’s behavior within the restaurant. Restaurant offer foods, drinks, and accommodation services to the customers. Customers attending a restaurant come from different social-cultural backgrounds that affect their eating habits and behaviors with other people within the same social context (Kang, Lee, and Huh, 2010, p. 75). Recreation avenues, travel agencies, food service, and outside catering activities are also provided by a restaurant.
Chefs serve the guests. Excellent relationships and friendships between the chefs make them offer the best staff food as ordered by the menu. Guests typically order different types of foods based on their preferences, cultures, and life habits since their birth. Regardless of individual differences, restaurants operate within a set of policies and work cultures, and this makes all people interact within the restaurants freely (Kellner, 2011, p. 10). Restaurant shoppers and guests have the freedom to interact freely with their peers. Their interactions have always rested in shared social background assumptions which as a result enable them to share meals from one another’s culture.
Restaurants have been the perfect social site for different people to interact. It is around restaurant table where people form new acquaintances. The world’s social life and interrelationship get shaped in the restaurants where people from different parts of the world meet. With most people shifting to the urban areas where big restaurants are found, human interactions have been facilitated with high frequency (Kimes and Kies, 2012, p. 99). Restaurants provide the most conducive environment for people to meet and share social histories with one another. This has been contributing to changes in feeding habits and patterns by the customers.
Since the past, restaurants have always played beneficial roles in the social and artistic life history of this thriving society. The recruitment of employees from different social-cultural backgrounds has contributed to the sketching of new ideas that have revolutionalised the operations undertaken within a restaurant (Lynd, 2015, p. 10). Today, major life events of people get celebrated in restaurants something which was not the case in the past. In the past, restaurants were seen as dining places where certain matters were considered immoral. However, with globalization and digitalization of culture; people have transformed restaurants as loving zones.
People develop new customs and life habits in perception to life events from their social interactions within a restaurant. New diet, living habits, and the learning of new languages arise while at the restaurant (Pantelidis, 2010, p. 5). The uniqueness and conduciveness portrayed in a restaurant setting have been offering a conducive environment where the guests have the freedom to talk and express their ideas and feelings to others. This conduciveness gives rise to networking and development of new friends where both personal and professional life histories get shared.
The 21st century has been coupled with numerous social-cultural life changes. The society has moved beyond the gathering and hunting stage by becoming more impersonal and selfless on cultural norms. In the past, people’s interactions within a restaurant were different as compared to today’s modern society (Tiggemann and Williams, 2012, p. 70). The emotions, beliefs, and behaviors of people keep on influencing social interaction proceeds within a restaurant. I have always liked interacting with peers, and other aged people within restaurants since nearly every person has shown fascination in learning, unlearning, and relearning social, cultural behaviors and characteristics of different people from different origins.
The restaurant guests share their social-cultural stories with one another. Stories based on gender perceptions, food and eating patterns, gender roles, and ancient cultural histories get shared by the customers and guests (Kim, Wen, and Doh, 2010, p. 110). The employees in restaurants have caught my eye in how they show teamwork and cooperation while preparing fast foods as ordered by the guests. The employees greater sense of interaction and job enjoyment makes them share ideas on how to make different traditional dishes for the customers.
Restaurants operate within various business sectors which include the hospitality industry, fast foods services industry, and services restaurant industry. Primarily, restaurants prepare meals as ordered by different customers whose food preferences differ because of cultural habits, behaviors, and attributes (Ungar, 2011, p. 10). What fascinates me most in the hospitality, fast foods, and service restaurants industry is how these companies have been able to understand behavior patterns of people to eat and ensure that customers get the foods of their choice. These industries offer drinks, foods, recreation, and accommodation services to the guests. Recruiting diverse workforce both at the front house and back of the house and this makes them share life behaviors hence forming an excellent working environment.
The restaurant industry has been representing different social relations to people with interacting within the premises. The most common social relations represented in restaurants relate to the personal and professional life events for both the guests and the employees. Employee versus employees relations prevail within a hotel, and this leads to the sharing of cooking and customers service ideas amongst them (Ungar, 2011, p. 12). There are also restaurant employees versus guests relationships that prevail when the chefs serve the customers. There is also a customer to customer relationships within the hotel. These relationships affect people’s eating behaviors and dietary choices while interacting.
Restaurants contain kitchens, recreational facilities such as television, accommodation rooms, table maps, and the menus. The ability to provide different menus for different meals with different charges makes the menus convenient to the customers. Some people from a given cultural background prefer their historical dishes. This makes restaurants prefer preparing such dishes on order. In ensuring effectiveness to service delivery, foods are seasoned, marinated, and stored in refrigerators that are kept mostly in the kitchen. The understanding that different customers value social interactions and enjoyment, restaurants offer recreational facilities over the TVs (Wells, Evans, and Cheek, 2016, p. 205). There has been a great transition on the things contained in restaurants. Some of the changes include the provision of 100 percent DNA-free foods, immediate ordering of foods unlike in the past where order needed to get done a day before the visit, and the use of coffee machines to process foods for the customers.
The designing of restaurants have been shaped by the gender, family, ethnicity, and social class of the targeted market by the industry players. The African, Chinese, Australian, and other aboriginal traditional cultures of people dictate the outward and inner designs of restaurants. Depending on the traditional beliefs of the target market, restaurants get designed in a manner that a certain historical culture of people feels appreciated. Most tourists during the summer spend most of their times in restaurants (Gibson, 2016, p. 44). The foreign tourists are known to understand the history and culture of a given country having studied it in history as a subject. This gives them a curiosity to experience these traditional cultures in reality thus making restaurant players design the hotel operations in accordance with the most famous customs of a particular community.
Restaurants operate in a unique rhythm. Restaurants understand the nature of the market it is dealing with hence designing unique dining, cuisine, and control systems. The operating rhythm within restaurants establishes communication principles and interactions amongst the people working in the restaurants and the customers attending the hotel. The working codes of ethics and policies used in restaurants align to the industry’s visions, guests social-cultural attributes, and the business strategy plans (Cross, 2010, p. 297). There is communication freedom in restaurants where employees and customers freely interact. As a result, there is foods and accommodation service delivery excellence due to increased understanding of one another. The restaurants are led by hospitality managers who get support from departmental leaders, and this sets a clear distinction between the restaurant’s operations.
The most important senses used in restaurants are smell, taste, and sight. The day to day foods and beverages choices by people is affected by subsequent food preferences. Since the past, regional cultural preferences change people’s drink and food choice, and this makes people from the same cultural background portray a similar odor preference (DiPietro, Crews, Gustafson, and Strick, 2012, p. 270). The human body adapts to certain frequent tastes making their bodies crave for the exact metabolical demand (Cross, 2010, p. 290). The sense of taste and smell is grounded on the cross-cultural patterns of people’s backgrounds. This then makes restaurants prepare different foods based on human body metabolical studies that arise from the senses of smell, taste, and sight. When people get used to smelling a particular food, this affects their metabolic needs (Lantolf, Thorne, and Poehner, 2015, p. 220). Foods smell from restaurants affect people when at home, they desire to consume what they consumed in the hotel. As a result, there are changes to eating patterns of people due to metabolical needs.
Restaurants are differently constructed. The construction of restaurants varies according to the location and the target market. The traditional restaurants are mostly thatched as a sign that the historical cultures of the community are highly acknowledged and appreciated. On the other side, the modern restaurants are built on the grounds of globalization and digitalization since there is advanced cultural evolvement (Bryman, 2015, p. 40). In the last fifty years, restaurants have been built and remodeled on historical, social-cultural background, and advancement of technology. The design and structure of restaurants are attractive to the guests with excellent electrical plans, refrigeration, wall elevations, ceilings, and fire marshalls. The construction of restaurants in this manner is due to mass production and for the benefit of both the owners and the guests.
Having restaurants in the major cities attract people from various social, cultural backgrounds. The understanding by managers that the restaurant services and hospitality industry are competitive makes them establish extra recreational facilities to attract more guests and customers. There are TV rooms within restaurants as well as pool tables for customers to enjoy. The continued advertisement of restaurant services to people in different locations play a critical role in restaurants sector transformation (Blute, 2010, p. 6). Restaurants have excellent ergonomic design layouts, and this helps in offering valuable services to the disabled and the elderly customers. The success of restaurants is realized from its food preparation, service, and tidy washrooms which are organized in a particular pattern that helps in optimizing performance and efficiency. What comes as an extra for these ergonomic designs is menus that are kept in convenient and configure zones where people can access them.
In conclusion, the behavior, habits, and attributes of people get influenced by the social settings in which they interact. Sharing personal life events stories with friends, family members, and work colleagues remains as an everyday activity. The social events occur in different social environments. Social interactions play important roles in shaping our life patterns. The wellbeing of people depends on the conduciveness of the social context under which people interact at. Restaurants act as a critical social site where people from diverse social backgrounds meet and interact. There is need to upgrade the designs, services, and operations of restaurants so as to enhance social interrelations among people within the industry.
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