Making and selling Greek food in London: migrant hospitality professionals talk about food authenticity over dinner

The 2007/2008 financial crisis more than doubled the number of Greek nationals in London (Pratsinakis et al. 2020, ONS 2022). This transformation is visible in London’s foodscapes, as the number of Greek restaurants in the city boomed over the last decade, which was also marked by Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper, based on a Research England-funded project, shows how professionals in London’s Greek food businesses oscillated between competitive and solidarity positionings in conversations over dinner. The data were collected in focus group interactions and using multi-sited, participatory, multisensory ethnographic tools (Pink 2015). Five Greek hospitality workers and four researchers participated in discussions that took place over dinner in three Greek restaurants in London; these were followed by two online conversations. The data were analysed using concepts from Membership and Conversation Analysis (Smith, Fitzerald & Housley 2021, Mondada 2018) to examine the negotiation of categorisations situated in the glocal economic conditions. Participants claimed, ascribed and negotiated a range of professional roles (from novice to expert) and other regional and social class identities and contrasting positionings vis-à-vis what is considered “Greek” food, including juxtapositions between homecooked and professionally prepared food and contrasting constructions of authenticity, tradition and modernity in Greek food and hospitality. At the same time, participants also constructed some solidarity positionings as joint members of the Greek food hospitality industry in the UK, looking to forge shared networks that would help them face the shared challenges in staffing and costs created by the wider economic and political forces of Brexit and the post-Covid recession. The participants’ limits as to how far they were prepared to go in terms of making intra-sector alliances at a time of crisis provides a glimpse into the wider neoliberal context of the UK (food) market of free competition, gig economy and gentrification.