Molz

Ethnic restaurants are one of an increasing number of arenas in which people can engage in tourist ices practices within their own culture and as part of their everyday life.

Authenticity
Authenticity is the plastic words that “have come to mean so much that they really mean very little while nonetheless signaling importance and power”. Authenticity is motivation for tourism. Erving Goffman’s study of social performance divides the social world into back regions and front regions. Back regions are off limits to outsiders or audience members, are areas where social actors usually prepare their performances and store props, and relax between performances. Front regions are areas where social actors actually perform in front of an audience.
Thai restaurants use several strategies to imbue their food and the overall dining experience with a sense of authenticity. Thai restaurant tends to reflect the American perception of what constitutes an authentic Thai experience. The Thai Restaurant as “Staged Authenticity”

The menu of Thai restaurant is often states that its food is authentic or original, or food is authentic or original. Most Thai menus include typical dishes, such as Tom Yum soup and Pad Thai noodles, other equally authentic dishes and preparation techniques may be omitted with the customers’ preferences in mind. In Thailand it is common to put a fried egg on top of a dish of fried rice, most Thailand it is common to put a fried egg on top of a dish of fried rice, most Thai restaurants will only do this as a special request and usually charge extra for this authentic addition. Serving fried rice Kai Dao (with a fried egg) does not appeal to most Western dinners, and therefore Thai chefs omit the egg.

The Ingredients
Thai restaurants also attempt to provide an authentic experience by using typical Thai ingredients. More than any other ingredient, the chili pepper has come to stand for Thai-ness. Thai restaurants understand this equation, and spiciness is indicated in every menu.

The Décor
Thai restaurants often attempt to create a sense of authenticity beyond the food. They use native artwork, decorations, and music to suggest that the restaurant really is an enclave of Thai culture. Common in these Thai restaurants are photographs of King Bhumipol, the current king of Thailand, or of King Rama V, the revered nineteenth-century king who modernized Thailand. Several of the restaurants also have spirit houses, small altars with offerings of oranges, water, jasmine, and incense. This music, and all of the props typically found decorating a Thai restaurant, set the stage upon which Thai-ness, in the form of a dining experience, is performed for the culinary tourist.
Negotiating Authenticity in Thai Restaurants
Authenticity is negotiable, emergent, and socially constructed. Tourists bring their own symbolic systems and cultural experiences to bear on this negotiation of authenticity. Authenticity is created as much through the tourist’s own perceptions as it is by the host’s performance of otherness.

Culinary Tourism as Identity work
Foodways and tourism converge within the wider social discourse concerning identity making. Both include processes of identity construction that occur along a perceived cultural divide between that which is familiar and that which is different, between the edible and the exotic, the self and the other.

Authenticity and Identity
Authenticity has been both an implicit and explicit inspiration for classifying tourists and tourist behaviors. On the other hand, Erik Cohen does overtly use the concept of authenticity to create a typology of tourists and touristic experiences that provides a useful framework for understanding how authenticity facilitates identity construction and validation in Thai restaurants.

The Culinary “Post- Tourist”
Cohen’s recreational tourist is synonymous with what other scholars refer to as the “post-tourist”. Cohen’s recreational tourist is “prepared playfully to accept a cultural product as authentic, for the sake of the experience, even though ‘deep down' they are not convinced of its authenticity”.

Conclusion
This paper has attempted to outline some of the ways in which the concept of authenticity can be used in exploring the social dynamics that occur in instances of culinary authenticity. Authenticity, considered in the context of the tourist interaction, is one means of understanding the processes of identity construction and validation that take place in arenas of culinary tourism.