My Home Is My Stage: Restaurant Experiences in Two Estonian Lifestyle Enterprises | Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics

  1. Home /
  2. Archives /
  3. Vol 5 No 2 (2011) /
  4. Articles

This article discusses recent developments in the home-based lifestyle business featuring the example of two cases: Tammuri farm restaurant near Otepää in South Estonia, and home restaurant MerMer in Kolga-Aabla in North Estonia. We study the restaurants from a Goffmanian performance perspective, focusing on the lifestyle entrepreneur’s viewpoint of creating a restaurant experience in their homes. Accordingly, the home and its surroundings are considered a setting in which food has an important role as a performance medium and multiple roles are enacted by a single entrepreneur as a performer. Freshness, quality and locality of food, homeliness and personalised service are used for creating a special home restaurant meal experience. The two cases also shed light on the dynamics of the concepts of home and lifestyle entrepreneurship in contemporary Estonia, challenging the understanding of restaurant cuisine and home cooking as oppositional practices of food preparation and consumption.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license, the author(s) and users are free to share (copy, distribute and transmit the contribution) under the following conditions: 1. they must attribute the contribution in the manner specified by the author or licensor, 2. they may not use this contribution for commercial purposes, 3. they may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.

Authors retain the following rights:

– copyright, and other proprietary rights relating to the article, such as patent rights,

– the right to use the substance of the article in future own works, including lectures and books,

– the right to reproduce the article for own purposes, provided the copies are not offered for sale,

– the right to self-archive the article.