Urban tourism and spatial segmentation in the field of restaurants: the case of Amsterdam

This paper aims to show that the field of restaurants in Amsterdam, a tourist-historic city par excellence where tourism and daily life of locals are spatially intimately intertwined, is nevertheless segmented according to types of restaurants and their micro-geography (passers-by streets versus side streets and “hidden places” in the city). The kernel of the authors’ argument is that on the restaurant market, just as on markets of other cultural products, there is a lot of quality uncertainty because the standards of valuation are contested, differ between classes and lifestyle groups and vary in space and time.

Case study is based on face-to-face interviews with tourists and restaurants in the summer of 2013 in Amsterdam. The restaurants to be interviewed were selected on the basis of a stratified sample of new start-ups, covering different neighbourhoods of Amsterdam. The interviews with restaurants and tourists were done on the basis of some open-ended and some semi-structured questions. Simple cross-tabulation tables with shares, Herfindahl index measures and a chi-square analysis were employed to make the analysis.

Quality uncertainty in the restaurant market is higher for tourists than for locals. Restaurants that are strongly oriented to the tourism market are more found in the lower-middle segments of the market, are more located in passers-by streets, participate less in local networks and monitor other restaurants less than restaurants that are predominantly dependent on locals.

Due to the lack of interest of making interviews from tourists, the authors could only apply interviews to queuing tourists who have time to reply questions. The long queue was mainly in front of Van Gogh Museum. Madame Taussauds Museum and the boat tours queue was tried a lot but no success achieved for making interviews. The authors’ empirical research is based on interviews with tourists only, whereas gentrifiers are not interviewed at all.

This paper enriches knowledge on food tourism on the one hand and the relation between urban tourism and gentrification on the other. Streets with a variety of different restaurants and shops are attractive to both locals and tourists. But the more attractive those streets become, the more property prices increase as a result of which their diversity and attractiveness particularly to locals declines.

This paper argues that mainstream economics does go very far in analysing the restaurant market. The authors argue that Bourdieu’s impressive works bring us further. That is why the authors prefer the concept of field to market because the concept of field implies power relations largely neglected in mainstream economic analysis. However, Bourdieu hardly pays attention to geographical space (only social space). By bringing geography in to the field of restaurants, the authors get a better grip on the geography of social construction of quality and why tourists have a peripheral position in the field vis-à-vis gentrifiers (or locals).

Most of the literature on food tourism is strongly focussed on the demand side and neglects the supply side and is very empiristic, ignoring the analysis of how the restaurant market really works; it never wonders how it is possible that the restaurant market works, given the problem of quality uncertainty. This paper aims to link production and consumption in the restaurant market under conditions of quality uncertainty. The paper enlarges knowledge on the relation between urban tourism and gentrification in tourist-historic cities. Although both are spatially intertwined in those cities, the authors argue that there is a tendency to segmentation in the restaurant market.