Food and wine presence and pairing within traditional restaurants’ menus as regional heritage promotional behaviour: Gemeinschaft or Gesellschaft?

Abstract

The owners of traditional restaurants in North Portugal provide “slow” food, displaying their region’s intangible cultural heritage while offering local food and wine. This research examines if community attachment (an expression of Gemeinschaft) is a mediator of the relation between the traditional restaurant owners’ offerings and their intention to promote regional heritage. A mixed methodology was used, with survey responses from 309 restaurant owners in the wine regions of Northern Portugal, complemented by naturalistic observation, unstructured interviews and a group discussion. Findings indicate that traditional restaurant owners use regional food and wines in restaurant menus to strengthen the promotion of regional heritage. This use of traditional food is not only a result of community attachment that is as a Gemeinschaft-driven behaviour. Instead, it is a result of a combination of Gesellschaft (business-rationalistic decisions) and Gemeinschaft (community attachment) representations within the traditional restaurant owners reasons for promoting a region’s wine and gastronomy, as tradition and post modern economic models obviously go together. In the future, tourism theory would benefit of considering social and economic evolution of different local communities in the sense of Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft to apprehend the ongoing processes within the wider tourism system.