John Birdsall’s “What Is Queer Food?” and Erik Piepenburg’s “Dining Out” both seek to define the place of cuisine in queer culture, history and expression.
By Lukas Volger
Lukas Volger is the author of six cookbooks, and the former editor of the queer food journal Jarry.
June 14, 2025 (NYTimes.com)
WHAT IS QUEER FOOD? How We Served a Revolution, by John Birdsall
DINING OUT: First Dates, Defiant Nights, and Last Call Disco Fries at America’s Gay Restaurants, by Erik Piepenburg
What’s queer about food? Over the past decade, momentum has gathered around this conversation. By nature, the intersection resists fixed rules and embraces abstraction, but the benefits of asking seem clear: As two new books demonstrate, food can reveal a richness of queer culture, expression, possibility and survival.
Building on a 2021 New York Times article, Erik Piepenburg’s “Dining Out” looks at 150 years of queer American food establishments, from cafeterias to diners to bathhouses. He argues that gay (his chosen modifier, meant to encompass all queer and L.G.B.T.Q. people) restaurants — defined simply as places where gay people eat — have been every bit as essential to connection, activism and queer history as have bars.
Early gay restaurants were often those that attracted artists and other bohemians, who invariably numbered gays and lesbians among their ranks. The storied Pfaff’s Saloon opened in Greenwich Village in 1856 and was a known gay meeting place, counting Walt Whitman as a regular. Other restaurants became gay more serendipitously — such as Automat cafeterias, whose rapid turnover, communal seating and atmosphere of anonymity created inconspicuous venues to meet and cruise.
Like bars, gay restaurants were frequent sites of pre-Stonewall uprisings and sit-ins, as well as a backdrop to history. Annie’s Paramount Steak House in Washington, D.C., opened in 1948 and served gays and lesbians through the Lavender Scare of the McCarthy era, the gains in sexual liberation of the 1960s and ’70s, the devastation and aftermath of AIDS. It continues today.
When restaurants became a target of hysteria at the height of the AIDS epidemic, thanks to the dining public’s ignorance and panic about the virus’s transmission, gay restaurants were one of the few spaces that provided respite for queer patrons. Florent, which opened in Manhattan’s meatpacking district in 1985 and epitomized downtown cool for 23 years, helped to destigmatize AIDS, with its H.I.V.-positive proprietor, Florent Morellet, listing his latest T-cell count prominently on the day’s menu board.
The diversity of queer people has always meant a diversity of queer restaurants. Bloodroot, in Bridgeport, Conn., was one of several lesbian feminist restaurants that opened in the 1970s, leading with progressive ideals like non-hierarchical staff, and vegan and vegetarian fare. Places like La Rondalla in San Francisco attracted Latino diners, and Pink Tea Cup and Horn of Plenty in New York catered to Black gays and lesbians. Trans-specific restaurants are rarer, but Napalese Lounge and Grille in Green Bay, Wis., has long hosted a monthly “Cross Dressing/Transgender Social Gathering,” and HAGS in New York City infuses its fine dining experience with the proprietors’ queer ethos.
Piepenburg is most animated when fueled by nostalgia, such as in his chapters on 24-hour diners and the “golden age” of gay restaurants — a period he identifies as stretching from the late 1960s to the aughts — and when he ponders how to feel about dining at establishments not expressly meant for him. This invites an inevitable further question: How might lesbians or trans people capture the pleasure of their own establishments? Any topical survey will wrestle with the subjective nature of queer belonging, but in “Dining Out,” Piepenburg’s rigorous research and sensitive reporting are vital to the book’s impact.
Piepenburg is upfront about drag brunch never having been about the food, and it must be said that the menus at many of these restaurants don’t stir much excitement. So what to make of food’s claim to queerness? John Birdsall, the author of a 2020 biography of James Beard, makes immensely satisfying strides in answering the question in his book’s title — “What Is Queer Food?” — and in the process shares an approach for future writers, cooks and scholars.
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Consider the case of Harry Baker’s chiffon cake, a sensation among Hollywood’s A-listers in the 1930s. In 1923, Baker fled Ohio after being caught having gay sex in a public restroom. Established in Los Angeles, he baked his renowned cakes in a makeshift kitchen in a bedroom. This closet becomes a “site of magic” for Birdsall, and Baker’s recipe, later scrubbed clean of its queer origins after General Mills bought it, represents for him “the expansion of pleasure that is possible in the defiance of limits.”
Or take paper chicken, a signature dish at Esther Eng, the Manhattan restaurant that was owned by the eponymous male-presenting lesbian (and pioneering Chinese-language film director). A fitting metaphor for Eng’s known, but rarely acknowledged, queerness, it “masks and reveals,” Birdsall writes. “It transforms base poultry into something pink and transcendentally perfumed.”
The Paris expats James Baldwin and Richard Olney, who shared meals at the recurring Left Bank “Saturday Night Function” starting in 1956, mark a diverging sensibility. For Baldwin, food functioned as a source of nourishment and catalyst for connection. But for Olney, it was a medium for expression. In his work over the subsequent decades, living in the Provençal countryside, Olney would manifest a fertile culinary space for queer excavation, fusing gay and culinary performance.
Who could ignore quiche, a dish that is, today, “embodied” with queerness? In 1948, it was just another recipe in the women’s pages of newspapers. But by the second half of the century quiche had became such a fixture of gay brunching that matters reached a tipping point. The widespread homophobic backlash was neatly captured by the 1982 publication of Bruce Fierstein’s tongue-in-cheek look at masculinity, “Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche.”
If “queer” itself may resist easy definition, food can help clarify its central conviction: that we deserve pleasure. “What Is Queer Food?” puts the sensual and the sensory at the fore, and it pulsates with hunger for what’s possible when queer life and expression is examined through food.
And at a moment when queer and trans people are increasingly under attack, the subject of quiche again becomes a poignant call to action: “Hedonism,” Birdsall writes, “can pull us deeper into our own humanity, and quiche — food of queer resilience and queer power — is fuel for the journey.”
WHAT IS QUEER FOOD?: How We Served a Revolution | By John Birdsall | Norton | 292 pp. | $29.99
DINING OUT: First Dates, Defiant Nights, and Last Call Disco Fries at America’s Gay Restaurants | By Erik Piepenburg | Grand Central | 321 pp. | $30
A version of this article appears in print on July 20, 2025, Page 8 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Taste the Rainbow. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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