The interculturalist paradigm emphasises the importance of the intergroup contact to foster social cohesion of diverse, ethnically heterogeneous societies.[2] The contact theory suggests that interethnic contact results in less prejudice and more interethnic tolerance.[2] For instance, the type of contact between immigrants and natives is important: meaningful contact or accidental proximity matter for intergroup relationships. Warm, positive and personal interactions are considered meaningful and aid in fostering better relations between the two groups leading to more mutual respect.[2]

The present study explores the role of food as a symbolic, material, and relational device in identity construction and community processes. Drawing on a qualitative case study of a community-based social restaurant in central-northern Italy, the results demonstrate the multifaceted role of food practices at the restaurant, which serve to strengthen internal relationships, regulate community life, construct intercultural narratives, and establish spaces of recognition and agency for the women involved. Moreover, the restaurant has the capacity to influence broader social representations of migration in the urban context, thereby promoting processes of cohesion and belonging, showing food practices as a medium for identity negotiation, cultural belonging, and the exercise of migrant agency within everyday interactions.

Food originating from the host-country can also be a way for people to connect with natives. It is in this context that we can start to talk of the acculturation of food and eating habits among second-generation immigrants.[4] For a migrant, food has the power to connect and ensure one’s own identity and the bond with a group… Migrants who arrive in a new country feel a belonging to their lands and community through food traditions they have been used to and that other people share the same emotions for.[4] Additionally, food can be a tool to connect and unify people with more or less similar backgrounds.[4]

A third set of interventions focuses on intergroup contact. Articulated by Allport (1954), contact theory predicts that positive social contact can reduce an individual’s stereotypes and misperceptions toward an out-group if the type of contact meets four optimal conditions: equal status among groups, inter-group cooperation, working toward common goals, and an institutionally supportive context.[6] Through this type of social contact, destination community members would learn more about immigrants, build trust and friendships, and change their attitudes toward them.[6] Cultural convergence through interpersonal engagement… perceived cultural distance can be reduced through interaction and inter-group contact, by both migrants and those in the destination society, in order to build greater interpersonal tolerance and understanding and, over time, to produce two-way integration through cultural convergence.[6]

In the case of “ethnic” restaurants and food manufacturers—as embattled as that definition may be—migrants develop tactics that employ their culinary know-how and traditions to negotiate their position within the host society.[10] They use food to reproduce aspects of their culture while also translating and adapting them to reach out to consumers unfamiliar with those traditions.[10] These enterprises can therefore become spaces where cultural reproduction, transformation, and exchange occur in everyday life.[10]

The contact theory further endorses these expectations, specifically with respect to the effect of social integration. The main idea of the contact theory is that interactions between groups or between individuals from different groups are necessary to dissolve group barriers that exist between them (Allport, 1954).[5] The contact helps individuals to see each other as individuals rather than simple members of another, in itself uniform, group.[5] To achieve the desired change in attitude and herewith identification, the contact needs to occur under specific conditions… advantageous characteristics for the contact setting are direct personal contact…and a collective goal that creates a cooperative interdependence between the individuals involved.[5]

This article examines how migrants create value through food- and hospitality-related enterprises, focusing on the ways in which social and commercial imperatives become entangled. Knowledge of ingredients, recipes, craft skills, and techniques, alongside individuals’ life experiences, become important cultural resources for migrant groups: first, as symbolic devices to maintain and celebrate distinct heritages and identities, enabling migrants to become socially and economically present in urban areas; second, as resources that generate economic capital supporting migrants’ vitality and agency. As physical spaces, hospitality venues act as community hubs, encouraging fellow migrants to interact through familiar foods, drinks, music, and objects that connect the venue to countries and cultures of origin, while migrant chefs exercise agency through culinary experimentation and entrepreneurial innovation, creating hybridized expressions of identity that amplify some cultural markers while rejecting others.

Three contact variables were measured: contact in the neighbourhood, going out for dinner to a restaurant, and visiting/being visited.[4] The types of ties migrants create in the destination country refer to contacts with locals and migrants. Both types of ties are deemed relevant for the social integration of migrants.[4] Contact with locals can reduce prejudice and increase trust between groups… contact with fellow migrants can ease new migrants’ settlement process by introducing them to migrant networks that provide support, for example in terms of housing and informal care, as well as providing a sense of belonging in their new residence.[4] Social integration is generally believed to be a combined process of contact opportunities and preferences and the findings in our study corroborate this view.[4]

The researchers found strong evidence that Asian and Hispanic populations are important contributors to local food culture. They used ethnic restaurants—both national chains and local eateries—as test cases.[2] Counties with proportionally larger numbers of Asians and Hispanics had significantly more Asian and Hispanic restaurants, and the availability of local Asian and Hispanic restaurants in a community is strongly associated with the share of the majority populations with a college degree.[2] An increase in the ethnic population resulted in an increase in ethnic grocery purchases by the majority population, suggesting relational assimilation through everyday food consumption.[2]

The concept of integration as a framework for understanding newcomers’ experiences evolved over much of the 20th century, and now often views the process as a two-way street in which migrant and host community learn from and adapt to each other.[8] Integration is frequently conceptualized across three dimensions: socioeconomic, civic–political, and cultural. Cultural integration may involve preserving elements of migrants’ heritage culture while also participating in and adapting to the norms of the receiving society.[8]

In this peer‑reviewed study, the authors “examine the role of ethnic cuisine as a potential mechanism for fostering outgroup tolerance,” using experimental data.[9] They report that exposure to ethnic food was associated with more positive attitudes toward the outgroup, suggesting that “ethnic food can function as a gateway to improved intergroup relations by encouraging openness and curiosity about other cultures.”[9] The study conceptualizes eating ethnic cuisine as a form of everyday intercultural contact that may enhance social cohesion in diverse societies.[9]

Thus, overall, the findings suggest that exposure to ethnic cuisine may serve as a subtle yet meaningful catalyst for direct intergroup contact, depending on the context in which it occurs.[9] Participants who imagined trying ethnic food showed greater willingness to have contact with ethnic outgroup members and reported more positive attitudes toward them, compared to control conditions.[9] These results support the idea that everyday consumption of ethnic food can contribute to intergroup rapprochement, by symbolically and physically engaging with another group’s cultural practices.[9]

This thesis examines how the identity of the Russian immigrant community in New York has been negotiated and articulated through foods, including traditional and non-native foods, as a vehicle for their shifting identities and for reaffirming their position and participation in mainstream American society. Brighton Beach restaurants and markets are described as prime sites of designed experience that bring "ethnic" lifestyle into view, where preoccupation with authenticity has been generated by adaptation to social forces. Authentic food places shape interactions between the immigrant community and mainstream society, enhancing the dominant group’s appreciation of Russian culinary traditions, while immigrants’ identity expressed through food becomes a form of symbolic resistance and ecological adaptation that seeks inclusion into the social life of the mainstream but through spatial separation and exoticism.

We find that reviews of Mexican restaurants mention ethnicity and authenticity much more than reviews of Italian and American restaurants, but less than reviews of Chinese restaurants, suggesting intermediate mainstreaming of Mexican cuisine.[3] Locales with large Mexican populations that show a lack of conventional assimilation (measured by English language acquisition) are more likely to have Mexican food as part of the mainstream.[3] We argue that regional versions of the composite culture change as ethnic groups come to define a region demographically and culturally, and that elements of a distinctive ethnic culture can become part of the mainstream’s composite culture through cuisine.[3]

In this paper we set out new ways of thinking about social integration into superdiverse contexts, highlighting how newcomers in such contexts not only build social networks but also negotiate their sense of belonging and emplacement through everyday practices.[10] Everyday spaces such as local shops, cafés and other small businesses run by migrants can become important sites where they maintain aspects of their cultural identity while interacting with a wide range of residents, thus contributing to social integration in a two-way process.[10]

Ethnic or culture-specific restaurants may be owned by first-, second-, or even third-generation immigrants who have a bicultural identification, with or without strong ties to their heritage homeland. Such restaurants are discursive sites where cultural narratives are constructed and contested; they both preserve and commodify cultural difference, while also adapting cuisine, decor, and service styles to the expectations of the host society. The chapter argues that ethnic restaurants function as spaces of everyday intercultural contact in which physical elements (food, space, bodies) and symbolic representations (menus, stories, aesthetics) enable cultural exchange between minority and majority populations.

Food practices and traditions help communicate cultural values, reproduce those values over time and across generations, and help bolster a group’s sense of having a distinct identity, different from other groups.[6] Food is an important way that people experience elements of cultures that are not their own, and people who are open to new and novel experiences often seek out opportunities to experience foods associated with other cultures.[6] These experiences enrich our lives, but eating “someone else’s” food is also a relatively superficial way to engage in cultural exchange and can create complicated dynamics around authenticity and exotification.[6]

This article on immigrant‑owned restaurants in Greensboro, North Carolina, describes how the Ethnosh project uses local ethnic restaurants to build social and cultural connections.[5] Organizer Phil McKnight explains: “You have the social engagement of coming together and eating in these local businesses then the cultural exchange,” and asks, “What if I can take this formula that has been successful getting people together… around these food businesses?”[5] The initiative both “exposes visitors to new cuisine and cultures” and “supports the people who have propped up a layer of Greensboro’s economy,” underscoring the dual economic and integrative roles of migrant‑owned restaurants.[5]

One of the main aims of communal integration projects is then to decrease their alleged social isolation by providing spaces in which increased contact between immigrant and native residents can take place.[1] Most projects also incorporate social and cultural activities that are intended to improve local-immigrant relations through increased interaction. Common are for example joint weekly breakfasts for neighborhood women, intercultural dinner ‘cook-ins’, weekend dance evenings, or presentations of immigrants’ cultural traditions.[1] Varied spaces of encounters—those of chance contact as well as those consciously constructed through integration projects—facilitate and support different kinds of encounters, ranging from superficial and fleeting to close and sustained.[1]

This blog post from a museum and cultural center documents immigrant food businesses as part of a broader history of migration and American cuisine.[8] It notes that brands and restaurants founded by immigrant families show “how street food, entrepreneurship, and cultural exchange can create lasting American symbols,” indicating that migrant food ventures simultaneously preserve heritage and reshape mainstream culture.[8] Through individual stories, it emphasizes that these culinary enterprises are both economic and social spaces where immigrant identities are expressed and shared with the wider public.[8]

Numerous businesses along Mount Pleasant Street and Columbia Road serviced the growing need for Latin American products and became hubs of socialization and network creation for new immigrants. In Adams Morgan as well as Mount Pleasant, new grocers, restaurants, barbershops, and shoe repair stores became spaces where Spanish was the dominant language and individuals could connect with others who shared similar cultural experiences. These spaces were essential to establishing a strong Latino community in the District; their prominence contributed to an external sense of the neighborhood as a Latin American space, drew new immigrants to the area, generated kinship networks, strengthened community ties, and allowed for expressions of cultural heritage in a new country.

Food is used in the construction and expression of ethnic identity, serving as a marker of group boundaries and belonging.[9] Immigrant communities often rely on food practices to preserve and transmit cultural heritage, while also adapting recipes and eating habits to the resources and tastes of the host society.[9] Ethnic restaurants and food markets provide public spaces where these identities are displayed and negotiated in interaction with majority consumers.[9]

Just like you’d expect, social scientists have long found that contact with out-group members can reduce prejudices about them from in-group members.[7] Meta-analyses of over 500 studies concluded that intergroup contact typically reduces prejudice (Pettigrew and Tropp 2006; Pettigrew and Tropp 2008).[7] One such essential condition is the “friendship potential”: the contact process must present real opportunities for immigrants and natives to become friends, and that typically requires interactions across times and different social contexts.[7] The big lesson is that while more contact with immigrants can yield both more positive and negative effects, the positive ones are more common.[7]

This article describes Sanctuary Kitchen, a program that “partners with immigrant and refugee chefs to build economic opportunity and authentic connections through food.”[1] The organizers state: “We believe that sharing a meal and personal stories is a strong and meaningful gesture of welcome and acceptance, an intimate space in which simple and genuine cultural exchanges can occur.”[1] It highlights that Sanctuary Kitchen’s culinary events both provide employment for refugees and “cultivate authentic connections between local residents and new arrivals,” positioning the kitchen as a site of economic integration and everyday intercultural dialogue.[1]

The article argues that immigrant restaurants play an outsized part in making New York’s neighborhoods what they are, representing immigrant entrepreneurialism and serving as a sense of home and community for national and ethnic compatriots. For Chinese and Taiwanese people, these restaurants represent spaces to reconnect with home or their cultural heritage, as well as for family gatherings and holiday celebrations; they are described as sanctuaries for immigrant communities and beacons of culture. Without these restaurants, the owners would lose their livelihoods and their communities would lose precious spaces to feel at home and commune with compatriots with shared experiences, customs, and values.

Intergroup contact theory supposes that the greater the interaction between in-group and out-group members, the less prejudice exhibited by the in-group; cross-group friendships in particular help to attenuate this prejudice.[3] Positive contact experiences can humanize out-group members and provide everyday opportunities for mutual exchange and understanding.[3]

Chef and food writer Pati Jinich explores immigrant-owned restaurants across the United States, emphasizing that these are places where diverse cultures coalesce and are celebrated. The story highlights how flavors serve as an enduring testament to the resilience and adaptability of immigrant restaurateurs and their communities, and how these restaurants create spaces that unite people across backgrounds. Immigrant-owned restaurants are portrayed as both economic ventures and social spaces that foster understanding and connection between immigrants and long-time residents through shared meals and stories.

Students explore Los Angeles through its diverse culinary landscape, tracing the ways migrant communities have shaped the city’s food culture.[5] By visiting restaurants, engaging with local chefs, and studying the intersection of migration and cuisine, they gain deeper insight into the stories behind each dish—and, in turn, the experiences of those who create them.[5] Their journey through migrant foodways has shown them that food is more than sustenance—it is history, identity, and connection.[5]

This opinion piece argues that eating at “authentic restaurants”—defined as small local restaurants “run by people who grew up around the cuisine they serve”—is a way to experience other cultures while supporting immigrant families economically.[2] The author notes that customers at such restaurants “have the opportunity to try distinctive flavors” and “learn about the culture of the cuisine they are eating,” since dishes often reflect traditional recipes and family histories.[2] It also points out that some recipes are altered due to local ingredients or production needs, showing how migrant restaurateurs adapt their food to the host context while retaining symbolic cultural meanings.[2]

A segment on a Boston restaurant traces the journey of immigrant food and celebrates the people who bring it to diners’ tables. The restaurant is portrayed as helping diners think more deeply about immigrant experiences by integrating storytelling, menu design, and space into an educational and cultural encounter. By highlighting the histories of immigrant cooks and the origins of dishes, the venue functions as a space of everyday cultural exchange where majority-population customers engage with immigrant cultures through both physical food consumption and symbolic narratives about migration and identity.

This blog post on “culinary diplomacy” recommends field trips to local ethnic restaurants and cooking classes hosted by chefs from various countries as a way to “further enrich the cultural exchange.”[3] It encourages families and exchange students to share recipes, stories behind dishes, and language related to ingredients, positioning food spaces and cooking encounters as informal venues of cross‑cultural learning.[3] The article also suggests creating fusion dishes that “combine elements from both your cultural backgrounds,” highlighting how culinary practices can both preserve home traditions and creatively adapt to a new cultural environment.[3]

Ethnographic and sociological research on immigrant foodways has documented that restaurants and food businesses often operate as "third places" where migrants can recreate familiar social environments while navigating new cultural contexts. Studies of immigrant neighborhoods in cities such as New York, London, and Berlin show that migrant-owned restaurants simultaneously preserve culinary traditions and adapt dishes and practices to local tastes, creating hybrid forms that facilitate interaction with majority populations. Researchers describe these venues as spaces of everyday multiculturalism, where physical co-presence and symbolic representations of culture (menus, decor, language use) enable incremental cultural integration rather than full assimilation.

This Facebook community post about food origins notes that many dishes are shared or borrowed between groups, stating that “there are so many foods that are similar; tribes will have borrowed from each other,” and that assigning a single nationality to a dish can obscure this exchange.[10] The discussion frames food as a product of ongoing cultural borrowing and adaptation, suggesting that what appears as an ethnic cuisine in a restaurant often reflects layers of historical interaction between communities.[10] This supports the idea that contemporary ethnic restaurants participate in continuous symbolic exchange between cultural groups rather than preserving static traditions.[10]

Wikipedia’s overview of ethnic restaurants notes that such establishments are commonly started by immigrants and serve cuisine associated with a particular national or cultural tradition. It explains that ethnic restaurants may cater both to co-ethnic patrons seeking familiar food and to members of the majority population interested in experiencing other cultures, leading to cuisine that can range from highly traditional to adapted or fusion styles. The entry emphasizes that these restaurants can play a role in the representation and perception of immigrant cultures in host societies, sometimes reinforcing stereotypes and sometimes broadening understanding through more nuanced culinary and cultural offerings.