In her captivating memoir, Blood, Bones & Butter, the chef Gabrielle Hamilton writes about opening her signature New York City restaurant, Prune, on a block of the Lower East Side still populated by “random derelicts” who would leave their messes behind in her side alley. That was in 1999, at the moment when the lamp of urban gentrification was passing from the hands of artists to those of chefs, where it remains still. In any American city old enough to have an old downtown, the frontier between derelicts and gentrifiers is a street of 19th-century brick warehouses or new glass-walled condominiums, lined with folding chalkboard menu signs and outdoor café tables, irrespective of the local climate. Increasingly in this postindustrial era, the preparation and sale of food are what drives urban development, leapfrogging ahead of actual changes in demographics. “Restaurants used to want a good address,” muses Rozanne Gold, a New York chef and restaurant consultant. “But now, chefs starting up are looking for cheap rents, and out-of-the-way locations actually add to the cachet of a place.”

A city by its very existence calls into being wholesale markets, grocers, bakeries, taverns, and restaurants, which in turn become part of its identity. Think of Pike Place Market in Seattle, Zabar's in New York, Bookbinder's in Philadelphia, or for that matter Applebee's, which evokes a generic American suburb the way the Tour d'Argent does Paris. And restaurants also evoke their period: step into a room where gilded Buddhas gaze at artful arrangements of black river stones and you are transported back to the lemongrass-scented, ponzu-dipped world of a decade ago. People still eat duck-kimchi samosas, but the design world has moved on. The fields of organic m'che on which the herd of urban sophisticates now grazes must be watered regularly with the blood of architects.