Cuisine happens when cooking leaves the kitchen, in the first instance when it  escapes the domestic kitchen, and in the second instance, when it spreads onto the print media to give durability to the talk about taste. Based on detailed archival work and quantitative data this presentation seeks to measure the talk about restaurants in American newspapers from its first appearance in 1830 to the present. The restaurant kitchen is the space of mongrel borderland – an orality of Hispanidad, Bengali, Cantonese, and Hakka – and the dining room a pedigreed and printed Anglophone parlor with Francophile accents. This work looks at taste and toil as a dynamic, dialogic relationship between producers and consumers of commodified cuisine.