Blogs : Food Media
Food Media CHOW's roundup of food-related news from blogs, newspapers, magazines, cookbooks, and film.
Really, Frank Bruni?
Did you have to go and publish a 2,000-word think piece on how, despite striving for gender equality, women in upscale restaurant settings are just … different?
Did you have to trot out hoary assumptions like women are bad tippers? (Not true, it turns out, they just don’t order as much food and booze so they’re tipping on a smaller total check—and, apparently they sit around for hours monopolizing tables.)
Did you have to talk about how all the women who ask you for restaurant recommendations want to make sure the lighting isn’t too harsh? Did you have to dig someone up to give you a quote that “women more often hesitate if the name or look of a dish is too blunt a reminder that they’re biting into an animal.”
Oh, it’s nice that you interviewed women who take the lead in ordering wine and expect the sommelier to present the wine to them, rather to the man who is accompanying them. And we appreciate that you interviewed a progressive restaurant owner who is working (sometimes in vain) toward a more gender-neutral dining room.
But your nut graph says it all:
[R]estaurant owners, managers and servers say that in ways that are often laughably clichéd men and women—viewed as groups, not as individuals—don’t gravitate toward the same dishes, communicate the same priorities or seek the same emotional payoff from dinner out.
Yeah, people when viewed as a group can sure act in certain ways, can’t they? But viewing people as a group as opposed to individuals is what creating stereotypes is all about. And rather than giving us strength in numbers, lumping us all together diminishes everyone.
Posted by | Wednesday, October 8, 2008 at 10:30am | 2 comments
« Previous Post: Simian, Check Please! Next Post: Commodity (Carbon) Farming » |
That person Bruni "dug up" is Stephen Starr. He's one of the most significant restarauteurs in the country, with 20 or so high end restaurants in New York, Philly, and Atlantic City.
Another person he got to tell him what he needed to hear was some guy named Batali. Where does he find these people?!
The restaurant industry is a multi-billion dollar one, and to think that business owners shouldn't pay attention to gender differences is incredibly naive.
But your role on the pc police is secure, so you have that going for you.
I thought that his article was right on. While, we (waiters) need to be careful to watch who is indeed the wine expert among the guests at the table, and not mistakenly return a woman's credit voucher to the man at the table, certain distinctions remain generally true. That's life. Don't shoot the messenger. Here's another shocker for you: you're about 80% more likely to get a sub-par tip from an african-american person than anyone else. Does that make me a racist? Absolutely not. It's based on half a lifetime of service. But profiling, while mostly sad from an idealistic point of view, is just good business sometimes. Is a salesperson on the floor of any retail store smart to politely cut off his/her conversation with a grown man wearing tattered Sketchers and a sports talk radio t-shirt to go help the woman that just walked in with the new Chanel pumps? 'Sounds like good business. Lighten up...and if you're gonna sit around chatting with your girlfriends for an hour after you've paid your bill, try throwing in an extra 2-3% tip for taking up the servers means to otherwise make a living beyond the $3.15/hour he/she's getting paid.