Old Gender Roles With Your Dinner?

Gee thanks, New York Times! This article, found on October 10th in the Dining & Wine section of a recent New York Times, covers the recent trends and practices of wait staff of upscale restaurants in New York who are suddenly grappling with dining room tables as gendered spaces. One server essentializes the idea that choosing to place a check in front of a man or consulting his opinion on wine before a woman is “chivalrous from one perspective, chauvinistic from another.”
A reasonable impression of navigating this conflict would be to, as one female restaurant owner put it, “read the table, and if it seems like they would appreciate ladies being served first, just do it.” The consensus among the servers interviewed seems to be that it’s not that easy. They are eager to hold on to stale notions such as that men tip more, order more and that “men eat and leave, women eat and stick around,” allowing lower table turnover and less profits. Pair these prejudices against women as low tippers and more needy diners and serve it up with some ageist presumptions, and you’ve got yourself fine dining! While not addressed in the article, the assumption that young diners will yield less profits because of their inability to order alcohol, their more limited budgets and the inherent stingy or individualist qualities of their youth, leads service to decline rapidly. I have spent many dinners out with a group of teenage girls, only to be simultaneously flirted with and condescended to by male waiters a few years older than ourselves. However, this article claims that younger generations are experiencing more equality because servers are now responding to the (previously unheard of) desire of women to be respected. Nowadays, “if she makes eye contact with a server and seems the most inquisitive and purposeful, the server notices, and responds to it” unlike years past when male waiters would ignore female attempts to achieve gender equality within even the small and seemingly insignificant space of a restaurant’s dining table. I was surprised that this was covered in such a detailed manner, enumerating the differences in male and female taste in decorating and even bathrooms, but even more surprising was the blatant heterosexuality that characterized the piece. Each generalization posed by this article accessed stereotypes of straight, white, upper-middle-class women and men who are of course the only people who eat at upscale restaurants. I wish that the Times had chosen to do a more challenging piece, maybe framing this article from the perspective of young women who are shocked that equal service is NOT the norm, or including multiple perspectives of gender and sexuality.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/08/dining/08gend.html?pagewanted=1&8dpc&