It sounds Pleistocene, but it’s mainstream. Of the nation’s nearly 1.5 million food servers, more than three quarters are women, but most still sling hash. The classier the restaurant-and the bigger the tips the fewer women it tends to hire. “It’s the policy at a lot of restaurants, but they can’t say that,” says Wendy Levy, who is completing a documentary film on waitressing in America called “Alice Lives Here.” “So they give other reasons.”
Even today, 20 years after a class-action suit was brought against such notable New York restaurants as Lutece, La Cote Basque and The ‘21’ Club, none has a waitress on staff although most agreed at the time to hire more women. But spokespeople at these and other all-waiter restaurants are unanimous: discrimination has nothing to do with it. It’s just that women don’t have the … well, they can’t seem to … really, it’s a matter of . . . “that demeanor,” Lenzi calls it. “We love women,” says Sirio Maecioni of Manhattan’s Le Cirque. “It just happened like this,” says Jean-Pierre Goyenalle of Le Lion d’Or in Washington, D.C. “It’s really a question of us seeing an endless number of male applicants and few female applicants,” says James Soule of Masa’s in San Francisco. Rose Sutter of Cafe La Cave, near Chicago, says the restaurant would hire a woman, if it were “in desperate need of someone.”
But sex discrimination is exactly what’s going on, according to a recent study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a private, nonprofit organization in Cambridge, Mass. Researchers sent men and women with similar, fictitious resumes to apply for waiter/waitress jobs at 65 Philadelphia restaurants. At the high-end restaurants, 12 job offers came throgh - 10 of them to men. At the cheap restaurants, nine out of 11 offers went to women. he researchers also estimated that servers in the expensive restaurants earned nearly $19 an hour in wages and tips, while those in the cheap restaurants took in just over $11. “Discrimination isn’t that hard to do.” says a New York restaurateur. “You take the applications and keep them all. Then you call the ones you want.”
The all-male serving staff is a holdover, and a hardy one, from the European restaurant tradition. In France especially. to create and serve haute cuisine are honors largely reserved for men. In America, the wanna-bes follow suit. “It’s anachronistic.” says Clark Wolf of The Markham, a New York restaurant with a mixed staff. “These places think they have to have men to be taken seriously-”
It’s true that men who apply for serving jobs tend to have more extensive resumes than women. “Because this has been a male dominated profession for so long, you’re going to have more qualified males,” says David Schlismann, dining-room manager at Chicago’s Everest. Even so, he has hired three waitresses. “You can easily train someone,” says Anne Rosenzweig of New York’s Arcadia, who hires men and women. “Ninety percent of the job of waiting on tables is attitude.”
Many restaurateurs say they welcome applications from women but receive very few. In part, that’s because some waitresses don’t even bother applying to certain restaurants. Christina Campanella, a waitress at The Markham, says many of New York’s upscale restaurants seem to exude a men-only policy. “Some of these places are run by older men and inhabited by older men, " she says. " I wouldn’t be comfortable. "
Mary Manzo, an EEOC attorney in Chicago, says few waitresses file discrimination charges. “That is really the only way that we can get a restaurant to change its hiring practices,” she says. Penalties can reach $300,000 per victim, but many cases settle out of court. Manzo recently won an agreement from Chicago’s La Strada to add three women to its 10-man serving staff. just as important, she won a related victory at J. Randolph’s Bar & Grill, a casual restaurant owned by the same company. J. Randolph’s has seven waitresses-but every other new hire for three years must be male. Just desserts all around.
PHOTO: Where the boys are: Serving, and being served, and New York’s Lutece restaurant.
At many of America’s best restaurants (each one here was rated tops for food by the Zagat survey) that suave creature with a tray is likely to be male.
Boston: olives, Mediterranean MMM FFF Chicago: Le Francais, French Classic MMMMMMMMM F Dallas: The Riviera, Mediterranean MMMMMMMM Los Angeles: Patina, California French MMMM FF New York. Bouley, New French MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM FFFFFF Philadelphia: Le Bec-Fin, French Classic MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM FFFFFFFF San Francisco Bay area: Masa’s, New French MMMMMMMM Wash., D.C., area: Inn at Little Washington MMMMMMMMMMM FFFFFF
