Front of the House, Back of the House: Race and Inequality in the Lives of Restaurant Workers 9781479800674

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Front of the House, Back of the House

L at i n a / o S o c i o l o g y S e r i e s

General Editors: Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo and Victor M. Rios Family Secrets: Stories of Incest and Sexual Violence in Mexico Gloria González-López Deported: Immigrant Policing, Disposable Labor, and Global Capitalism Tanya Maria Golash-Boza From Deportation to Prison: The Politics of Immigration Enforcement in Post-Civil Rights America Patrisia Macías-Rojas Latina Teachers: Creating Careers and Guarding Culture Glenda M. Flores Citizens but Not Americans: Race and Belonging among Latino Millennials Nilda Flores-González Immigrants Under Threat: Risk and Resistance in Deportation Nation Greg Prieto Kids at Work: Latinx Families Selling Food on the Streets of Los Angeles Emir Estrada Organizing While Undocumented: Immigrant Youth’s Political Activism Under the Law Kevin Escudero Front of the House, Back of the House: Race and Inequality in the Lives of Restaurant Workers Eli Revelle Yano Wilson

Front of the House, Back of the House Race and Inequality in the Lives of Restaurant Workers

Eli Revelle Yano Wilson

NEW YORK UNIVERSIT Y PRESS New York

NEW YORK UNIVERSIT Y PRESS New York www.nyupress.org © 2021 by New York University All rights reserved References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Wilson, Eli Revelle Yano, author. Title: Front of the house, back of the house : race and inequality in the lives of restaurant workers / Eli Revelle Yano Wilson. Description: New York : New York University Press, [2020] | Series: Latina/o sociology | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020015843 (print) | LCCN 2020015844 (ebook) | ISBN 9781479800612 (cloth) | ISBN 9781479800629 (paperback) | ISBN 9781479800667 (ebook) | ISBN 9781479800674 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Restaurants—United States—Employees. | Hispanic Americans—Employment. | Discrimination in employment—United States. | Restaurant management—United States. | Racism—United States. Classification: LCC HD8039.F72 U595 2020 (print) | LCC HD8039.F72 (ebook) | DDC 331.60973—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020015843 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020015844 New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books. Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Also available as an ebook

Contents

Preface Introduction

vii 1

1. Producing Difference

23

2. Worlds Apart

53

3. Flexibility, Play, and Privilege in the Front of the House

82

4. Brown-Collar Careers in the Back of the House

105

5. Mobility Pathways and Closed Doors

132

Conclusion: Serving across the Divide

159

Acknowledgments

175

Appendix A: Glossary of Key Terms

179

Appendix B: List of Interviewees

183

Notes

185

References

199

Index

213

About the Author

223

Preface

I didn’t know it then, but the idea for this book was born during a year working in restaurants after college. In the winter of 2010, just months after graduating from Wesleyan University, I landed a job as a food runner at a much-hyped new restaurant in downtown Los Angeles. Both the chef and the restauranteur were well known in the LA food scene, and this opening was to be their big splash, announcing their competition with the hottest restaurants in the city. I was very excited to be part of it. Training as a food runner meant mingling with the rest of the “support” staff—bussers and food runners, all of whom were working-class Latino men. As a white man and the son of a college professor and an architect, I stood out like a sore thumb. Regardless, my new coworkers taught me how to identify each dish coming out of the kitchen and how to carry plates properly. They taught me to memorize the dining room seating chart and what tasks to prioritize when things got busy. All of this seemed second nature to Manuel, Jose, and Abelardo, my coworkers; I figured it would be the same for me. I was dead wrong. On opening day, with dishes emerging from the kitchen at a rapid pace and accompanied only by several sharp barks from the head chef, I was completely overwhelmed. For days, I did all I could to keep from bumping into someone as I made my way around the dining room haphazardly setting down fresh plates and extracting dirty ones. Meanwhile, my peers were running circles around me. After a Thursday night shift, I remember Manuel joking that he was able to take food out to a table, wipe another clean, and reset a third with silverware and water glasses faster than I was able to deliver food to a single four-top. He wasn’t wrong. One month after opening, it was clear that the restaurant had not achieved the level of business that the owner, chef, and general manager had expected. Management called a meeting with the staff and announced that they were going to have to let some people go. Instantly, I vii

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knew that my food-running ineptitude had put me on the cutting block. I was improving, but far too slowly for a fast-paced restaurant in a fight for its life. Three workers were let go: one server and two support workers. Much to my surprise, I wasn’t one of them. Relieved, I focused on honing my skills: reading food tickets separated by courses, communicating which dishes were on order to the kitchen in restaurant-speak (“four ribeyes all day!”), and holding two dinner plates in one arm. I was very aware that I was still the greenest food runner on staff, and thus relegated to slow-paced lunch shifts. Then, a week later, my general manager, Donald, a white man in his thirties, leaned close to my ear and uttered the five words that signaled my worst fear. “See me after your shift,” he said. Later that afternoon, my head a pressure cooker of frustration, regret, and embarrassment, I found myself sitting across from Donald on one of the banquettes that I had wiped down and sanitized just minutes earlier. “So. You probably know already that food running here is not for you.” I was silent, staring at him. “Don’t get me wrong. I can tell you are getting the hang of it, but we have so many others on staff who can do the job better. And faster. So I talked with the other managers about it,” he paused, matching my glance, “and we have another idea.” “I see you behind the bar. I think you’d be great with guests, and that would play more to your strengths. How do you feel about training as a bartender?” I was stunned. A move to the bar meant going from scraping dirty plates at the dishwashing station to pouring pints of craft beer into custom glassware, making cocktails with fresh herbs, and schmoozing with affluent “guests” (as we were instructed to call them). Then there were the economic benefits. Barbacks were tipped out 50 percent more each night than food runners. Bartenders made twice as much in tips as food runners. I don’t remember what I said in response to Donald’s offer that day, but I’m sure the answer was all over my face. During the next month, I trained with two seasoned bartenders on staff, both of whom were white men in their twenties and only slightly older than I. I watched their fluid motions as they stirred a Mojito cocktail (with Thai basil and Chinese five spice), and listened to them use colorful language to talk about the local ranch where we sourced the beef

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for our handmade burgers. My bartender-trainers would joke with the men seated at the bar and flirt with the women. Donald appeared to be happy with the way I was progressing. “Give diners a backstory on how Chef Todd created this dish,” he coached me. Another manager added, “When you walk in the front door, come in with the right energy—hair combed, looking sharp. Because you are already on display for guests.” I was fascinated by my coworkers’ response to my promotion to the bar. On my first training shift, one of my new front-of-the-house peers, a woman in her late twenties with pale and freckled skin, said, “I knew you didn’t belong as a food runner; it makes so much more sense now that you’ve joined us!” After the shift, I was invited to join a group of servers for post-shift drinks at a nearby pub. “Wait, I thought you were already a daytime server?” asked a man with short-cropped brown hair. The prospect of facing Manuel and the rest of the support staff caused me much more anxiety. It would be clear to them, or so at least I thought, that I wasn’t promoted on the basis of my performance metrics. A few days later, Manuel spotted me polishing wine glasses behind the bar as he walked in. He did a double-take, then walked towards me. “They move you to bar?” he said. “Yeah. I don’t know why,” I stammered, trying to act confused. “Ah.” Seconds passed. “My job just got easier then! No more covering for you, güey!” Not one of the Latino food runners and bussers at the restaurant lodged any complaint about my promotion. I appeared to be more concerned about it than they were. One of the bussers who had patiently trained me just months previously began to refer to me as “el jefe” (boss), and, for the rest of my six-month tenure at the restaurant, would occasionally come around to the side of the bar to chat during slow times or after the shift. Manuel would do the same. “How’d we do tonight?” he asked me one Friday night, referencing the tip pool. I still remember him standing there looking up at me, with his tattered backpack on and Dodgers cap backwards—a sure sign he was about to take the bus home. “Better than last week,” I said, handing him his share of the tips in a pile. “Good, good, I saw you talking to that gringa at the bar.” He whistled. “She tip you well?”

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I nodded, chuckling. “Okay, good, good. See you tomorrow, jefe.” These interactions stayed with me for years, propelling my graduate research into restaurant workplace dynamics. It was my attempt to understand the events that transpired before this project ever started. I knew that I wanted to scrutinize the social environment of restaurants, and that this meant analyzing the interrelationship of coworkers, managers, and, often, customers. Why was I promoted over my more capable Latino colleagues? Based on what logic? How might my white colleagues—or I—have inadvertently reinforced a system of inequality through our actions? A full decade has transpired since I last spoke to Manuel (or Donald, for that matter). Since then, my research has sought to answer a range of questions, and stir more, about what I experienced first-hand in restaurants. My hope is that the pages that follow provide some framework for understanding, and for sparking a conversation about, the complexity of service labor and inequality in the City of Angels and beyond.

Introduction

It is 11:00 a.m., just before the start of the Friday lunch rush at Match Restaurant. The morning sun brings soft light from a palm tree–lined corridor in west Los Angeles into the dining room through large patio windows. Inside, polished silverware and wine glasses sparkle on each of the exposed wood tables, freshly set for lunch service. There are already sixty reservations on the books as the last guests from breakfast trickle out. I watch two men in suits head towards the front door. “Have a great day!” calls out the host, a young woman wearing long teardrop earrings and a flower-print dress. One of the men smiles and lets his gaze linger in her direction, the other strides towards the sidewalk. At the rear of the restaurant, just out of guest view, three cooks are a blur of motion. One of them places a handful of french fries in the deep fryer. The sharp pops from the oil mix with the squish of work boots on damp rubber mats and the clang of metal pans. Over all this noise, voices: “¡Caliente, caliente, cuidado!” (Hot, hot, be careful!) “¡Manos por favor!” (Hands, please!) “¡Puta madre!” (Motherfucker!) “¡Dieciocho, pollo para el asiento uno!” (Table eighteen, chicken for seat one!) Javier, an immigrant from Oaxaca, Mexico, in his midforties, has been on his feet since 6:00 a.m. He prefers working early at Match when the restaurant is quiet. He and two other cooks can go about their prep work while listening to their favorite cumbia station on a portable radio that Javier brings from home. Some mornings, I hear all three of them singing along to the music while chopping away at vegetables. At other times, Javier likes to dance in a tight circle, lifting his feet to the beat while the other cooks watch in amusement. As soon as the restaurant opens for breakfast at 8:00 a.m., all “kitchen music” must be turned off. The main dining room speakers come to life with the synthetic pulse of Chromeo’s “Bonafide Lovin’.” Given the popularity of breakfast at Match, Javier knows that this song—the first on a looped soundtrack of indie electronic music—means that the first order of the day will be arriving any minute. 1

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Now, hundreds of orders later, he turns over a charred piece of marinated chicken on the wood grill. “¡Listo!” (Ready!), he grunts towards Xeno, the short-order cook stationed next to him. In a flurry of motion, Xeno heaps shoestring french fries, crisped golden brown, onto an ovalshaped plate and hands it to Javier. Javier carefully places the pollo asado on the plate, then swivels around to set the dish down on the long metal counter facing the dining room. He splashes it with flaked sea salt and minced cilantro with two flicks of his wrist. Pulling a towel from his back jeans pocket, he wipes the edges of the plate clean of fingerprints and stabs a grease-splattered food ticket onto the spike. “¡Cuarenta y cinco!” (Forty- five!), he says. This elicits a casual glance from the chef, who is hunched over a food order sheet. Javier rubs his forehead with the underside of his forearm, then takes a swig of black coffee. Seconds pass. “¡Oye, cabrón! ¡Cuarenta y cinco!” Javier barks again. This time, he directs his call towards Juan, who is standing at the pass just outside the kitchen but is distracted in conversation with one of the bussers. Juan moves towards the voice without looking. Raised in south Los Angeles by a single mother from Jalisco, Mexico, Juan has buzz-cut black hair and a skinny frame. He is wearing his usual outfit as a food runner: baggy jeans worn low, a black polo shirt, and nonslip shoes. One of his uncles helped him land a job at Match several months ago, just before his twenty-second birthday. “¿Qué pasó?” (What’s up?), Juan says to Javier, who is already faced back towards the grill. Juan scans the food ticket on the spike. He darts three feet to his right and grabs two plates of french toast with fruit that have been sitting on the counter. He holds one plate in his left hand and balances the other on his left wrist and forearm. Adding the order of grilled chicken with fries to his collection of plates, Juan walks briskly towards the dining room. His destination is table forty-five, where four stylishly dressed men and women sit. All are white, and appear to be around the age of thirty. Without a word, Juan goes around the table setting plates down in front of them. “I’ll be back with your dish, ma’am,” he says, bowing his head slightly to the one diner with nothing in front of her. The other diners glance at the food, none so much as looking up or pausing their laugh-filled conversation. “Thank you,” one of the men says distractedly in the general direction where Juan used to be. Just then, Diego, the busser, leans towards the table to refill a water glass.

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3

“Excuse me,” Diego says quietly, his eyes fixed on the ice cubes clunking into the glass. Diego is fifty-five years old with a stout build and medium-brown skin; a pattern of fine wrinkles around his eyes and mouth make it look as though he is perpetually smiling. Or winking. Diego first arrived in Los Angeles nearly thirty years ago, having crossed the border in Tijuana without papers. He has worked in restaurants ever since—alternating between jobs as a busser, food runner, dishwasher, and cook—and averaging over fifty hours of work a week. Today, after the lunch rush dies down, he will head to a nearby seafood restaurant to clock in for the dinner shift as a food runner. Annabelle slides up to the table, resting her arm lightly on Diego’s rounded shoulder. Unlike Diego’s or Juan’s, her arrival commands the diners’ attention. “What’s up, guys?” she asks brightly. “Everyone having fun yet?” Annabelle’s wavy blonde hair swishes back and forth as she talks. She is dressed in a red plaid shirt, fitted jeans, and short-cropped leather boots. Annabelle moved to Los Angeles five years ago after graduating with a theater degree from a large state school in the Midwest. She still juggles occasional acting classes alongside her four serving shifts at Match, each averaging six hours. “Oh dear, where is your food?” Annabelle asks the plateless woman. The woman shrugs. Annabelle places her hands on her hips. Diego, now free, grabs two dirty pint glasses and a plate and backpedals towards the kitchen. “Well, what-ever is going on—it wasn’t me I swear!” Annabelle says. “So, if my manager asks, let’s just agree to blame the kitchen,” she says, glancing at a man standing behind the bar, then cocking her head in the direction of Javier and Xeno. They don’t see her. “I’m sure it’ll be here soon. In fact . . .” she pauses for dramatic effect, “who’s up for a little morning beer? Let me get you a sample of our new mango hefeweizen while you wait. I’m in love.” Annabelle twirls away in the direction of the bar. I watch her lean on the bar top, chatting with Kevin, the dining room manager and a white man in his late twenties with short-cropped brown hair and scruffy stubble. Kevin is tending bar until the regularly scheduled bartender arrives at noon. He and Annabelle talk, leaning towards each other. Annabelle suddenly rears her head back in laughter (“what does that one taste like again? I think I need another sample”). Kevin pours her two shot glasses full of beer. Annabelle grabs one and

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quickly gulps it down, then pushes it back towards him. She turns and walks the other back towards the table of diners. “Here—this’ll help,” she says. “Now let me go check on your food.” *** Each day, scenes like the one above repeat on a loop inside urban restaurants all around the United States. Trendy eateries, artisanal bars, and Third Wave coffee shops now dot the urban landscapes of revitalized downtown neighborhoods, many packed each day with a mixture of young business professionals and bourgeois creative types.1 Popular television shows such as Chef ’s Table, Ugly Delicious, and Brew Dogs celebrate the gourmet products these places offer and the visionary chefrestauranteurs behind their operations. One million domestic food and drink establishments now generate over $800 billion in annual revenue, and employ fifteen million people—the equivalent of one out of every ten workers in the United States.2 The average American today spends more money dining out than in grocery stores.3 We are in the middle of a golden age of restaurants, and the industry is booming.4 What happens every day within restaurants is also about social inequality. It is a kind of inequality that, when compared to more overt displays of power and exploitation, often falls below the radar of scrutiny. It is too ordinary, too taken-for-granted to register as alarming to much of the dining public. Annabelle, like many of her white, collegeeducated coworkers of both sexes, operates in the front of the house, the genteel public areas of the restaurant. As a server, Annabelle is required to write down orders, deliver food and drinks, and mingle with guests in the dining room. She is compensated relatively well for doing these tasks, and expects to exceed two hundred dollars in tips on a busy shift in addition to her base hourly pay of minimum wage. Meanwhile, Javier, like many of his fellow immigrant and male Latino peers, operates in the back of the house of restaurants, out of customer view. As a line cook, he is required to prepare food items, cook dishes to order, and perform other tasks related to general kitchen upkeep. Javier makes just over minimum wage, and does not receive any tips. Although the jobs that Javier and Annabelle respectively perform are intertwined in the flow of food service, they are sharply divided in other ways. These coworkers do not speak the same language or hang out together outside work. The

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job tasks each performs at the restaurant are poorly understood by the other, and they approach these labor duties very differently. At the end of the workday, Javier and Annabelle will get compensated in strikingly uneven ways for their respective jobs in the production of restaurant service. Juan and Diego fall somewhere in between. As members of Match’s support staff, these men weave in and out of the dining room when performing their jobs. They labor alongside coworkers and customers who are overwhelmingly white and class privileged. Yet the specific tasks that Juan and Diego do as food runners and bussers are performed exclusively by first- and second-generation Latino men in Los Angeles. These support jobs, much like back-of-the-house jobs, are what Lisa Cantazarite refers to as “brown-collar jobs”: racialized (and gendered) employment associated with foreign-born Latino men.5 Juan and Diego’s daily experiences at Match thus reflect both their formal job duties and the social organization of labor within restaurants—who does what job based on social characteristics and not just skills. As a result, Diego counts many of his fellow Oaxaqueños who work as line cooks as close friends, but he is also thankful to be “out of the heat” himself (and making enough in tips to exceed the earnings of any front-line kitchen worker). Meanwhile, Juan, who is fluent in Spanish and English, jokes around with gringo servers during down times and sometimes teaches them dirty expressions in Spanish. But he has never been invited to join the dining room crew that regularly goes out for drinks after work. As this book details, two divergent and unequal worlds of work exist within higher-end restaurants. The worlds of work that Annabelle and Javier respectively inhabit within the same workplace are patterned by race, class, and gender; what goes on within these worlds of work also reproduces these social inequalities anew. I ask, how are individuals such as Javier and Annabelle channeled into different types of service jobs? What keeps them separated within hierarchical spheres of employment? Well beyond the purview of customers, both managerial actions and coworker interactions jointly pattern the unequal opportunities that workers encounter within restaurants. By controlling the “front door” to the workplace, managers divide up groups of workers through hiring decisions and supervisory practices. They use racialized, gendered, and classed standards to dictate who slots within one world of work or

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another. As a result of management’s actions, class-privileged white men and women gain access to the most desirable jobs in restaurants in terms of pay, working conditions, and authority. While managers may initially place workers into distinct labor capacities, the ways in which workers come to be separated is not solely the product of managerial decisions. Moving beyond the front door to this workplace, I argue that employees themselves seal these worlds of work apart through their everyday micro-interactions. White, collegeeducated men and women in the front of the house and Latino men with low levels of education in the back of the house draw boundaries against each other that reify their sense of group social distinctions by race, class, and gender. The boundaries that workers enact on a daily basis make it difficult for those perceived to belong to one group to navigate jobs dominated by another. This has particularly harsh consequences for immigrant Latino workers, who become confined in the least desirable jobs in restaurants. The way workers draw boundaries in the workplace also has unexpected consequences, coming to represent meaningful ways in which individuals on both sides of the divide make sense of their jobs, their labor opportunities, and, ultimately, each other.

Inside Restaurant Labor Labor scholars and public commentators alike generally consider frontline restaurant jobs in the United States to be bad jobs. This is the case because working as a cook, dishwasher, server, or busser at many food and drink establishments often means contending with low wages, poor benefits, fluctuating schedules, hazardous workplace conditions, and limited advancement opportunities.6 Nationwide, restaurant workers average less than thirty thousand dollars a year, with few employer-paid benefits—all while contending with fraught workplace conditions and insecure employment.7 Unsurprisingly, the restaurant workforce in the United States is disproportionately comprised of people from disadvantaged groups, such as racial minorities, immigrants, and women.8 These trends are not new. Restaurant employment has long been considered entry-level work for those on the margins of the labor market who possess few technical or English linguistic skills, and often face exclusion from more desirable types of jobs.9

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Higher-end, full-service restaurants in urban centers are different. By “higher-end” and “full-service,” I am referring to food and drink establishments that offer sit-down table service, charge upwards of twenty dollars per entrée, and feature an assortment of premium food and drink products.10 Organizationally, these types of restaurants feature jobs that require specific skills from workers. These jobs also tend to represent a wider range of earning opportunities than do lower-end restaurants (e.g., diners, “mom and pop” eateries, and fast-food establishments) that offer uniformly low wages. It is thus within higher-end restaurants that structural inequalities between different types of service jobs are most clear. This makes them ideal settings in which to study how social inequality manifests in the workplace: who has access to which jobs based on race, class, and gender, and why. Restaurant labor is split into two categories of work, each overseen by different types of managers. Back-of-the-house work involves food preparation and falls under the oversight of chefs and kitchen managers. Primary positions within the back of the house are those of line cooks, prep cooks, and dishwashers. By contrast, front-of-the-house work principally involves customer-service tasks that are overseen by dining room supervisors. The primary front-of-the-house positions are those of servers and bartenders. “Support” workers, such as bussers and food runners, also operate in the dining room, assisting servers and bartenders in the task of serving guests and keeping dining room areas clean. That said, tasks that are commonly handled by support workers involve little to no face-to-face communication with customers (bussing tables, polishing glassware, dropping off plates of food). Each of these types of restaurant jobs is an essential component to the overall production of service within these establishments. Raw food materials being prepared by one set of workers are based on customer orders handled by another set of workers and brought out to customers and later removed by another subgroup. Despite the interdependence of these tasks, what each type of position offers workers in terms of employment is far from equivalent. Front-of-the-house workers at full-service restaurants enjoy substantially higher earnings than back-of-the-house workers.11 Much of the economic disparity between those in each category of work is due to tips. Tips flow to front-of-the-house workers, trickle down to support

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workers, and—by federal law—stop short of the kitchen staff entirely. Because cooks and other kitchen workers are not considered in “the direct line of service,” they are legally excluded from receiving tips, according to the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. Support workers are “tipped out” a small share of tips each night, ranging from a few dollars to roughly half of a server’s cut.12 The unequal way in which tips are distributed within restaurants can make for sizable earning inequalities between workers. According to a recent study, full-time servers and bartenders at metropolitan restaurants averaged fifty thousand dollars annually in combined wages and tips, whereas full-time cooks and dishwashers averaged twenty-four thousand dollars.13 This probably underestimates the earning disparity in restaurants due to chronic underreporting of tips. Some of my coworkers told me stories of working in expensive restaurants in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and Chicago where dishwashers were being paid scandalously low (and sometimes under-the-table) wages while servers and bartenders took home six-figure earnings. In full-service restaurants in the United States, people with different social characteristics inhabit front-of-the-house jobs and back-of-thehouse jobs, respectively.14 Walk into any popular restaurant and you will find that those who greet you at the front door will not look and sound the same as those scrubbing pots or wiping down the floors. For reasons explained in this chapter, front-of-the-house workers tend to be white, class-privileged young men and women; back-of-the-house workers tend to be working-class racial minorities and immigrants of color, disproportionately men, and of varying ages. The socially segregated nature of employment is not unique to restaurants, and mirrors that found in many other customer service settings.15 The social organization of restaurant labor patterns the worlds of work that employees experience on the ground. While the dining room swoons with soft jazz and the measured tones of white men and women carefully describing the daily specials (using words like “peak season” and “grass-fed”), out of customer view, a scratchy radio blasts cumbia to Mexican and Central American immigrants who blend restaurant lingo with Spanish slang in short phrases uttered over the drone of the kitchen exhaust fan. In turn, patterned social distinctions between workers can facilitate cultural distinctions associated with different subworlds of work.

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As worker social distinctions laminate onto structurally unequal jobs, workers separated by a matter of feet can find themselves at odds with one another. Seventy years ago, sociologist William Whyte observed that relations between male cooks and female servers were characterized by chronic tension and miscommunication.16 Cooks did not appreciate being rushed or scolded by what were then called “waitresses,” and would occasionally retaliate with slowed service that would leave the latter vulnerable to the wrath of impatient customers. Since Whyte’s study, interactions between front- and back-of-the-house workers are increasingly mediated by technology. The electronic point of sale (POS) system has largely replaced the need to relay orders verbally between the dining room and the kitchen. But the social differences between these worker cohorts are also more pronounced. Today, back- and front-ofthe-house employees find themselves separated not only by gender but also by race, class, and immigration status. Against the backdrop of unequal restaurant jobs, their sense of shared occupational community is anything but guaranteed.17

How Social Inequality Takes Place What accounts for the durable social segregation of labor in restaurants? Joan Acker argues that workplaces themselves function as “inequality regimes,” which she defines as “loosely interrelated practices, processes, actions, and meanings that result in and maintain class, gender, and racial inequalities within particular organizations.”18 Simply put, place matters for the study of social inequality because of the way systematic biases can be perpetuated through them.19 Interrogating what goes on within restaurants means paying attention to the ways in which managerial practices, organizational processes, and labor dynamics all contribute to the way social inequalities get reproduced within these types of organizations.20 The actions of managers play a fundamental role in this process. Managers use their preconceptions about who belongs in what job to make hiring decisions. Yet, in the post–civil rights era, institutionalized hiring discrimination must take subtler forms. Managers employ a variety of fuzzy logics, personal preferences, and stereotyped shorthands to favor some types of people for certain jobs while excluding

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others. For example, research shows that managers favor job applicants who possess “soft skills” such as friendliness and likeability, and that because they perceive white applicants as more personable than black applicants, this criterion favors the former.21 Managers may also seek out applicants who share similar hobbies and leisure tastes as their own or those of their intended consumer base. Insofar as these qualities are class and race coded—think golf or sailing—this introduces systematic inequalities into the hiring process.22 Many of these “color-blind” hiring logics effectively reserve the most desirable job openings for white, upper-middle-class candidates. Whether managers make these decisions out of personal biases or with perceived customer interests in mind, their actions serve as powerful forms of gatekeeping that control access into the workplace. In service and retail settings, as Christine Williams and Catherine Connell’s research shows, managers favor candidates for customer-facing positions whom they perceive to “look good and sound right” when representing the company’s brand on the service floor.23 These standards tend to favor those who embody racialized and classed ideals of attractiveness in our society: upper-middle-class white men and women.24 By contrast, for labor-intensive and low-wage jobs away from customers, managers use a different set of hiring standards. They often target nonwhite immigrants with low levels of formal education for hire. They do this because they see applicants with these social characteristics as willing to work hard at jobs that are undesirable to most Americans.25 For back-of-thehouse restaurant jobs, employers see strategic advantages to hiring a “brown-collar” and foreign-born workforce. The precarious legal status of many Latino immigrants, coupled with their disadvantaged race and class backgrounds, renders these workers all but powerless to resist exploitative labor conditions. Immigrant workers may also be more amenable to low-wage service employment than their US-born counterparts due to what migration scholars refer to as a “dual frame of reference”: the ability to draw on favorable comparisons between jobs “here” and bleak employment prospects back “there” in their home countries.26 Supervisory practices by managers can also channel workers with certain social characteristics into distinct categories of work. Managers set shop floor policies and reinforce rules selectively based on their understanding of who will be doing what job. Kevin, the dining room

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manager from the opening vignette, casually interacts with Annabelle, the server, in ways that grant her, as a college-educated white woman, extraordinary flexibility to “play” around while with guests. Sociologists Adler and Adler (2004) note that, in luxury resorts, managers assume that many of the young and white customer service workers they hire have no intention of remaining on the job for very long. Rather than reprimanding these employees, management accommodates their loose commitment to the job by offering them part-time jobs and flexible schedules. They do this because these workers otherwise represent desirable social and aesthetic traits for the job based largely on their whiteness and middle-class comportment. As I detail in the next chapter, restaurant managers also structure back-of-the-house labor in ways that reflect their assumptions that Latino men will be the ones who will fill these jobs. Whether it is a posted announcement for the kitchen staff written in Spanish, or wine tasting notes passed only to the white servers instead of the Latino support staff, supervisory practices can reinforce the fit between workers with distinct social characteristics and jobs in divergent worlds of work. Managers may initially place workers in distinct occupational capacities and supervise them accordingly, but what ends up sealing these worlds of work off from one another? Solely emphasizing management’s role in reproducing social inequality is too simplistic. While several restaurant workers recalled stories of racist managers blatantly hindering their job opportunities, others in both the front and back of the house enjoy relations with supervisory figures that they say have involved mentorship and offers of assistance over the years. To be sure, these two perspectives need not be mutually exclusive: management can achieve discriminatory hiring by encouraging consent from workers.27 But the complicated relationship between workers and managers in restaurants suggests that other processes also influence the persistent segregation of the workplace by race, class, and gender. Narrowly focusing on managerial practices ignores the mundane ways in which workers themselves reinforce social hierarchies.28 The bulk of face-to-face interactions in service workplaces occur between workers or with customers—that is, away from managers. This is evident when Annabelle leans on Diego, the busser, while she talks to diners, and places blame on “them” in the kitchen—referring to Javier and

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Xeno—for the delay in food service. In doing so, she makes clear distinctions between herself and her coworkers. Sociologist Vanesa Ribas (2016) describes the ways in which immigrant Latino workers frame group boundaries with their African American coworkers in the same factory. From their vantage, Latino workers see black workers as doing easier types of jobs (though not necessarily higher paying) and as being treated more leniently by white managers while they themselves occupy bottom-tier jobs. As is the case with Annabelle, Ribas’s research shows that through daily micro-interactions, workers come to see how they are similar and dissimilar to others who not only operate in distinct capacities but are perceived to possess divergent physical, social, and cultural characteristics. This book aims to link what Everett Hughes called the “social drama of the workplace” to the reproduction of social inequality within everyday service settings.29 I do this by analyzing everyday relations between different types of workers, managers, and, to a lesser extent, customers in restaurants. Seen from the ground level, workers negotiate their surroundings by finding ways to make their labor conditions more palatable, using the resources available to them. Amid compounded forces that pull workers into divided worlds of work, class-privileged whites and working-class Latinos derive meaningful forms of identity and community from their respective roles in restaurants. This nuances the workplace in unexpected ways: while immigrant Latino workers struggle to contend with their structural disadvantages in marginal jobs, later-generation workers have been able to leverage some of these very conditions to their advantage.

Studying Higher-End Restaurants in Los Angeles Los Angeles is a prime metropolitan area in which to study the intersection of service work and social inequality. According to recent estimates, more than one in three of the city’s 3.9 million residents are foreign born, and nearly half identify as Latino.30 Each of these factors makes Los Angeles a paradigmatic global city in which to observe the incorporation of both immigrants and their US-born offspring into the social, political, and economic fabric of the city—and into its workplaces, more specifically.

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Los Angeles is home to one of the largest restaurant industries in the country. Over 320,000 workers are currently employed in what is the largest private-sector industry in the region.31 Over half of these workers identify as racial minorities, and nearly one out of every two restaurant workers was born outside the United States.32 Many white and collegeeducated young adults also work in restaurants in the city.33 While some of these individuals undoubtedly fit popular stereotypes of aspiring starlets who flock to Hollywood from around the country and moonlight in restaurants waiting for their big break, many others do not, and instead engage in restaurant work for a wide variety of reasons that range from schedule flexibility to sociality (I detail this in chapter 3). Overall, Los Angeles’s restaurant workforce remains similar in composition to that of other cosmopolitan city centers such as San Francisco, Chicago, and New York.34 Los Angeles is also home to countless higher-end restaurant that cater to a mixture of wealthy locals, tourists, and celebrities. Due to intense competition for business, many of these establishments seek to differentiate what they offer from what their competitors offer on the basis of nuances of menu items, décor, amenities, and service style. This makes no two higher-end restaurants exactly alike—both for diners or for workers. More traditional fine-dining restaurants in the city, such as Spago, Providence, and Mélisse, offer guests an elegant dining experience in which they can expect to find French- and Italianinspired entrée options of steak, caviar, and lobster, served by formally dressed, predominantly male servers.35 By contrast, a new wave of “casual upscale” restaurants offers a deliberately dressed-down experience that blurs distinctions between different types of workers and customers, at least on the surface. Gjelina, one of the most decorated casual upscale restaurants located in Los Angeles’s affluent west side, features minimalist décor, t-shirt–clad servers (both men and women), and loud rock and roll playing overhead—to go along with twentyfive-dollar “small plates” (the equivalent of tapas). While none of these higher-end restaurant service brands upend the dominant social segregation of labor by race, class, and gender, their subtle organizational differences shape both the standards that managers use to evaluate job candidates and the workplace conditions that individuals must navigate on a daily basis.

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Methods The everyday enactment of inequality I witnessed while working in upscale Los Angeles restaurants is what compelled me to write this book. It also informed the role I found myself in within them. Between 2012 and 2018, I worked as a server at three different higher-end restaurants in Los Angeles. While my previous industry experience in restaurants gave me a crucial “in” to a workplace that can be difficult to enter otherwise, it was also clear that management at each restaurant ushered me into a customer-service role because I, as a college-educated white man in my midtwenties, represented traits that they desired for these positions. Several managers told me point-blank and without prompting during my hiring interview, “I can see you working in the front of the house.” Because I am an ethnographer, my approach to this research was to illuminate the everyday struggles, nuanced relations, and complex perspectives of those I worked alongside every day. Each of these aspects complicates popular portrayals of restaurant labor that tend to focus on one of two extremes: kitchen debauchery filled with drugs and sex, or the tedium of low-wage service work.36 I intend this book to stand as an empirically grounded account of how service work and social inequality come to be intertwined in ways that go largely unnoticed by the people who patronize these establishments. At each of the three restaurants, I averaged between three and five shifts per week, which management considered “full-time” for front-ofthe-house workers. This allowed me to record hundreds of pages of field notes documenting daily labor experiences in the workplace as well as informal conversations with front-of-the-house workers, back-of-thehouse workers, managers, and customers at each restaurant. Because these conversations were necessarily constrained while I was clocked in during shifts, I also conducted fifty-seven open-ended interviews with workers and managers in order to more fully flesh out the themes of this study. (For a list of interviewees, see appendix B.) Throughout this research, I was constantly aware that my personal characteristics were more similar to Annabelle’s than to Javier’s or Diego’s. Management at each restaurant slotted me into the front of the house unquestioningly, and in a role where I resembled most others

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doing this job. Likewise, few of my coworkers, as far as I could tell, found my employment as a server the slightest bit unusual. This was true even after I revealed that I was a graduate student getting my doctorate (“ah, so that’s your side hustle!”). However, because I was quickly immersed within the sociocultural world of the front of the house, my ethnographic data collection draws disproportionately from the dining room instead of the kitchen. Recognizing this bias, I made extensive efforts to understand the perspectives of my coworkers in the back of the house, who were overwhelmingly first- and second-generation Latino men. While at work, I hung out near the kitchen pass whenever I could in order to be closer to cooks, and chatted with the bussers and food runners while doing closing side work.37 Among my fellow servers and bartenders, outreach of this nature—towards “them”—was rare. Initially, it produced considerable amusement among the kitchen staff, who were unused to having someone from the front of the house show such interest in their lives both inside and outside the workplace. Through hanging out with different groups of coworkers during lunch breaks, down times, and after work, I began to get a sense of how each group navigated its respective work environment. Still, I do not claim be an “insider” to the experiences and perspectives of my former restaurant coworkers, particularly those in the kitchen. My decision to conduct field research within three restaurants instead of one was strategic. It allowed me to examine variation in the internal organization within different kinds of higher-end service workplaces. Match, Terroir, and The Neighborhood38 each represent different service brands that are structured by management and enacted by workers. These brands have implications for workers, who, as a result of their interaction with these subtly distinct workplace structures, encounter distinct kinds of barriers, opportunities, and social relations on the job.39 I now profile each of these restaurants in the chronological order in which I spent time within them.

Match Restaurant Match is a casual-upscale restaurant located in west Los Angeles near the posh neighborhoods of Santa Monica, Venice, and Brentwood. The

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restaurant’s front entrance faces onto the street, framed by fairy lights hung across an understated white exterior. Above the restaurant sit luxury condominiums with a distant view of the ocean and the Santa Monica Mountains. To the left of the entrance is a spacious patio area ringed by an array of potted plants. Past the front door, the restaurant opens up to a central dining area with high ceilings, exposed wood tables, and large canvases of modern art. When the restaurant fills up on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights as well as during weekend brunches, Match has a lively, trendy ambiance. Over the din of chatter and clanging silverware emanating from dozens of tables and booths in the dining room (the seating capacity is 120), indie rock pulses from four high-end speakers, one in each corner. Match enjoys brisk business for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Most days, the restaurant opens at 8:00 a.m. and does not close until past 11:00 p.m. when the last guest leaves. Match’s main patrons are young, white professionals in their twenties and thirties. From my estimate, many live and work locally, though the restaurant also sees a substantial number of tourists spilling over from nearby attractions such as the Santa Monica Pier and Venice boardwalk. Many regular diners come to the restaurant at various times of the day, and for different purposes. On weekday mornings, for example, guests might sit down for Intelligentsia coffee and a fresh seasonal fruit and granola bowl while they read the New York Times. At lunch, a group of tech workers might discuss the latest app releases over plates of fresh-caught marlin tacos and a locally brewed Pilsner. At dinner, a young couple pushing a small baby carriage might request a quiet table on the patio to split a grilled New York strip steak, a kale salad, and a bottle of red wine. Match’s clientele, and their typical food and drink orders, reflect who can afford to dine at the restaurant. While Match is far from the most expensive restaurant in the area, lunch entrées at Match average twenty dollars per person, dinner entrées, thirty-five dollars. After tip, tax, dessert, and a round of alcoholic drinks, the dinner bill for a couple can easily exceed a hundred dollars. When I was hired as a server at Match in 2012, the restaurant employed half a dozen managers and eighty workers, roughly split between the front of the house and the back of the house. The management team, comprised of chefs in the kitchen and floor managers in the dining

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room, consisted of five white men and women and one Asian American man. Most had culinary degrees, or had majored in hospitality in college. Front-of-the-house workers at Match were overwhelmingly young, white, and college educated. These workers were given considerable liberties to dress as they pleased for work: male servers would arrive wearing plaid collared shirts and faded jeans, while female hosts would wear ankle-length dresses and an assortment of jewelry. Sometimes the only identifying feature that distinguished front-of-the-house workers from customers would be a small, black, unisex “waiter’s skirt,” tied just above the waist. This proved a striking contrast with Match’s back-of-the-house and support staff. Line cooks, prep cooks, dishwashers, bussers, and food runners at the restaurant were almost exclusively first- and secondgeneration Latino men. The youngest was nineteen while the oldest was in his midfifties, and none had college degrees. The uniform these workers were required to wear was standard issue: for support workers, a black collared shirts and jeans; for kitchen workers, a pullover “chef ’s coat” and a white, shallow hat.

Terroir Restaurant Dining out at Terroir is a much fancier occasion than at Match. Located on a posh, tree-lined business strip between Santa Monica and Brentwood, Terroir features a fusion of Asian and European culinary traditions ranging from fresh sushi to gourmet dry-aged steaks, marinated lamb, and Japanese-style butterfish. Terroir is also a chef-driven restaurant. New menus are printed daily, and diners are encouraged to share a multicourse meal comprised of an assortment of small and midsized dishes. Each plate arrives perfectly plated, “finished” (garnished) with herb garnishes and decorative flowers that the head chef places himself. Meals at Terroir can easily last well over two hours, or more, if paired decadently with sake and wine. Terroir is housed in an old bank building, and its interior has been redone with minimalist dark wood paneling, sleek curves, tasteful spot lighting, and handcrafted ceramic plates and bowls. Terroir moved into this space to much restaurant media fanfare in the fall of 2015 (when I began working there), although a previous iteration of the concept had

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been open for ten years at a smaller location. Compared to Match’s, Terroir’s dining room feels like serene temple grounds, where music, boisterous chatter, and other forms of restaurant white noise are in short supply. Instead, tables are liberally spread out in the dining room so that, according to one manager, “You should not be able to hear the conversation next to you.” As one might expect, a meal at Terroir is very expensive. For dinner, the restaurant’s main meal service, personal entrées range from thirty to eighty dollars, excluding tax, alcohol, and tip. From my experience, a couple will typically spend between $150 and $200 per visit to Terroir. To prepare for its elaborate dinner production, the restaurant is not open for breakfast and offers only a limited menu for lunch. Those who dine at Terroir contrast with Match’s yuppie clientele. Terroir’s typical patrons are middle-aged, wealthy, and white or Asian American. Their attire reflects the restaurant’s more formal ambiance when compared to Match; guests arrive wearing blazers and evening dresses, not designer t-shirts and yoga pants. Terroir is a more modest-sized operation than Match. With a seating capacity of eighty guests in the dining room, it has a staff consisting of three full-time managers and roughly forty employees. In the front of the house, the team of servers, server “assistants,” and bartenders consists of primarily white men and women, though slightly older and less uniformly college educated than their counterparts at the other two restaurants. Servers and bartenders arrive to work an hour before dinner service wearing street clothes and carrying on coat hangers their standardized uniform of a pressed white shirt (unisex), black slacks, and black shoes. Thirty minutes before opening the restaurant, with the tables and folded napkins in place, workers scramble to finish their cigarettes out on the back loading dock, put on makeup, and dress using the restroom and back storage areas as impromptu changing rooms. The majority of Terroir’s back-of-the-house workers are immigrant Latino men, though less uniformly so than at Match or The Neighborhood. They are allowed to wear black t-shirts and comfortable jeans to work given the sweltering, humid conditions near the dishwashing station (or “dishpit,” hidden out of view from guests in the dining room by a solid wall). During slow times at the restaurant, some of the prep cooks take a break from their kitchen stations to sit on plastic buckets, turned upside down, in the narrow back hallway at Terroir.

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The Neighborhood While technically open to the public, The Neighborhood is a highly exclusive restaurant nestled in the Santa Monica foothills in one of the wealthiest areas of Los Angeles. It emphasizes “farm-to-table” dining centered on partnerships with local farmers, growers, and purveyors, who provide the restaurant with the freshest meats and ripest produce. The menu, designed by the restaurant’s decorated head chef, features contemporary American cooking that changes with every season’s bounty. So does its décor, which includes baby pumpkins in the fall and bowls of apricots and peaches in the spring. The Neighborhood’s dining area evokes an elegant feast in a quaint farmhouse setting. This ambiance spans from the interior décor to the staff uniforms. Seating just under seventy people in a U-shaped arrangement of comfy banquettes, The Neighborhood’s interior is framed with green and grey accents, polished oak tables, and designer light fixtures. The gleaming white tiled walls and freshly starched white chef ’s coats worn by cooks are also clearly visible to the seated guests, and integrated into the aesthetic of the restaurant. Front-of-the-house staff uniforms also match the ambiance: servers wear a simple brown apron over a white collared shirt and dark jeans (which I presume resembles an imagined farm outfit). The Neighborhood is well known locally for its gourmet breakfasts (fifteen- to twenty-five-dollar entrées) and power lunches (eighteen to thirtyfour dollars). These meal services draw lines even on Mondays. During evenings, the restaurant offers an upscale dinner service (thirty- to fiftydollar entrées) that is a less crowded affair of multiple courses and expert wine pairings provided by the staff (two servers are certified wine sommeliers). The Neighborhood’s primary clientele draws from the city’s wealthy and famous, many of whom live close by the restaurant in secluded mansion compounds. Compared to Match and Terroir, The Neighborhood goes to much greater lengths to cater to its VIP guests’ every whim. Special guests (either by recognizable fame or repeated patronage) are often surprised to find that, upon arrival, a manager introduces herself and offers their favorite brand of sparkling water (I elaborate on the production of service in chapter 1). On most days, this kind of specialized attention is par for the course. While I was employed at The Neighborhood from

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2015 to 2016, I counted over two dozen families that regularly dined at The Neighborhood multiple times a week for occasions that ranged from special anniversaries and birthdays to quick Tuesday lunches. The Neighborhood has a seating capacity slightly less than that of Terroir’s, but it maintains a staff closer in size to Match’s due to the volume of business. In the front of the house, management employs only servers and hosts (there are no bartenders because servers pour their own wine and beer for guests tableside). The majority of these employees are white, college-educated, and in their twenties and thirties, though one Latina woman and one Latino man are also full-time members on the lunch service staff. By contrast, back-of-the-house and support workers are uniformly first- and second-generation Latino men ranging in age from twenty to fifty. For nearly twenty hours a day seven days a week, the back kitchen at The Neighborhood is bustling with activity. Depending on where one looks, cooks of various titles are baking, chopping, weighing, marinating, frying, or, more furtively, eating.

Organization of the Book Javier and Annabelle, the Latino cook and white server from the opening vignette, know each other as long-time coworkers. That is where their knowledge of each other ends, for the restaurant is the only space they cohabit. The lives they lead both inside and outside of the workplace, and detailed in the pages to follow, are worlds apart from one another—driven apart by vectors of inequality but pulled together by the coproduction of the meals they serve. Chapter 1 shows how management structures a socially divided workplace from the back office. Chefs and dining room supervisors at Match, Terroir, and The Neighborhood channel workers into distinct types of service jobs based on socially coded ideals, and subject each group of workers to divergent supervisory practices. I argue that management’s strategic decisions regarding hiring, service protocols, and workplace policies adhere to an overarching logic of upscale service packaged with powerful racial, classed, and gendered assumptions, as well as strategically differentiated service brands that nuance how each workplace is organized. I show how service brands shape the kinds of social relations and labor prospects that workers encounter.

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Chapter 2 brings readers further into the workplace by examining how coworker dynamics reinforce the extant social organization of higher-end restaurants, and ultimately how workers themselves understand their differences. I detail how educated white servers and workingclass Latino cooks enact symbolic boundaries against each other that close off two distinct worlds of work by race, class, and gender. The racialized and classed boundaries that employees enact lead to strained and distant interactions, and can disrupt the flow of service in very real ways. More importantly, symbolic barriers decrease the likelihood that workers themselves feel they are able to access jobs for which they do not fit. This disproportionately affects Latino workers by further miring them in the lowest-paying and least visible jobs in the workplace. Chapters 3 and 4 examine the respective worlds of work in the front and back of the house through the perspectives of those who inhabit each space. These chapters explicate the two asymmetrical work cultures in restaurants, engendered by divergent social memberships and structurally unequal job conditions. In chapter 3 I describe how many of the men and women working in the front of the house are able to approach the unpredictable elements of their jobs as “perks.” These perks, such as flexible schedules and lucrative tips, allow them to forge custom-fit work lives. Chapter 4 turns to the back of the house, where many first- and second-generation Latino workers work long hours that they view with a complex mixture of loyalty to mentors, masculinity, and an ethos of craftsmanship. While back-of-the-house and support workers endure more structurally marginalized work conditions than their front-of-thehouse colleagues, many are also more committed to building “browncollar” work careers within restaurants rather than beyond them. Chapter 5, the final empirical chapter of this book, compares instances of worker mobility and marginalization in the workplace. I examine the mechanisms by which some Latino workers have been able to access better-quality jobs while others have not. Specifically, I argue that later-generation Latinos leverage their “in-betweenness” to gain more prominent roles in a socially and culturally divided workplace. By contrast, those who remain stuck in lowest-rung restaurant jobs are hampered by compounded disadvantages that cut them off from not only their fellow coworkers but also relatively better job opportunities that are available to the latter. Confined to the “back closet” of restaurant

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employment, undocumented Latina workers bear the brunt of a socially segregated workplace that has no place for them but at the bottom and out of the way. The concluding chapter details the main theoretical contributions of this book. It also surveys recent trends in the restaurant industry, such as the move to eliminate tipping, that affect its workers and the inequalities that separate them. *** The forces that divide Javier and Annabelle in restaurants are unseen by the hundreds of customers who dine at Match every day. The food somehow arrives at the table, having passed through Javier’s calloused hands and amid Annabelle’s light-hearted jokes. But paying attention to what surrounds this transaction reveals how organizational and interpersonal dynamics thread durable forms of social inequality within service workplaces. This book offers an insider’s glance within these spaces and into these processes. It provides fresh ways of understanding the nature of everyday exclusion and opportunity in the United States today.

1

Producing Difference A big-name Hollywood celebrity—and regular at The Neighborhood— has bought out the restaurant for the evening. By midafternoon, a team of workers is busily preparing the dining room for a lavish dinner set for thirty VIP guests. One decorative element involves a large, floor-toceiling wooden partition separating the dining room from the back-ofthe-house areas. “Hey Eli, check it out!” calls out Deborah as I emerge from the kitchen with a bucket full of ice, heading for the bar. She points to the wooden barrier-prop. “It’s like Trump has already started building his wall! See? All the white people are on that side [dining room], and it’s only us Mexicans over here!” she chuckles, adding, “Looks like you are stuck on the brown side now.”

When one dines out in Los Angeles, New York, or San Francisco, why are all the servers white, and—as Deborah indicates—the kitchen workers “brown”? And why might workers feel as though an invisible wall separates them from their coworkers? This chapter examines the fundamental role management plays in reproducing social inequality from within restaurants. By setting specific policies and practices, managers at Match, Terroir, and The Neighborhood structure not only the organizational conditions of service work but the social segregation of these jobs by race, class, and gender.1 Higher-end restaurants subscribe to an overarching logic of upscale service that grants access to the most desirable jobs to educated, white men and women, and relegates immigrant Latino men to the least desirable jobs. Yet restaurant managers also attempt to distinguish their respective service brands in order to stand out in a fiercely competitive Los Angeles dining scene. By enforcing characteristic styles of customer relations, dining room ambiance, and menu items—what I refer to as “service 23

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brands”—managers nuance the kinds of workplace conditions that employees experience. How does the logic of upscale service contribute to the reproduction of social inequality in restaurants? At a basic level, managers strive to hire employees who, in addition to being dependable laborers, help the company provide a positive dining experience for customers. Doing so requires different things of front-of-the-house and back-of-the-house workers.2 Managers seek back-of-the-house personnel who possess the ability to properly prepare food orders in a timely and consistent fashion; they seek front-of-the-house personnel who will ensure that guests have an enjoyable social experience at the restaurant. These distinct objectives can be reframed as what managers do not need for each type of work: kitchen-based employees need not be able to produce emotional labor for guests, whereas dining room workers need not be able to put together the food they serve in a busy kitchen.3 These contrasting labor objectives also incorporate social and cultural shorthands for each type of service job. At each of the three restaurants I studied, the kind of person whom managers perceive as able to interact positively with guests is not the same kind of person they think will be willing to work a hot grill in the kitchen for hours on end making near-minimum wage. As this chapter explains, the ways in which managers seek to hire, train, and supervise their workforce come packaged with powerful racial, class-cultural, and gendered assumptions. Acting on these assumptions reserves the highest-paid and most visible jobs in restaurants for educated white men and women, and the most marginal jobs for less educated, foreign-born Latino men. Further, the second half of this chapter details how managers at Match, Terroir, and The Neighborhood use distinct service brands to differentiate their version of upscale service. These decisions sculpt the job requirements, rewards, and barriers that workers encounter. In the name of producing upscale service that appeals to guests, management effectively underwrites race- and classbased job segregation and hierarchy within service workplaces. Altogether, this chapter shows how management structures social inequality “from above,” doing so in response to perceived customer tastes as well as their own ideas about what upscale service looks like.

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Different Jobs for Different People In restaurants, managers channel individuals into unequal types of service jobs on the basis not only of formal qualifications but also of socially coded ideals for these positions. Managers then reinforce these divergent ideals for front- and back-of-the-house jobs through daily supervisory practices. That certain jobs in our society are ascribed social attributes is, of course, hardly new. Women continue to be closely associated with care work and secretarial jobs, men with bluecollar work and managerial positions.4 Immigrants, especially those with low levels of education, are presumed to slot into unskilled manual labor jobs in this country, just as American teenagers will work stopgap jobs such as babysitting and fast-food cashiering.5 Employers use these social and cultural heuristics when making hiring decisions, and encounter job applicants who are primed in similar ways. Antidiscrimination labor laws mitigate managers’ use of overtly prejudiced hiring methods, but they do little to curb the influence of implicit biases. Put differently, the mechanisms that infuse social inequality into the hiring process today often involve a subtler set of screening mechanisms and coded preferences.6 Recent studies have shown that employers make hiring decisions on the basis of a person’s intangible qualities, such as their perceived likeability or “fit” within the company.7 Found nowhere on the job flyer, these criteria introduce racialized, classed, and gendered standards for job entrance. As I illustrate in this chapter, managers at Match, Terroir, and The Neighborhood readily subscribe to socially coded standards for service jobs when evaluating job candidates and subsequently supervising them in the workplace.8 Amid tight business competition, managers also nuance these standards to fit specific service brands at their restaurant, which in turn allows some workers opportunities to cross race and class lines.

Hiring a “Brown-Collar” Back of the House Hiring managers seek immigrant Latino men to fill service jobs that are labor intensive, low wage, and located away from customer contact.9 The racialization of cooking, bussing, and janitorial work in Los

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Angeles as “brown-collar” jobs reflects racist stereotypes about the fit between low-wage employment and foreign-born, nonwhite workers. This process also has a self-reinforcing aspect: as anthropologist Ruth Gomberg-Munoz writes, “The notion that working hard is attributable to ‘Mexican culture’ naturalizes Mexican immigrants’ subordination and reduces their work performances to a putative cultural inclination for socially degraded, back-breaking labor.”10 The more Latino workers prove their worth at these types of jobs through hard work and pliability, the more they confirm their predilection for it in the eyes of American employers.11 This feeds back into management practices. At The Neighborhood, when managers need to hire a new dishwasher, they check with Latino cooks and bussers—never white servers and bartenders—to inquire whether anyone knows a friend or family member who wants a job. To be sure, managers are quick to point out that expecting Latino immigrants to fill back-of-the-house and support positions is not racist but rather the path of least resistance. Doing so does not require them to post any job advertisement or go through a lengthy HR (human resources) approval process. Wally, a thirty-four-year-old white manager at The Neighborhood, described his approach to hiring for back-of-thehouse positions: “Every time we have a job opening in the back of the house, I have ten resumes in my hand ready to fill it, . . . [The resumes are all from] friends and family of the cooks. All of them [are Latino]. And they are ready to work, so it’s convenient. It makes my job easier.” When I asked if it had always been this way, he responded, “It is the same thing at every restaurant I’ve managed for the last ten years.” For Wally, hiring immigrant and second-generation Latino men to fill vacant kitchen and support jobs is just common sense. If someone quits, Wally turns to his existing back-of-the-house employees, whom he already knows to be reliable and hard working. The prospective job candidate they are likely to bring forth is usually another Latino man. Beyond the recruitment tool of social networks, the way management advertises back-of-the-house jobs online can also reinforce the racialized nature of these positions. A number of the back-of-the-house and support job advertisements posted on the Craigslist Los Angeles job board are written entirely in Spanish:

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Muchas oportunidades de empleo en los mejores restaurantes de LA Si esta buscando trabajo o tiene en mente cambiar de trabajo? Tenemos muchas oportunidades de empleo que apoyan la diversidad y autenticidad de la Cultura Latina. Aplica a través de Harri.com y podrás encontrar un sin número posiciones abiertas para ti! Anímate y descubre nuevas posibilidades para tu futuro. Ahora mismo tenemos 50 Back of House positions en importantes restaurantes de alta calidad ofreciendo empleos de: Executive Chef, Baker, Dishwasher/Porter, Line Cook, Pastry Cook, Pastry Chef, Sous Chef, Prep Chef, Event Chef y muchas posiciones más. Lo único que necesita hacer es crear un breve perfil para aplicar a una o a todas las posiciones que hay disponibles en Harri.com. Qué está esperando para cambiar su futuro?” (A lot of employment opportunities at the best restaurants in Los Angeles Are you looking for work or want to change jobs? We have a lot of employment opportunities that support the authenticity and diversity of Latin culture. Apply through Harri.com and you will be able to find many open positions! Get excited and find new opportunities for your future. Right now there are job openings for 50 Back of House positions at important and high-quality restaurants; these include Executive Chef, Baker, Dishwasher/Porter, Line Cook, Pastry Cook, Pastry Chef, Sous Chef, Prep Chef, Event Chef and many more. The only thing you need to do is create a short profile and apply to one or all the positions available at Harri.com. What are you waiting for to change your future?)

By posting job listings in Spanish, hiring managers assume the native tongue of their prospective hires. The demographic characteristics of those who are most likely to reply to these advertisements are implied, as is the “brown-collar” status of the job. Other job postings treat the ability to speak Spanish as an employment requirement listed alongside other rudimentary skills: Good Restaurant is looking for DISHWASHER EXPERIENCE:12 Fast Neat Bilingual

Multi task Organized

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As implied above, ideal applicants for back-of-the-house positions should be ready to work hard, willing to accept low wages, and able to communicate with their Spanish-speaking coworkers on the job (bilingual, in the context of the job ad above, can only mean English-Spanish). While these posts stop short of requiring applicants to be of Mexican or Central American ancestry, they insinuate as much.

Reinforcing White Space in the Dining Room For front-of-the-house jobs, managers at Match, Terroir, and The Neighborhood prioritize applicants with traits they perceive will be appealing to their clientele. This means favoring job candidates whom management sees as having an attractive physical appearance and a pleasant personality—intangible and highly subjective qualities that are impossible to capture on a resume. Crucially, because these hiring standards derive from Western cultural ideals in our society, they tend to favor white, young, and middle-class individuals.13 According to a server at Match named Crystal, “It’s like when they hire, they are trying to hire the same person over again! Like, look at the newest class [of servers]—all blonde, skinny, and beautiful.” The hiring uniformity that Crystal perceives among her front-of-the-house colleagues both past and present reflects deliberate hiring decisions by management. These gatekeeping decisions reinforce the supremacy of whiteness and middle-classness in seemingly innocuous spaces of consumption. They also represent decisions that Crystal, as a young, white, college-educated woman, has benefited from personally, given her rapid ascent into the ranks of servers at Match. Management’s use of socially coded hiring ideals controls access to serving and bartending jobs within higher-end restaurants. These standards create a visual hierarchy among applicants based on skin color and body shape before any interview is conducted or resume is exchanged.14 These hiring procedures function as an open door for white, collegeeducated young adults to walk onto the job despite limited restaurant experience. That same door is closed to working-class minorities for similar reasons, as described by Mary, a white woman in her forties who works as a dining room manager at The Neighborhood:

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Mary: So, it’s very clear what kind of person [the general manager] wants to hire. And I’ve only hired black, Latin—you know what I am saying? And one particular person told me I’m not hiring right. EW: How did you respond when you heard that? Mary: It’s not like anyone has actually talked to me about these things . . . EW: Because that would be illegal? Mary: Exactly. But . . . EW: It sounds like you are getting the subtle cues of it? Mary: Oh, it’s not very subtle, I’m sorry. They are not saying specifically, “Hire her, she’s blonde-haired blue-eyed.” But they are saying, “She’s bubbly and bright, just what the people want.”

While the explicit standards for front-of-the-house hiring may be framed as “bubbly and bright” or “graceful,” the implicit race and class screens are clear. Mary understands that her responsibilities as a hiring manager depend on adhering to unspoken ideals that are being pushed down from the top (the general manager and, possibly, owners). Management is also careful to avoid any accusations of prejudiced hiring. All three restaurants in this study did in fact employ a small number of racial minorities in the front of the house. However, hiring “diversity” in strategic ways does not necessarily upset the white hiring ideals in the dining room. Instead, it represents what Jodi Melamed refers to as “neoliberal multiculturalism,” controlled and depoliticized forms of diversity that ultimately serve capitalistic aims.15 According to another manager at The Neighborhood, “You have to sprinkle in everyone else. So you have your dominant, which are normally white. That’s what should be dominant—that’s not my view. I’m saying, this is your dominant: I want my white, beautiful, tall servers, and I want the Latinos and everyone else on the line, dishwashing, bussing, all that.” This manager lays bare a system of racial discrimination that preserves the whiteness of the staff members who are visible to diners. Maintaining a “sprinkle” of racial diversity in the front of the house can be a calculated way in which management can imply egalitarian hiring practices without necessarily altering the fundamental social order of this world of work.16

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The small number of black and Latino men and women hired into the front of the house at Match, Terroir, and The Neighborhood embody social ideals for customer-facing positions in other ways. This can grant them tenuous access to jobs as servers and bartenders. For example, the two black men formerly employed as servers at The Neighborhood are tall and broad-shouldered, with college degrees in journalism and liberal arts, respectively. At Match, several third- and fourth-generation Mexican American women employed as servers and bartenders are petite, conventionally feminine, and well spoken. All speak English exclusively (one Latina female server told me, “I’m such a coconut—brown on the outside, white on the inside”). While the color of their skin may deviate from that of their white front-of-the-house colleagues, they meet other intangible standards that managers set for these positions. Hiring carefully curated racial diversity can also be an advantageous way to produce elite, cosmopolitan service brands. According to Chris, a white bartender at Terroir and a twenty-year industry veteran, At a number of high-end restaurants that I’ve worked in Los Angeles and New York, the hiring has been like a casting call, in that [management] seems to be trying to match certain roles that they want. Obviously, everyone has to look good. But it’s also: I want this kind of look, and that kind of personality. When I was younger and working out at the gym four days a week, my look was the all-American guy. But there can only be so many all-American guys and gals on staff at any one time.

In today’s milieu, an all-white staff raises eyebrows. Chris’s comparison of restaurant hiring to a movie casting call parallels sociologist Nancy Yuen’s study on racism in Hollywood, in which she finds that people of color are typecast and hired to fill stereotyped roles (e.g., Asian women as dragon ladies or seductresses).17 Back in restaurants, managers can bolster their service brand by maintaining a slightly more diverse—but ever friendly—cast of characters in the front of the house. This has its limits. Managers who personally question racialized and classed hiring norms can end up being pressured into upholding them all the same. Courtney, an upbeat, twenty-eight-year-old African American hiring manager at The Neighborhood, explained,

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Although it is unsaid, it is very clear from seeing [the owner]’s energy, what kind of people he wants here. If [the owner] had a perfect world, every employee would look like Margaret [server]. Every employee would look beautiful, blue eyes and blonde hair. And walk gracefully. And people who look like Kevin [waiter]. Full of them . . . it’s his ideal world. And it used to be like that here! And then Katie or another manager gave Rudolfo a shot, and that was a thing . . .

Courtney feels pressure to adhere to The Neighborhood’s implicit hiring standards, and saw the tension that one of her manager colleagues brought on by hiring a Mexican man (Rudolfo) as a server (“that was a thing”). Courtney told me she was also put in a very tough situation in the summer of 2016 when she led the hiring process for an open host position. Three of the leading applicants happened to be African American women. “My stomach was churning,” she says. “I knew the owner wouldn’t dare tell me, but we already had enough black people on staff.” With two African American men working as servers, hiring another black person in the front of the house would violate racially coded expectations for the front-of-the-house staff, possibly leading the owner to question Courtney’s ability to manage. Dubiously, just one month later—and with the host hire still pending—Courtney’s immediate concern about this issue solved itself. Both black servers at The Neighborhood quit unexpectedly.18 Though I could find no hard evidence that they were pressured out, the timing seemed more than coincidental. Managers also rely heavily on stratified employee social networks to recruit workers who possess the physical and social characteristics that managers desire for front-of-the-house jobs. I calculate that one out of every three server and bartender hires that I observed got their jobs through existing connections with white servers, bartenders, hosts, or dining room managers already employed there. For example, when Terroir hired a new general manager named Theodore in January of 2016, within a week of his start, he introduced us to three of his “friends,” two white men and one white woman, who would be joining us as part-time servers. “These guys are real pros,” Theodore told us during a mandatory meeting for front-of-the-house staff. “And I vouch personally for what they can do and what they will bring to our team.”

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In order to search for additional hires, managers also rely on formal job postings on Craigslist or other industry hiring websites to hire frontof-the-house staff. Wally, the hiring manager at The Neighborhood described earlier, explains why this is important: “The people that drop off resumes [at the restaurant] are primarily for the back of the house. We have to go out and look for servers because no one is walking in and dropping off resumes.” From my observation, this is only partially true. While the volume of resumes that cross Wally’s desk is less for front-ofthe-house job openings, the appearance and personality standards he uses to assess prospective hires are also more stringent. This leads him to perceive fewer “qualified” applicants for the front of the house. Online job postings can address this problem. Managers can state their ideals for front-of-the-house candidates more bluntly through online advertisements than, say, paper flyers posted in the restaurant, because the former do not need to feature their name or any identifying information. Because of this, I was never sure which specific job ad posted to restaurant hiring boards belonged to Match, Terroir, and The Neighborhood. However, an ad from another “high-end” restaurant reads as follows: Model/Waitress Wanted We have Immediate Position for a Waitress for a new high end Japanese Restaurant in Pasadena. Also experience in a restaurant is Preferred.

Under the cover of relative anonymity, managers can be more forward about their de facto job requirements online. While the majority of job ads for front-of-the-house positions do feature only the basic details of the job, it is not uncommon to see job ads requiring that applicants submit headshots or full-body photos along with their resumes, despite the suspect legality of this practice.19 Managers can also structure hiring and training procedures to appeal primarily to certain kinds of individuals. Although many front-of-thehouse jobs offer only part-time hours, managers prefer that applicants have “open availability” for job training. This attracts individuals with a buffer of class resources and ample schedule flexibility. Managers essentially pitch these serving and bartending “gigs” to people who can afford to work them; men and women without sufficient class resources to undergo two weeks of training at minimum wage need not apply.20

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The way managers evaluate job qualifications can also uphold aesthetic and social standards for front-of-the-house restaurant jobs. An applicant’s name, education, residence, and past work experience—all common features of a resume—can dictate who is deemed eligible for a callback.21 At Terroir, for instance, the general manager would thumb through the resumes of those applying to be servers at the restaurant. “If we want to play in the big leagues,” he told me, “we need to start attracting servers who have worked at Spago, Valentino, Capo, those kinds of places.” We were closing up the restaurant after dinner that evening, and he was unhappy with the customer service that he saw from some of my serving and bartending colleagues (apparently I wasn’t at fault that day). Idealizing candidates with experience at top restaurants in Los Angeles ensures more than just the fine-dining acumen of new hires: it means favoring workers who have already passed unspoken racialized and classed industry hiring standards.22 This helps to maintain an industrywide status quo of whiteness and middle-classness for these customer service positions, especially in more upscale environments. Lonnie, a manager at Match, reportedly has his own system for sizing up potential hires, though I did not observe it in practice. According to Crystal, the server described earlier, when applicants arrived at the restaurant, she would tell them to wait while she flagged down Lonnie to inform him of the situation. Lonnie would covertly observe the potential hire from a safe distance and signal to Crystal whether to tell the applicant to wait for an interview (“we’re hiring, would you mind waiting up front so I can introduce you to a manager?”) or indicate that there were no job openings at the moment. The uniformity of the dining room staff at Match—even compared to Terroir and The Neighborhood—lends credibility to Crystal’s account of this practice. “It is all about looks,” Crystal mused, shaking her head. Management also sources potential front-of-the-house employees from patrons dining at the restaurant.23 Melanie, a twenty-five-yearold white woman, explains how she first got a serving job at Match: “I thought this place was so cool and, I wanted to work here, you know? In fact, I used to be a regular, especially for brunch. So one day, Kyle [manager] came up to me and we talked. He’s like, ‘Do you want a job?’ And I’m like, ‘Sure!’” As a regular diner at Match, Melanie was unaware that she was simultaneously interviewing there. Her previous part-time

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serving experience while attending a prestige university nearby sealed the deal. Cassandra, a twenty-two-year-old white woman, grew up near The Neighborhood on a tree-lined private street. She and her family dined there regularly while she was in high school. Her job working at The Neighborhood during her summers back from college came from Chef Morgan, whom her father had become close friends with over the years. Months after Cassandra was hired, another manager at The Neighborhood petitioned her younger sister to work there as well. By treating restaurant patrons as a steady stream of potential hires, managers keep a tight grip over who is offered a job.

Managing Difference At Match, Terroir, and The Neighborhood, managers use socially coded standards for employment to produce upscale service. This does not end with hiring. Behind the scenes, specific policies and day-to-day supervisory practices within each establishment reflect assumptions about the race, class, and gender characteristics of those in the front and back of the house. Officially, managers make their restaurants sound like bastions of teamwork and unity. “We are all one family,” declared the general manager at Terroir when I was first hired. “Let’s take care of each other out there,” Kyle says at every pre-shift meeting at Match. Actual proceedings suggest otherwise. Managers treat front-of-the-house and backof-the-house workers as entirely separate groups—both socially and organizationally. By standard procedure, kitchen-based workers seldom make direct contact with dining room workers while on the job. Cooks must go through the chef on duty to relay information to other nonkitchen coworkers, and vice versa. At Match, servers are reprimanded for communicating directly with line cooks during service—regardless of the nature of the conversation. I found this out the hard way my first month on the job: A guest flags me down to say she forgot to specify that the cream sauce should be on the side instead of directly on top of her omelette. I hurry

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back to the kitchen to convey the message to the cooks. I go directly to Javier [line cook], who I know is manning the egg station today. I begin to explain the new revision to him when Chef Eric (executive chef) screams, “Hey! Don’t talk directly to him. You give me the instructions, then I’ll relay the message!” Humiliated, I repeat the special instructions to him while Javier and several other line cooks look on.

Front-of-the-house workers are forced to follow a formal chain of command that discourages them from communicating directly with line cooks. This holds true even when basic and urgent information needs to be conveyed (“sauce on the side for the chicken on twenty-one!”; “nut allergy on five!”). Management insists that this policy is in place for practical reasons: chefs, who are responsible for directing the flow of food production in the restaurant, feel they need to know what is happening in the kitchen at all times. Opening a line of communication that circumvents them violates the Way of Things. Yet the results of this mandatory mediation between cooks and servers are often absurd and alienating. At The Neighborhood, for example, one sous chef quickly shuts down with an icy stare all attempts by front-of-the-house workers—and sometimes even dining room supervisors—to verbally communicate with the kitchen. Any comments that are intended to cross the threshold of the kitchen must instead be written down and submitted to him on a “refire” ticket. This strict practice is a running joke among servers, who, when at the bar together after their shift, sometimes pass written memos to one another for several minutes instead of speaking. But more importantly, the enforced noncommunication between front- and back-of-the-house workers systematically cuts off employees into distinct worlds of work. Servers and cooks, separated at the kitchen pass by only three or four feet of metal countertop, rarely speak directly to one another, even while attempting to coordinate the same meal for guests. Standing physically next to each other, workers are made to be socially and symbolically isolated. (I describe this in the next chapter.) Managers orchestrate staff meetings in an equally segregated manner. Formal meetings at Match and Terroir are frequently held for “servers and bartenders only,” or are advertised as “mandatory for all kitchen personnel.” Pinned side by side on the backroom event board, the former are printed in English, the latter hand-scribbled, in Spanish, using a black

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Sharpie. During front-of-the-house meetings, servers and bartenders receive thick pamphlets with glossy pictures. These pamphlets have titles like, “Why we source our lamb from X farm in Colorado,” or “the newest vintage of rosé from our friends in Santa Ynez.” Daily pre-shift meetings regularly feature food tastings, in which the chef on duty would emerge from the kitchen to explain his latest creation (“we have a dozen in the back, so it’ll be a hand-sell, for eighteen a pop”). At the Neighborhood, Chef Morgan would carefully set a dish down in the center of the meeting table, along with eight spoons draped along the edge, upside down. He would walk us through why he decided to pair ripe figs with local nasturtium leaves. As he would talk, servers and bartenders would dig into the food item and comment (“I would love this with the zip of a dry Riesling”; “yeeeess, Chef, this is amazing. I’m gonna make it fly tonight”). The remainder of the dish, now excavated beyond recognition, would be passed down to the bussers and food runners sitting silently at the end of the table—at which point the chef would move on to describing the next dish. While the support staff, all of whom are Latino men, would still get to sample new menu products, this pre-shift procedure at The Neighborhood upholds race and class exclusivities by implying which staff members are expected to appreciate sophisticated cuisine. Scheduled food tastings and discussion of ingredients also happen in the back of the house, but mostly among white male chefs, sous chefs, and other members of management. Meetings in which these individuals share information with line cooks, prep cooks, and other back-ofthe-house staff are held on an impromptu basis, and only when the food item being discussed is about to debut on the menu. No equivalent of a pre-shift meeting where an incoming group of workers sits down together on a daily basis exists at any of the three restaurants in this study. Instead, back-of-the-house workers are often made to stand in the kitchen while the chef on duty conveys a range of topics in broken Spanish (or sometimes with the assistance of a bilingual staff member): cooking instructions, legal information, such as a change in the minimum wage, FDA instructions on hand-washing procedures for employees, or new approval procedures regarding overtime hours. According to several cooks I talked with, many of these “gatherings” do not feature any written material at all. Managers give cooks directives, while the latter listen while uttering only “yes Chef!” in response.

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The unequal training regimens for new hires in the front and back of the house also showcase the way management treats these groups as systematically unequal. For front-of-the-house hires, managers vet applicants carefully through a multistep process. Prospective servers and bartenders go through multiple rounds of interviews with the general manager, head chef, or any available floor supervisors. Each manager must green light the hire (candidates on the cusp may be asked to “stage” for one shift, a trial run of service where management has a chance to observe the prospective employee’s demeanor with guests as well as general service technique and savvy). If successful, front-of-the-house hires are invited to a formal training that can range from one to two weeks at each restaurant. During training, workers are instructed to memorize the restaurant’s food menu and wine list, and, most importantly, practice restaurant-specific guest service protocols. Managers go through extensive efforts to welcome new hires to the “team” during their training period. For example, during my front-ofthe-house orientation at Terroir, the general manager, Jim, spent the first hour of each six-hour training day leading group icebreakers. As we sat in a circle format with fresh coffee and pastries in front of us, each of us was asked to state our name, identify our favorite restaurant in the city, and tell a joke. Jim encouraged us to “be as goofy and personal as you want” while getting to know one another. This lasted for a full week, at which point the icebreaker had transformed into a social hour. One server, a white man in his thirties, told the group a “horror story” about how his former coworker used to mispronounce “confit” like “convict” when talking to diners in his section. To my surprise, throughout the two-week orientation at Terroir, we were never formally introduced to any of the back-of-the-house workers besides the head chef (who would quietly sit on a bar stool in the back during our training). We would arrive at the restaurant each morning and immediately begin chatting with our fellow servers, bartenders, server assistants, and hosts—all of whom were white. Only a stone’s throw away, the kitchen would be bustling with activity, filled with Latino cooks and dishwashers whose names we had never heard. Being strangers to the cooking staff grew increasingly uncomfortable: by the second week of training, as we began tasting the menu items, the food would be brought out by “the cook with the long hair” or “the guy with

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the red sweatshirt.” I observed two servers go out of their way to introduce themselves to the dishwashers as they dropped off dirty plates in the sink. A quick handshake or fist-bump, and they were back off towards the dining room training table. By contrast, at each restaurant, managers treat the hiring and training procedure for back-of-the-house and support workers far more informally. Prospective cooks, dishwashers, or bussers, who are usually Latino men, arrive at the restaurant in the company of existing employees and wait for the chef on duty or general manager to finish their current tasks. The chef asks the prospective hire a series of questions in basic Spanish, or with the help of a bilingual English-Spanish employee. While I was never present for one of these hiring interviews, several cooks told me that most of the questions they were asked when they were hired focused on two things: their previous kitchen experience, and their schedule availability relative to the shifts that needed filling. Table 1.1. Hiring & Training Practices (Excludes Managerial Positions) Front of the House

Back of the House

Hiring

Training

MATCH

2 interviews with FOH managers

5-day orientation, interview with chef on the job 3-day shadowing, service test

TERROIR

1 interview with 10-day shadowing interview with chef on the job FOH manager and and stage stage

THE 3 interviews with NEIGHBORHOOD FOH managers and chef

10-day shadowing, service test

Hiring

Training

interview with chef on the job and stage

Following an initial interview and depending on the experience of the job candidate, managers ask new hires to follow up with a live demonstration of their cooking abilities. For line cooks, this means being asked to “stage” in the kitchen for one or two shifts, often unpaid. One chef at The Neighborhood told me that he likes to evaluate potential prep cook hires by handing them an onion and telling them to dice it (cooks usually bring their own knives to work). Successful hires may then be asked to shadow incumbent workers—usually the same employee who helped get them the job.24 The chart in table 1.1 illustrates how managers at each restaurant use distinct hiring and training procedures towards front-

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and back-of-the-house workers (support workers are treated similarly to back-of-the-house workers except that they are interviewed by dining room managers instead of chefs). Given a system of racialized, classed, and gendered management for each of these subgroups, workers are socialized into divergent worlds of work within restaurants.

Managing Service Brands At Match, Terroir, and The Neighborhood, management’s reliance on the logic of upscale service to structure restaurant workplaces reproduces social inequalities among workers. However, each of these establishments also works hard at making its specific service brand stand out from others’. They do so by altering not only menu items and décor elements on the basis of what they think will appeal to customers but also the customer service style they offer.25 These methods of producing customized service brands affect the labor conditions that front- and back-of-thehouse workers encounter, including the kinds of exclusionary forces and opportunities that exist within each establishment as a result.

Proximal Service at Match Restaurant Striving for a “casual-upscale” aesthetic, Match has done away with white linen tablecloths and other traditional fine-dining embellishments. In their place management orchestrates a trendy ambiance of exposed cement walls, high ceiling fans, and ambiguously themed modern art; while diners enjoy the food at Match, they come back for the atmosphere (at least according to the restaurant’s Yelp page). The capstone of Match’s service brand is its proximal service style.26 Under the logic of proximal service, management attempts to play down distinctions between server and served. Contrasting the service norms found at other luxury service settings—think fancy hotels, black-tie banquets—the person who greets you at the dining table is expected to act more like a peer than like the help. However, in an effort to produce proximal service for Match’s yuppie, white clientele, managers seek front-of-the-house workers who represent youth, whiteness, and upper-middle-classness—a more exclusive set of social characteristics than that found at Terroir or The Neighborhood.

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Management screens front-of-the-house hires for qualities that allow them to resemble the restaurant’s primary clientele. Hired servers, bartenders, and hosts are overwhelmingly young, white, college-educated men and women. These individuals approximate the customers sitting at the tables and on the bar stools (who are, on average, slightly older and more professionally dressed). Managers hone proximal service through distinctive training and workplace policies. For example, during training, new server hires are given guidelines for demeanor and self-presentation when with customers. The guideline for proper conduct when with guests involves considerable flexibility, customization, and autonomy on the part of employees. This contrasts the strict managerial control over employees’ emotional displays found in other corporate service settings.27 As a staff trainer named Sarah explained during orientation for front-of-the-house hires, service at Match means practicing a certain brand of friendliness: Sarah acts out what a timid server looks like, as she tiptoes with an aghast expression on her face towards our trainee table (six of us). We laugh as her eyes dart back and forth, shoulders hunched, trying to stutter out a word. She then snaps out of the skit, bellowing “Be confident! For god’s sake, they know they are at a restaurant, and the server is there to do a job. They expect to be interrupted at some point!” She follows this with, “A lot of service is confidence. When you have to interrupt a table in conversation, do so boldly and with purpose. When you are walking by a table on a busy shift, slow down and appear calm. Customers take a lot of cues off the waitstaff, so if you appear out of control, that is how they will perceive the service.”

Match provides white, college-educated front-of-the-house employees with few required scripts, acts, or routines for how to interact with diners.28 Servers need not be overly polite—calling everyone “sir” and “ma’am”—on the service floor; they simply need to be themselves and let their cultural capital do the rest.29 Similarly, training at Match is also less conspicuously engineered. As Sarah suggests, managers expect front-of-the-house workers to exhibit a confident, calm, and affable style of service as opposed to being too deferential or businesslike. Servers should not be so rushed as to feel uncomfortable if a customer wants to

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casually chat. Servers are encouraged to appear cool in multiple senses of the word: someone who looks like they would be fun to hang out with, and not overly burdened by the job. Even while at work, they should embody upper-middle-class leisure rather than working-class labor. Match’s front-of-the-house dress code provides its team of white, college-educated workers with substantial leeway to wear what they feel comfortable in (workers must display “good personal hygiene,” wear fitted jeans, and wear tops that feature the color white and “no large logos, advertising or slogans”). Setting up Match’s dress code this way allows workers to play up their sense of personal style and fashion, setting the tone for their interaction with guests. Floor managers facilitate this through loose monitoring of server attire: The manager on duty, Kyle, gathers the servers together for a pre-shift meeting at 8:00 a.m. and says, “As you know, our dress code is to dress trendy with the primary color being white.” The servers look at each other and smirk. Crystal rolls her eyes and says jokingly, “Am I trendy enough for you today?” She points to her striped, loosely hanging black-and-white t-shirt. Kyle pauses to look at her, then, with a shrug, says, “Sure?” He resumes reading off his meeting notes.

Front-of-the-house staff are encouraged to thread the line between fashion and function with their attire, and face only minor sanctions for dress code violations. As a result, servers assert extensive fashion vanities on the job. Crystal, who is white, comes to work wearing a combination of jewelry, scarves, hats, and jackets, all of which are unregulated by the dress code. Match’s dress code facilitates more conspicuous attention being drawn to servers’ personal fashion choices and sexualized labor in the workplace.30 It frames a dining room environment where fashion-savvy, physically fit white workers are “on display” amid trend-setting, moneyed white patrons who come to the restaurant to consume the whole experience.31 On multiple occasions, I witnessed restaurant diners who, unable to rely on conspicuous visual cues to differentiate staff from patron, would inquire, “Do you work here?” to a series of people before finally arriving at someone who could direct them towards the restroom.

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Dining room managers, who are themselves mostly white and hold college degrees, also contribute to the ambiance of proximal service. They stroll from table to table joking and shaking hands with diners, and selectively “comping” (giving away for free) food and drink items. Match’s formal policy on comps describes three occasions to which discounts may be applied: for the immediate family of employees, offthe-clock coworkers, and guests celebrating a special occasion. In practice, complementary items are given out at the restaurant much more liberally and strategically. Regular diners may find their appetizers or desserts mysteriously taken off the final bill by managers; friends of servers might find that several beers arrive at their table unordered and off the bill. Bestowed upon select guests, the distribution of “free stuff” helps solidify the dining room as a space for symbolic inner membership.32 At Match, orchestrating a brand built around proximal service is at least as much about reinforcing social exclusion. The characteristics that managers seek in front-of-the-house workers make it difficult for those who don’t embody youth, whiteness, and middle-upper-classness—or at least approximate these characteristics—to access these jobs. Some of the least likely candidates whom managers would consider for customer service jobs are the Latino immigrants already employed there as cooks, dishwashers, and bussers. This severely curtails mobility opportunities at Match from low-paying back-of-the-house and support jobs to frontof-the-house jobs. Under proximal service, employees are hired to socially coded positions that are difficult to break away from.

Professionalized Service at Terroir Managers at Terroir strive to make their restaurant a destination restaurant for the city’s cosmopolitan elite, one where expertly prepared food and drink are the primary showcase. Unlike at Match, the star of the show at Terroir is the kitchen, which is helmed by Jeremy, a decorated chef and industry veteran. Management aligns nearly every dimension of Terroir’s internal organization towards the aim of producing professionalized service in support of Chef Jeremy’s culinary art. The service style at Terroir is intended to be knowledgeable and understated, the interior decor sleek and minimalistic (featuring dark

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mahogany paneling and spot lighting over each table), and the wine display aesthetically impressive. Terroir’s professionalized service also informs what workers experience behind the scenes. More than at the other two restaurants, Terroir’s managers emphasize skill-based promotions in the front and back of the house: moving up is tied less to how you look and more to what skills you demonstrate. However, because managers prioritize those who already arrive with “professional” accolades, they, too, follow existing social patterns in terms of who is deemed qualified for certain roles.33 In the dining room, Terroir’s style of customer service follows traditional fine-dining norms more closely than at Match or The Neighborhood. Management expects service to be formal and understated, performed by workers who keep a respectful distance between themselves and guests. “We are striving to be service professionals,” said Jeremy during my first day of orientation. “And the main tools to help us get there are product knowledge and perfecting the steps of service.” “Perfect service” in the dining room—as Jeremy likes to call it—means that tables should always be clean and set with the proper cutlery for each course, staff uniforms should always be kept crisp, and guests should never need to ask for anything. Guests’ needs, according to Jim, the general manager, should be anticipated, not reacted to. Terroir treats service as the byproduct of learned skill and on-the-job vigilance. Managers maintain professionalized service through a system of training and supervisory policies that reinforces these principles. In the kitchen, Jeremy himself finishes every plate with a clean wipe and garnish before sending it off to the dining room (at Match, a cook or food runner often did this); any food item not to his liking is hastily handed back to cooks to be replated, or worse, recooked. In the front of the house, Jim reminds servers and bartenders before every shift to speak in hushed tones and keep side conversations to a minimum. During down time, he tells the servers to “fill the space” in the dining room by standing silently in a vacant corner of the floor. Servers should remain there, at attention, until a guest requires assistance, or food needs to be brought out to the dining room. Managers at Terroir are unafraid to correct employees on errors made on any of these service measures. The following occurred during a preshift meeting in November 2015:

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“We need to absolutely, at all cost, avoid some bad service stuff that I’ve been seeing the last few days,” Jeremy tells us. “If I see you doing any of these, I’m going to call you out for giving Denny’s service, and yes, that is meant to be an insult.” Jeremy demonstrates: he holds one plate in each hand, and walks towards us looking like he is in a daze. “Who has the Black Cod?” he mimes, holding one of the plates up. We sit in silence, listening. Jeremy snaps out of acting. “No more auctioning food!” he says, his voice nearing a shout. “At this level, we shouldn’t have to discuss this anymore!”

Informed by fine-dining formality, managers at Terroir drill the front-of-the-house staff that they should never outshine the food, or interfere with guests’ privacy. Whereas Match encourages playful intimacy between workers and diners, Terroir stresses maintaining distance between the two. As Jeremy explains, “Great service should be invisible.” At Match, if a male server approaches two similarly aged women, he might lead with a casual, flirtatious greeting—followed by a free mimosa (I witnessed this on many occasions). In the same scenario at Terroir, the interaction would be exceedingly polite, the server quickly and confidently moving the conversation along to explaining the menu, pointing out Chef Jeremy’s signature entrées, and offering drink pairings. Chef Jeremy and his team of male chefs are the heart of the restaurant, and the kitchen is their revered work studio. If cooks are treated as skilled assistants central to this operation, front-of-the-house employees remain a distant supporting cast. Servers are trained to guide guests through the menu, inform them of Chef Jeremy’s culinary philosophy, and upsell them on an array of appetizers, entrées, wines, and desserts. Should guests wish to alter dishes, which Jeremy hates, servers are instructed to politely steer them towards other dishes they may prefer. Whereas white servers at Match are used to establishing camaraderie with guests, their counterparts at Terroir are trained to follow routine while letting the food and drink speak for themselves. When one of my fellow servers protested that “it shouldn’t be a big deal” for the kitchen to make a small alteration to a dish, the manager’s response was pure ice: “That is not our policy here. It is your job to find out what else the guest would enjoy instead.”

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Terroir’s emphasis on service professionalism shapes management’s philosophy towards hiring and training. One can move up in the workplace only if one demonstrates proficiency at one’s job. Jim explained to me how this aligns with the restaurant’s professionalized brand: “Servers here do everything. And both servers and server assistants are trained the same; assistants should be able to answer any question about the menu and recommend wine pairings. The idea is that server assistants will try to make it up to the server position to get a bigger cut of [tips]. So yeah, everyone has to learn how to ‘own’ the table.” Jim demands a high level of food, drink, and service knowledge of all dining room employees. For this reason, bussers and food runners—jobs that are racialized and gendered as “brown-collar” jobs for Latino men at Match and The Neighborhood—have been done away with at Terroir. Instead, management relabels members of the support staff as “server assistants” and “bartender assistants,” and trains them the same way they train servers and bartenders. In theory, Terroir’s logic of service relies less on embodied traits to move up into more desirable front-of-the-house positions and more on skill; Jim joked with me one day that he wanted to hire front-of-the-house employees who “know their shit,” not those who simply look like they stepped off a modeling runway. This is true, to an extent. Although servers and bartenders at Terroir are primarily white, they are less uniformly college educated, represent a range of ages instead of being exclusively young, and have more experience in fine dining than their counterparts at the other two restaurants.34 But server and bartender assistant jobs at Terroir are also held by individuals who represent these traits. This is the case because management treats these positions more like opportunities for front-of-the-house understudies and less like racialized jobs for foreign-born Latinos. Management’s production of professional service shapes jobs in the back of the house as well. Because the nightly menu requires substantial skill and training to execute, kitchen workers are differentiated into a number of hierarchical ranks. During dinner service, for instance, accompanying Chef Jeremy is a sous chef, two “hot side” line cooks (on the grill and the sauté station), two bakers, one garde manger (salad station), two prep cooks, two to three dishwashers, and sometimes a “stage” (unpaid intern). Many of these employees are interested in building their culinary skills by working with Chef Jeremy. Moreover, outside of the two

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chefs, Terroir’s back-of-the-house team is less uniformly filled by foreignborn Latino men. One line cook, a white man in his late twenties with a prestigious culinary school degree, told me that he took a pay cut to work at Terroir to gain experience. Another cook, a second-generation Salvadoran man in his midtwenties, got a job on the line at Terroir after leaving a well-tipped job as a food runner at one of the top restaurants in the city. “I made much more money back then, not so much now,” he said. “But I’m doing what I love.” He arrives at Terroir early and leaves late, hoping to take every advantage of the sous chef’s tutelage on how to make stocks, perfect cooking times, and master flavor compositions. The well-defined job ladders and emphasis on skill proficiency under Terroir’s professionalized service brand contrast with the rigidly socially coded jobs at Match. Jim encourages server assistants to learn about wine and customer service, then compete for a promotion to the next available server job. At Match, managers do little to suggest bussers do the same. That said, Terroir still hires primarily middle-class, white men and women in the front of the house, while preserving kitchen leadership roles for white men with culinary degrees. In an effort to cultivate a brand based on the highest standards of fine-dining professionalism, Terroir favors individuals who arrive at the front door with (expensive) culinary degrees, prior knowledge about (white European) fine wine, and a talent for eloquently describing the daily amuse bouche.

Personalized Luxury at the Neighborhood Managers at The Neighborhood strive to make their establishment an intimate neighborhood dining experience for those who can afford to pay for the exclusivity. In contrast with Match’s proximal service and Terroir’s professionalized service, The Neighborhood is branded around offering personalized luxury for guests. Dining room supervisors and chefs work hard to create an environment that accommodates the whims of guests by making sure they receive service that embodies, to borrow Rachel Sherman’s words, “limitless entitlement to the worker’s individualizing attention and effort.”35 By prioritizing service that is accommodating to white elites, managers reinforce a binary of “guests” and “workers” that simultaneously loosens class and race requirements for desirable jobs, especially in the front of the house.

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Many of The Neighborhood’s wealthy white patrons enjoy multiple meals there each week despite the considerable price tag. It is not unusual for the same guest to hold a morning business meeting in the dining room over six-dollar lattes, convene with friends there for lunch two hours later (the most common order being an $18.50 chicken salad), and on the way out, reserve a table for the following evening’s family dinner (entrées start at thirty dollars). With each visit, a smiling host, server, or manager will greet them by name, guide them to their favorite seat, and already know their favorite dishes. All of this is accomplished by design. Managers go to great lengths to ensure that the restaurant’s core diners get the exact experience they want. While their counterparts at Match and Terroir also attempt to do this at some level, especially for repeat guests, The Neighborhood’s brand of personalized luxury elevates guest accommodation to a new level.36 This gives diners considerable power over workers. Managers cater to “SDs” (special diners) by offering them exclusive off-menu specials, tailored service, and behind-thescenes access to the operation.37 Dining room supervisors instruct hosts at the front door to keep extensive notes on customers using OpenTable software. These notes can include a given diner’s favorite table, usual food and drink order, allergies, service preferences, and family members’ names.38 New front-of-the-house hires (and sometimes cooks) are required to be familiar with SDs and their idiosyncratic tastes as a part of their training. For example, when I began training as a server, Courtney, the manager described earlier, told me to check OpenTable’s “guest card” before greeting any new group of diners at the table. I was quizzical about this practice at the time, but soon found out the reason for this procedure: guest notes in the computer system also include how they prefer to be treated by staff members. One SD’s profile reads, “does not like server to ask, ‘how is everything?’ when approaching the table”; another’s profile specifies that a large bottle of room-temperature, still water should be waiting on her table upon arrival. Courtney nudged me as I surveyed more SD notes. “See that guest sitting in the corner?” she said without looking in my direction. “Never ever bring him a check or make him sign anything. We have his credit card on file, and we are supposed to add an automatic twenty-percent tip to his bills.” Front-of-thehouse servers, like myself in this situation, are supposed to be grateful for the tip and unquestioning of their power dynamic with customers.

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Floor managers and chefs are also intimately involved in the daily performance of personalized service. They treat SDs to special perks and preferential treatment: At around 5:45 p.m., Chef Morgan greets a family of four that has just sat down on the table closest to the kitchen. He leans over the banquette separating the dining room and the kitchen with a big grin on his face. “And how you are today, Madam? Sir, how about yourself?” he asks the elderly man and woman at the table. They chat for a few minutes. After the group orders, Morgan approaches the table again, holding two plates. “Now here we have a squash blossom fresh, just harvested this morning from our friends up in Malibu.” He sets down one plate. “And this [points to the crispy dish] is what we turn them into with a little magic in the kitchen. Enjoy, my compliments.”

Managers such as Chef Morgan actively encourage regular diners to treat The Neighborhood like their home away from home: At about 11:45 a.m., I watch three young kids leave their table and walk straight into our staff area. Kevin [waiter] and I quickly turn to each other, then to Courtney for how to proceed. She only encourages them along with a wave of her arm. The kids go straight up to the kitchen pass near where Chef Morgan and Chef Eric are standing. To my surprise, both chefs immediately perk up, smiling brightly at them. With the kids’ parents looking on, Chef Matt teases, “We are going to have to put you two to work if you are back here! Would you mind taking this plate over to your parents for me?” While this is going on, more guests are arriving into an already packed dining room. Behind the chefs, I see Ignacio and Rodrigo [line cooks] working hard: a whole lineup of food orders still needs to be made, and the chefs are no longer directing traffic in the kitchen. “My gosh, it’s like we are their personal living room,” Kevin mutters to me under his breath.

At The Neighborhood, managers allow SDs unprecedented access to areas of the restaurant that are usually off-limits to guests. The stage for enacting personalized luxury service can expand to include staff areas (kitchen pass) and types of employees (chefs) that are otherwise beyond

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customer control. Workers must find a way to proceed with their duties while SDs enter backstage areas, place orders after hours, and make special food and drink requests. A Special Diner named Mark, a Jewish man in his midforties who manages a Hollywood production company, proudly explained to me that his standard breakfast meal was so specific that Wally and Chef Morgan had decided to create a special button in the POS system just for him (“Mark’s Scramble”). I learned to place this order as soon as I saw Mark walk in the front door in the morning. Another SD is notorious among servers for arriving at the restaurant right at last call, and sometimes later. He knows that managers will never turn down his request for a multicourse meal. The production of personalized service for an elite clientele influences the intangible requirements for employment at The Neighborhood in several ways. First, as a way to cater to SDs, managers offer part-time jobs to their teenage sons and daughters who are looking for summer work. Three of the four hosts working at The Neighborhood in July of 2016 grew up a short distance from the restaurant, and in families who frequently dined there. One such employee, a twenty-one-year-old white woman with blonde hair, told me she has fond memories of eating at The Neighborhood on a weekly basis with her father. Another employee, the nineteen-year-old son of a banking executive and current SD, works three days a week as a barista at the adjacent bakery (owned by the same company). Hiring the children of wealthy diners to part-time jobs is an ingenious way that managers facilitate the brand of personalized service at The Neighborhood while maintaining strong ties—literally—to its core patrons. Even the occasional comped meal does not achieve the same sense of loyalty as an open-arms invitation for employment for their son or daughter. Second, because managers closely monitor that front-of-the-house workers exhibit unwavering friendliness and flexibility towards guests, this acts as an employment requirement that can supersede other implicit racial and classed job requirements. Being accommodating towards diners means handling both everyday service and disruptive events with equal aplomb. For example, a young, college-educated white man named Derek found himself in jeopardy of losing his server job after several guests complained about him being “cold” towards them. Two weeks later, when an SD critiqued Derek’s “attitude” by mention-

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ing something to Courtney on her way out, Courtney fired Derek on the spot. Despite looking the part, Derek could not enact the emotional labor of personalized service to management’s standards. By contrast, several longstanding front-of-the-house workers at The Neighborhood come from a range of social backgrounds.39 This is particular true of the daytime service staff: out of the fifteen servers and bartenders working breakfast and lunch during the summer of 2016, six were people of color, including two black men, one immigrant Mexican man, two Mexican American women, and one Filipina American woman. A server named Sally is particularly well loved among the restaurant’s SD guests; management lets her enjoy her pick of the best shifts each week. Raised by working-class parents, Sally is a twenty-sevenyear-old, third-generation Mexican American with a high school education. She previously split time working at two family-style restaurant chains before getting hired at The Neighborhood in 2015. Sally treats every guest in her section to her big personality and uncanny ability to remember customer details. She frequently renames diners “honey,” while showering their kids with extra affection. When an SD walks in, Sally often pre-orders their preferred meal with the kitchen, then proceeds to greet them affectionately. While race- and class-based exclusivity in the front of the house is less prominent under The Neighborhood’s personalized service brand, management still leans heavily on “brown-collar” labor to fill back-ofthe-house and support jobs. Under the watchful eye of the restaurant’s white male chefs, the vast majority of line cooks, prep cooks, dishwashers, bussers, food runners, and cleaners are first- and second-generation Latino men. Maintaining personalized service requires considerable time, resources, and, most importantly, cheap labor, behind the scenes. While some of these workers are able to advance to better jobs either by crossing race and class lines or through promotions within this “browncollar” world of work (I examine these cases in chapter 5), many do not, finding themselves greasing the wheels of an operation that looks luxurious only from the dining room. *** The strategic management of upscale service reinforces social and structural inequalities between workers. Managers draw on divergent

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sociocultural ideals to make hiring decisions for jobs that offer unequal pay and visibility, then institute supervisory practices based on assumptions of who will fill these jobs. Highly tipped customer-facing positions “should”—to borrow Courtney’s earlier language—be reserved for whites, particularly those who are young and embody class-privileged traits. Meanwhile, labor-intensive back-of-the-house jobs—those offering low wages and difficult work conditions—are earmarked as “brown-collar” jobs fit for immigrant Mexican and Central American men. This gatekeeping process, aided by recruitment networks of employees themselves, segregates the workplace into hierarchical worlds of work. Management’s efforts to produce specific service brands nuance the hiring practices, training routines, and customer dynamics within each operation. Service brands capture important variation in the way managers seek to organize higher-end service. Sally, the popular daytime server at The Neighborhood and one of the few Latina/os on the frontof-the-house staff, epitomizes the restaurant’s brand of personalized service. Sally would not, however, fit in at Match Restaurant, where the logic of proximal service leads managers to screen front-of-the-house employees more stringently for traits of whiteness and upper-middleclassness. Nor does Sally meet Terroir’s professional ideal for front-ofthe-house workers, which prioritizes fine-dining skills and knowledge of upper-crust European food and drink. Because of these standards, managers at Terroir favor hiring industry veterans in the dining room, just as they favor skilled kitchen talent in the back of the house. Compared to the other two restaurants in this study, managers at Terroir view lowerranked workers as apprentices rather than members of a permanent worker underclass: server assistants are encouraged to build their skills in order to become servers; stages cycle through the kitchen learning directly from the head chef (although they are unpaid). Despite this, racialized and classed employment norms remain stubborn impediments for workers at Terroir seeking to move from the back to the front of the house, or into management.40 Workers are encouraged to improve their service or cooking techniques, but only those who couple these learned techniques with other ascribed traits that managers expect for upscale service will be rewarded for doing so. Management’s careful production of upscale service lays the foundation for the unequal labor conditions that workers face, but managers

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cannot dictate what these daily conditions feel like in the trenches of a fast-paced and highly interactive work environment. Beyond the watchful eye of floor supervisors and chefs, what I have described as the “front door” to inequality, much of what workers experience day to day on the job exacerbates, rather than mends, cleavages between fellow workers. Gaining a richer understanding of the way social inequality crystallizes within mundane service settings such as restaurants requires analyzing how workers themselves interact.

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The wood-grilled pork chop topped with bitter micro-greens at Match; the wild Hamachi crudo dusted with yuzu pepper at Terroir; the Moroccan lamb shank on The Neighborhood’s winter menu, simmered in a tajine and laced with aromatic spices. Each of these culinary masterpieces appears in front of guests at the restaurant perfectly cooked, seasoned, and plated. They leave diners swooning for days, if Yelp reviews and glossy Instagram posts are any indicator. But before any of these dishes ever makes its way into the dining room, it must undergo an extensive coordination of materials and labor behind the scenes. Along the assembly line of restaurant food service, workers in the back and front of the house must link together dozens of small tasks along an arc of labor at precisely the right moment, and repeat this chain of minievents hundreds if not thousands of times every day.1 Of this process, restaurant critic Steven A. Shaw has written, “To me, it’s more remarkable than sending a man to the moon.”2 But at Match, Terroir, and The Neighborhood, the systematic differences between workers directly threaten this process. In the last chapter, I showed how management orchestrates the social segregation of restaurant labor by race, class, and gender. Chefs and dining room supervisors draw on embodied ideals to make hiring decisions for front-of-thehouse and back-of-the-house jobs, then reinforce these standards in the workplace through supervisory practices. As a result, class-privileged, white men and women occupy different types of restaurant jobs than working-class Latino men. Thus, while the labor process within restaurants requires these individuals to coordinate their actions on a daily basis, they do so across divided lines. Behind the scenes, they are worlds apart. The compounded distinction between workers affects the way individual workers approach their jobs, their interactions with coworkers, and, ultimately, their relationships with each other. Each of these fac53

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tors makes crossing group boundaries all the more challenging, particularly for Latino men stuck in low-wage, invisible jobs. By going deeper within the workplace, this chapter explains how workers separated by social and organizational characteristics end up reinforcing social inequality through their everyday relations.3 Workers come to think of themselves as belonging to two different worlds of work. They evoke symbolic boundaries against one another that pull from their unequal backgrounds as well as structurally different job conditions. Many of these points of contention are on full display to workers, if not necessarily to customers. By enacting group boundaries along lines of race, class, and gender, workers make it increasingly difficult for those in the front and back of the house to coordinate their actions, much less relate to one another. This chapter explains how those who eloquently describe the yuzu-spiced wild Hamachi entrée to diners come to see themselves as different kinds of people from those who skillfully assemble the same dish a dozen feet away.

Doing Restaurant Jobs Differently Class-privileged, white men and women and working-class, Latino men approach the jobs they do in restaurants in distinct ways and using nonoverlapping skill sets. As a result, each has only a rudimentary understanding of what the other does on a daily basis. This can in turn exacerbate their sense of disconnection from one another. Servers and bartenders take pride in their ability to treat guests right. “I like to keep in mind that if I’m looking out for the customer—you know, doing the whole ‘customer is always right’ thing—then my answer to them should never be ‘no,’” Charlie explains. “So, like, I’m basically here to make people’s dreams come true.” For Charlie, providing hospitality means focusing his attention on immaterial forms of labor. It means orienting fully towards the needs of those seated in the dining room, no matter the strain this puts on other workers. His server colleague, a twenty-seven-year-old white woman named Melanie, agrees. “You can teach a monkey to wait tables or make a latte,” she explains. “But a monkey can’t do what I do.” Melanie knows all her regulars’ names. She engages in extended conversations with them in the dining room that—to my amazement—seem to always pick up

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where they left off every time she sees that guest again. With her purplehighlighted hair and black-and-white flannel shirt over fitted jeans, several restaurant regulars, mostly men, told me that they come to Match to see her, and sit in her section. “Being good at this job has nothing to do with food or drink,” Melanie says, flashing a knowing smile. Doing customer service at Match, Terroir, and The Neighborhood also requires a certain kind of preparation. Sally, a slender twenty-six-yearold white woman, says she spends an hour doing her hair and makeup before every shift. She likes to switch up her personal style on a weekly basis. “We are supposed to look good, aren’t we?” she told me after I marveled at yet another new outfit that she arrived to work wearing. Workers also use makeshift strategies to maintain their look on the go. One male server likes to duck into the bathroom every hour to readjust his gelled hair (I found this out by accidentally bumping into him in the bathroom while on break). “You never know who you are going to meet when you are out there,” he explained to me, looking a bit sheepish. Another uses the reflective metal surface on the side of the espresso machine at The Neighborhood as a makeup mirror. Crouching down eye-level with the portafilter, she touches up her lipstick and blush before heading out to greet new customers. Front-of-the-house workers realize that they are on stage for a rotating audience of diners, and that continued success in this environment requires them to use their personality and physical appearance to do their job, not just write down orders and carry plates.4 As a result, servers and bartenders focus much of their energy on ensuring that guests have a good time, and grumble when they must concern themselves with tasks away from guests, such as rolling napkins and refilling ketchup containers. Attending to diners has a temporal dimension: it requires workers to be ready to respond when necessary. This is not the same thing as requiring workers to be actively interacting with customers every second of their shift: It is Saturday brunch at Match, and most of the tables in the main dining room are filled. Just inside the front door, three of my server colleagues, Charlie, Allison, and Melanie, stand around a touch screen computer console looking on. I overhear them chatting about last night’s indie rock concert at The Bunker: the band’s drummer is a part-time barista at

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Match and had invited the (front-of-the-house) staff to the show. Melanie and Allison periodically glance over their shoulders as if they have a nervous tic as they continue to talk. Charlie, who has been assigned an enviable section of four-top tables along a plush leather banquette—the “high roller” section—suddenly puts a hand on Allison’s shoulder and squeezes. “Hold that thought,” he says. I watch as he strides away towards a group of diners.

Charlie, Allison, and Melanie know that customer service varies moment by moment, table by table. While the off-topic conversation that these servers—all of whom are young, white, recent college graduates—are engaging in may be frowned upon by management, they are unlikely to get in trouble unless diners in their sections complain of bad service. To back-of-the-house and support workers, what servers and bartenders do on a daily basis at the restaurant does not look like work—at least not hard work, and certainly not manly work. Victor, Arnulfo, and Tony each take pride in their ability to hustle around the restaurant floor doing physical tasks. As bussers and food runners, these Latino men do not “shoot the shit and stand around,” as Victor once described Melanie’s daily work ethic to me. Instead, they transport large numbers of plates and glasses wedged between their fingers (or sometimes with the assistance of a small black tray), shuttling them from the kitchen out to the dining room, then back again to the dishwashing pit. Victor, a twentyone-year-old Mexican American born in south Los Angeles, bragged that he recently figured out how to carry four large entrée plates at once. “When I first started, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing,” Victor explained. “I used to carry plates all wrong. [mimics a wobbling plate in each hand] I kept dropping shit too. Eventually, I got it down.” If the nuanced skills of food running and bussing tables go hand in hand with experience, Tony and Arnulfo are seasoned professionals by now. For the last twenty years, each has worked at countless high-end restaurants in the city, rotating between support and back-of-the-house jobs. Tony takes pride in the ability to clear away all dishes from a table in one visit, stacking them on one arm while using his free hand to wipe the table clean with a wet sanitized rag. Arnulfo resets tables faster than anyone at Match, including his white server and manager colleagues. Wearing a simple black polo shirt, dark jeans, and black shoes with non-

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stick soles, he silently moves in after diners get up out of their seats. Less than a minute later, the table comes out looking brand new. Compared to front-of-the-house workers, support workers are far less concerned about tailoring their actions and behaviors in the dining room to please guests.5 Their contact with guests is often brief and wordless, their presence at the table discreet. Many of the foreign-born and secondgeneration Latino men employed as bussers and food runners say they prefer it this way. Victor, for instance, has learned to approach diners with a half-smile and a quick “hello” as he drops off plates of food. He does not linger to chat. “When they [customers] ask me a question, I just nod and say, ‘let me get your server.’” Another busser told me that even though he can understand English, he sometimes prefers to act as though he does not in order to make his job simpler. Tony and Arnulfo, too, prefer to work in near silence when on the dining room floor (save for an occasional “excuse me” or “thank you”). Theirs is a skill set of stealth and quickness. One of the diners seated in my section told me he was genuinely shocked to find a brand-new place setting—fork, knife, plate, and napkin—in front of him when he finally paused his conversation with his tablemate. This diner never noticed the worker responsible for resetting his table; I imagine that Arnulfo, who was the busser for my section of tables that day, would have beamed with pride upon hearing this. By official job description, front-of-the-house workers are instructed to share in the task of dining room upkeep with bussers and food runners (or “assistants,” as Terroir calls them). Collectively, all of these workers are responsible for ensuring that guest areas remain clean and orderly while the restaurant is open. Yet because servers often choose to prioritize talking with, or simply monitoring, their seated customers, members of the support staff are left to complete all other service tasks in the dining room, most of which are monotonous or relatively physically demanding (e.g., sweeping under tables, polishing silverware). This discrepancy is a sore subject between servers and support workers that can compound their sense of group distinction. “That’s what they are there for, right?” one server—a white woman—remarked to me casually about the two Latino male bussers working that day. “Do they think that the restaurant just cleans itself when they want to go hang out with a table?” countered a food runner on another shift, raising his hands in the air with his palms facing up.

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To support workers, there are always more water glasses to refill, plates to bus, tables to mark with silverware, food to drop off, fallen napkins to pick up and replace. And the burden of this ongoing dining room upkeep falls unfairly on them. When I asked Arnulfo about this one afternoon, he sighed and shook his head. “I don’t know how come they don’t work sometimes,” he told me under his breath, eyeing Melanie as she checked her cell phone while crouching below a wooden partition, out of customer view. “They never get in trouble [for doing so] either.” Arnulfo has a point: as mentioned in the last chapter, dining room managers grant white servers and bartenders considerable latitude to perform customer service, and do not extend these supervisory methods to the all-Latino kitchen and support staff. If immigrant and second-generation Latino support workers remain quiet in the dining room when surrounded by gringo diners and frontof-the-house coworkers, they are considerably more vocal when interacting with their colleagues in the kitchen. At The Neighborhood, Rafael and Geraldo, two immigrant Latino men who work as a food runner and cook, respectively, like to chat at the kitchen pass (which separates the kitchen from the dining room). They communicate using a mixture of thick industry jargon mixed with Spanish: “¡Manos por favor [hands please]!” cries Geraldo, as he sprinkles fried rosemary and sea salt over an order of crispy chickpea fritters. “¡Sí, chef!” says Rafael. “Fritters, para la mesa veinte y tres, asiento tres, cuatro [for table 33, seats 3 and 4]. Gracias,” says Geraldo, pointing at the dish. Rafael swiftly grabs the plate of chickpea fritters. He pauses for comedic drama, staring at it. “This looks ugly, güey [dude],” Rafael says in deadpan, aware that I am looking on. Geraldo shakes his head and chuckles. He swears under his breath, watching Rafael head off into the dining room carrying the plate. Afterwards, Rafael returns to the kitchen pass, where he and Geraldo talk about last night’s Mexican League football game on TV.

In past restaurants, Rafael has worked extensively in the kitchen. He understands what cooks go through. If Rafael, Tony, and Arnulfo are frequently frustrated by what their white front-of-the-house colleagues

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are saying and doing (or not doing) at work, their sentiments towards their fellow Latino and male back-of-the-house counterparts are much more congenial. In the back of the house, the jobs that workers do are systematically disconnected from the dining room operation. Cooking on a hot grill, prepping at a side station, or cleaning back kitchen floors, these individuals operate behind the scenes. Back-of-the-house workers focus their attention on crafting material goods instead of immaterial service. This structures their jobs very differently. The daily workflow of cooks—the hours, tasks, and social interactions—adheres to the requirements of food production rather than the whims of guests.6 Whereas front-of-the-house and support shifts are typically between four and seven hours in length, depending on the shift and restaurant policies, no back-of-the-house shift is less than seven hours at any of the three restaurants in this study. This is the case because daily food preparation in an upscale kitchen operation is constant. Workers make soup stocks, mix sauces, marinate meats, and dice vegetables regardless of the expected number of guests for that day (known as the “cover count”). Consequently, cooks and dishwashers work on a fixed routine, and are less likely to be “cut” early from their shifts compared to front-of-the-house workers. Each day, a team of cooks sets to work well before the restaurant opens, and a different team of cooks will linger well after closing. At Terroir, for instance, the morning baker arrives at 5:00 a.m. every day to begin kneading the croissant dough by hand. He works alone, placing three-inch-long football shapes onto baking sheets while humming to fill the vacuous silence in the restaurant. The next employee to arrive comes a full two hours later: a prep cook who cuts fresh vegetables and peels potatoes with headphones in his ears and a Starbucks coffee by his side. By 11:00 a.m., the baker takes his thirty-minute break—six hours into his shift. If he is lucky, he will leave by 2:00 p.m., waiting for all guests to exit the restaurant before cleaning his kitchen station, passing on notes to the “swing shift” cooks, and going home. By contrast, no front-of-the-house employee will arrive to set up until an hour before the restaurant opens for lunch at 11:30 a.m. Most will leave before any of the morning cooks clock out for the day. At The Neighborhood, the “p.m.” line cooks arrive in the early afternoon to begin prepping their mis en place (organized and assembled

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ingredients) for dinner service. They will not begin breaking down their stations until after last call, at 9:30 p.m. Additionally, two assigned line cooks prepare soup stock in large metal vats after the restaurant closes, allowing it to simmer overnight. By contrast, servers and bartenders who work the same dinner shift arrive at 3:45 p.m.—the earliest of all three restaurants—and can expect to be “cut” as soon as there are no more diners in their sections. The divergent schedules of employees in the front and back of the house accentuate their lack of understanding about what the other is doing at any given moment. In my first few weeks working at Terroir, I, too, fell victim to this occupational myopia, as described in my field notes from a Thursday dinner service: I arrive at the restaurant at 4:30 p.m. to set up for dinner service, which begins an hour later. The night starts quickly. By 6:30 p.m., seven groups of guests are sat in my section, mostly two-tops and four-tops. The next two hours pass in a blur as I rotate between taking orders, pouring wine, explaining dishes, refilling water, and marking tables for the next course. It is over just as quickly. By 7:00 p.m., I fire [order] my last table’s main courses; no new groups are seated in my section. By 8:30 p.m., my guests are finishing desserts, closing bills, and clearing out. I head to the bar area to talk with Brady and Chuck [bartenders], who are casually polishing glassware, looking bored. Half an hour later, the manager on duty sends me home. A very smooth night. When I round the corner to the kitchen to say goodbye, I am surprised by the commotion. I figured everyone would be going home early. No. A New York steak sizzles in the upper right corner of the grill, half-done, the dessert station remains set up, and the dishwashing station is backlogged with a stack of dirty dishes next to the large, industrial sink. I sheepishly wave goodbye to Shawn [dishwasher] and turn to leave.

Four and a half hours after my serving shift began, I was on my way back out the door. Having concentrated on my narrow set of server duties, I was unaware that Shawn, a black man in his late twenties, was still waiting for the remaining plates, utensils, and glasses to be cleared from the dining room, and the dirty pans to arrive from the kitchen. I was also unaware that he had clocked in at 2:00 p.m., as I later found out he

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always does. “I need all the hours I can get here,” Shawn told me, never making eye contact. Given that Shawn has never worked in the front of the house, he was probably confused as to why I, as a server, did not seem to have a problem being sent home so early. Even if front-of-the-house and back-of-the-house workers were to spend the same number of hours at the restaurant, these hours would not feel the same, for the latter’s shift involves far more physically taxing labor. As several Latino cooks and cooks-turned-bussers explained to me, working in the kitchen requires strength (lifting pots), dexterity (knife skills), and the stamina to withstand the sweltering heat. Backof-the-house workers do their daily jobs while hunched over saucepans and cutting boards, operating deep fryers that splatter hot oil, and loading trays of ceramic dishes and metal pans into machines filled with chemical cleaners. Any sudden reduction in staffing can put the entire back-of-the-house team into a brutal head-spin of physical labor that will not cease until another worker is hired. During the winter of 2016, the kitchen staff at Terroir was already operating one worker short when a line cook abruptly quit. This left two cooks, along with the head chef and the baker, responsible for all meal services at the restaurant (lunch and dinner, seven days a week). For three weeks, each of the two cooks, both Latino men, averaged fourteen-hour days. During their one-hour break between lunch and dinner service at the restaurant, they would fall fast asleep on the banquette, drawing down the shades to the front sidewalk for privacy. While the front-of-the-house staff can also get short-handed, from my experience, this occasion is not nearly so severe since shifts are relatively short and most workers do not average more than thirty hours of work a week on a typical schedule. The unequal way workers get paid also highlights the ways in which front- and back-of-the-house workers approach their structurally unequal jobs. Because of tips, front-of-the-house workers (and to a lesser extent, support workers) not only earn more money than their kitchen colleagues; they also hold conflicting sets of labor motivations in the workplace. As sociologist Gary Fine notes, “Customers demand prompt service, forcing servers to pressure cooks. Cooks resent these demands in that they do not benefit from this pressure; servers do [through tips]—shaping their distinct monetary perspectives.”7 Servers and bartenders are motivated to maximize their tips, not their labor hours. For

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them, not all hours spent at the restaurant are worth the same, and the value of any one hour depends heavily on customer traffic.8 Meanwhile, cooks and dishwashers who do not make tips are motivated to work more hours and longer shifts, while pacing their level of output. Margaret, a thirty-one-year-old white server at The Neighborhood, explains her attitude towards her job: “I want to get in, run around like crazy for a few hours, make my tips, then get the fuck out.” She would rather not come in should customer traffic be slow, the front of the house overstaffed, or the kitchen severely understaffed (potentially causing nightmarish service disruptions). Each scenario compromises her ability to make tips easily and by the fistful.9 By contrast, most wage-earning cooks have incentive to stay clocked in, especially if the possibility of overtime pay presents itself. For example, Jorge, a second-generation Mexican American man, says he tries to find small tasks to do in the kitchen in order to exceed eight hours of work. Several other cooks collaborate on schemes to stay clocked in as long as possible without the head chef, or any other manager on duty, catching wind of their inflated labor hours.10 Both Jorge and Margaret circulate their respective work strategies among their immediate cohort of workers and no further. While these individual labor strategies—to make work life slightly easier, or more profitable—can be seen as an effort to resist managerial strictures, they can also cause friction with other groups of workers. Jorge sums up how the actions of a server can frustrate his plans in the kitchen. “By last call at lunch, I figure I still got four, maybe five hours left,” he says, explaining to me how he tries to pace himself for a long workday. “So don’t go telling me to put a rush on your order of salmon. Get outta here with that.”

Exacerbating Workplace Tensions The ways in which workers approach their unequal jobs in restaurants can produce interpersonal tension between them along well-trod occupational fault lines. In the process, workers attribute personal flaws to their coworkers instead of pointing to structural impediments within the workplace. One common source of conflict stems from the way workers handle a complicated food order. A food order with many

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modifications, or allergy considerations, may require a server to communicate directly with the kitchen. While this is standard protocol, both front- and back-of-the-house workers view it as an unwelcome hassle. On a slow Thursday night shift at Terroir, I watched a server approach Chef Jeremy in the kitchen pass to ask whether he could substitute grilled chicken breast for the sea bass entrée (the sides and plating could stay the same). Chef Jeremy’s eyes turned to darts. All of us servers were aware that Chef loathed making revisions to his menu dishes— inquiring about replacement items or substitutions was risky, even if done on behalf of a guest. “Would YOU scribble all over a painting hanging in a gallery?” Chef Jeremy stated with mock curiosity. “I don’t think so. So why are you trying to do that to my food??” The server left the kitchen quickly, his face white. “I’m not going back there again if I have to deal with that asshole,” he said to a group of servers and server assistants clustered near the bar. Chef Jeremy’s explosive reactions to what he liked to call “stupid questions” are notorious among the front-of-the-house staff at Terroir. I found this out one night first-hand: It is Friday evening at 7:00 p.m., the lights are dimmed, and the dining room is already more than half full. I am taking food orders from a middle-aged couple. The man points to the menu and explains to me, “I’d like to try the lamb entrée, but without the sauce—that sounds too heavy, and I have an onion allergy. Do you think you can do the lamb just with some potatoes on the side, olive oil, and no salt?” The revisions seem simple enough to execute, and obviously reflect dietary restrictions. I enter the entrée orders into the POS [point of sale], noting the revisions carefully, and send the ticket to the kitchen. I know Chef is not going to like the idea. Seconds pass. “WHICH FREAKIN’ SERVER IS THIS?” Chef Jeremy yells from the kitchen. Afraid customers can hear him bellowing, I begin moving towards the kitchen pass. “This is going to taste like crap! You know we don’t do this!” he shouts. I start to explain to him that it is related to a guest allergy but think better of it. There is no winning this argument. “I’m sorry, Chef—” I begin.

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“If the table doesn’t like this dish, we are going to have a problem,” he glares, insinuating that I might have to pay for the thirty-six-dollar entrée dish if the customer sends it back.

To be sure, many chefs are resistant to altering menu items no matter who makes the request. As the heads of the kitchen hierarchy who set the tone for all cooks to follow, chefs are responsible for ensuring that dishes are consistently made to their standards. But at Terroir, the violent and sarcastic responses from the head chef towards servers have become common practice among other line cooks that have taken after him. As a result, servers and bartenders try to avoid direct contact with their back-of-the-house colleagues at all costs. They input food orders using the electronic POS, punch in detailed notes to ensure accuracy, and hope they are not called on for any further clarifications. They turn to their fellow servers and bartenders to help them cope with the stress of a potential behind-the-scenes showdown with the kitchen.11 While self-imposed estrangement between workers takes the most extreme form at Terroir, few servers and bartenders at Match or The Neighborhood seek out contact with members of the back of the house if they can avoid it. The cumulative points of difference between what front- and back-ofthe-house workers do causes them to make character assumptions about the other that draw directly from these differences. Rather than seeing themselves as unified coworkers vis-à-vis whiny customers or exploitative managers, workers expound negative generalizations about those “on the other side.” Rodrigo and Juan, two second-generation Latino cooks in their twenties, have an unobstructed view of the front-of-thehouse staging area where servers often congregate. For Rodrigo, seeing his front-of-the-house colleagues “standing there doing nothing” affirms his frustration about them as a group: It’s weird. I mean, I want to say that I like the front of the house. I want to say that. But that would be a really big lie. I mean at first, when I got put on the line, I didn’t think too much about it. Like, okay, they are doing their job: take orders, ring tickets, and we do ours, we cook it. As time went on, you see how some of the servers, they make these really random requests. . . . It’s like, they’ll ring in something really specific when we are

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already really busy. And I have to leave for the other [prep area] to grab it, and when I come back I’m even more in the shit than before. So I’m like . . . uh, Jeremy [server] will ring in these stupid-ass mods [modifications to the dishes]. And then at the same time, he will be just kind of standing there, this goes for Jeremy and Loraine [another server], they’ll both be there chilling, talking . . . right in front of us. They’ll pull out their phones, check messages or whatever. And I’m like, what the fuck, I’m getting yelled at, and this fucker makes more money than me? So I’m just like, what the fuck?

Rodrigo views his white coworkers in the front of the house as lazy, undisciplined, and wholly undeserving of the money they make. He bases this judgment on what he sees every day in the workplace. While Rodrigo juggles three sauté pans at once, “they” stand around idle, make annoying requests of the kitchen, and complain incessantly about bad tips.12 Crucially, Rodrigo does not know any servers or bartenders personally who might be able to offer him perspective on the issue. Instead, his sense of “us” and “them”—with strong racial undertones—increases. Criticism of coworkers, of course, runs both ways. “Has he—or any of them—actually done this work?” Margaret asked me one day after a particularly stressful dinner shift in which a cook yelled at her to move faster. I couldn’t tell which Latino cook she was referring to, so I asked her to clarify. “Exactly,” she replied. “They don’t know what it takes. So if you are going to give me shit, you are just getting in the way of me doing my job.”

Tip Disputes The distribution of cash tips is a daily reminder of the economic inequality separating restaurant workers. The mere mention of tips can lay bare the social fault lines between those who operate in each world of work. While each restaurant has its own practices for “tipping out” employees, tips at all three restaurants mainly go to servers and bartenders, trickle down to the support staff, and stop short of the kitchen.13 As a result, tips stoke social tensions between workers who occupy these unequal capacities and inevitably feel they deserve a larger share of gratuities.

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Because of tips, workers are unequally rewarded for the same busy day of labor at the restaurant. The following field note takes place at the end of a hectic Sunday brunch at Match: I was happy that service for all my tables went smoothly today. Diners in my section also tipped well, averaging over twenty percent of each bill. Before leaving, I duck into the kitchen to crack a joke with Xeno and Juan and thank them for doing a good job on the line. I had received no customer complaints and lots of compliments on the food. Xeno, looking weary after nine-plus hours of hard cooking, turns to me and says, “It was really busy today, yeah? You guys must have made a lot of money in tips. Like, what, two hundred dollars maybe?” “Yeah, we did okay,” I say, thrown by the line of inquiry. We both stare off towards the dining room. “But not two hundred . . .” I protest. “How much you made then?” he interrupts, staring at me and looking more tired. “Uhhh, we don’t make that much money here . . . ,” I stammer. Xeno grunts and walks away without a word.

If Xeno already considers his white front-of-the-house coworkers to be, categorically, lazy gringos, the fact that the latter consistently go home with cash tips while he must wait for meager biweekly paychecks is utterly unjustifiable. It is a daily reminder of economic inequality between people like himself and people like them (me, in the above example) that is never buried far from the surface. Rodrigo, the cook described earlier, voices similar frustration: Rodrigo: Every now and then—well I guess it’s more like every time I see them [servers] counting their tips—I see those bigass wads. . . . It’s like . . . [pause] When I get my check? I have to immediately separate seven hundred dollars from my check, which goes into rent, bills, car payment. And it’s like, fuck, I only have three or four hundred dollars more to make last two weeks. Which is virtually impossible. It’s hard to save money, you know? . . . And when I see them get their checks, it’s like, cool, I like getting my check. But I don’t go all, “Oh look how much I got!” EW: You hear some of them say that?

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R: Yeah! And when I hear that, I’m like . . . I’m getting paid this much and this asshole is getting paid that much? And all they are doing is ringing in a fucking ticket, walking to the table. . . . I’m just like, Something. Is. Not. Right. [laughs, shakes his head] Something is definitely not right!

Rodrigo and many of his kitchen colleagues are critical of the earning disparity between themselves and white servers and bartenders (“something is definitely not right!”). Yet few are willing to risk losing their jobs by contesting the distribution of tips at the restaurant, or the racialized nature of tip earnings. By contrast, before I arrived at The Neighborhood, several hosts, all of whom were young, white, collegeeducated women, had allegedly complained to management about their low “tip-out” percentages, and how they deserved more. In response, management increased the proportion of tips given to hosts by 50 percent. Meanwhile, the tip-out rate for bussers and food runners remained unchanged. In the face of economic disparity relative to their well-tipped white coworkers, many Latino back-of-the-house workers learn to live with this tension and make the best of the circumstance. A cook named Andrew, a second-generation Mexican American, explains how he justifies his low earnings: “Cooking is a labor of love. We don’t get paid much, but it’s not all about the money. Plus I make enough to live. So I’m good.” Andrew’s statement may be earnest, but I find it hard to believe. For months, Andrew worked with one of his glasses lenses smudged and broken; he did not have the funds to repair it. When I would invite Andrew out to join a group of servers and bartenders for drinks after our shift, he would look away when my colleagues would bring out their wads of cash tips to pay for a round of beers. The son of a Guatemalan woman and an African American man, Andrew is making “enough to live” only if his reference group is the Latino cooks making low wages whom he works alongside. Others take a more proactive approach, choosing to leave the kitchen for support jobs where they can make some tips. Both Tony and Rafael, described earlier, traded years of experience as line cooks to work as bussers and food runners. While they remain employed in types of restaurant jobs that are racialized as brown-collar work, both men say

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they now make comparably higher earnings, have shorter work hours, and perform less taxing labor duties. “I tell all my friends in the kitchen to come join me out here,” Tony says. “Some of them have. The rest . . . I don’t know why they still do it [cook].” Tensions over the distribution of tips can also result in interpersonal conflict, though this outcome is admittedly rare. Of the few times I heard a coworker voice incendiary comments about tips to another coworker, it was initiated either by someone new to the restaurant industry (and seeing inequalities afresh), or someone whose social characteristics matched the white, class-privileged individuals hired in the front of the house: Eric [second-generation Latino] and Tim [white] are cleaning the grill in the kitchen as I walk up to them towards the end of a busy Saturday night. Tim pauses, eyeing me sideways, and says, “Oh, so looks like you guys are singing a different tune now that you’ve made a lot of money tonight.” His voice is thick with sarcasm. “Huh?” I say, feigning shock. “What do you mean?” “Before the shift, you people were complaining about being tired or whatever, but now everyone is bouncing around, happier ’cause that you’ve made good tips!” He shakes his head. Eric nods “mm-hmmm” and smiles sheepishly. He resumes cleaning. “Well . . . . where’s my tip, huh? Huh?!” Tim adds, smirking.

Tim, one of the few line cooks with a culinary school degree, vocalizes the elephant-in-the-room issue of tips. It was one of the few times I heard a cook do so directly to a member of the front of the house. In this case, Tim’s race- and class-privileged characteristics probably empowered him to stand up to issues of inequality within the workplace (recall that the hosts described above were similarly white and well educated). Tim’s blunt protest, however sarcastic, also stands out amid the hushed silence and icy glares that more often characterize Latino back-of-thehouse workers’ reactions to the cash sums they are well aware of but do not receive personally.14 Eric’s actions in the scene above—silently agreeing with Tim while continuing to do his job—illustrates the bind that many Latino cooks feel with respect to disparities in wages and job conditions vis-à-vis their white coworkers.

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Service Disruptions The compounded cleavages between workers who see themselves as distinct groups threatens the flow of service. Few Latino cooks or white servers have the capacity to buffer social relations across the divide, and instead operate within bounded spheres of work. In this organizational climate, even minor errors and mistakes can spiral into bigger crises behind the scenes. And workers who are not given a chance to see eye to eye with each other due to systemic hiring biases end up exacerbating the problem themselves. In an extract from my field notes, I recount the aftermath of a particularly chaotic lunch service at Match, where two groups of diners got up and left in frustration because entrées were taking over thirty minutes to reach tables and multiple menu items were “86’d” (industry-speak for gone out of stock) at once: Xeno explained what happened from the kitchen’s perspective. Someone had ordered several dishes during the heart of the lunch rush that had been 86’d for hours. This meant that Xeno and the other line cooks had to inform a manager to help track down whoever ordered the food ticket. (Jerry and Moore had their names listed at the top of two of the problematic food tickets, but Xeno did not know who they were.) Xeno had to wait for the servers to ring in new replacement items for that table. In the meantime, the kitchen paused everything else coming out for that table (to ensure that all entrées arrived at the same time). This caused a plate of nachos to go cold and be trashed, and the roasted chicken had to be deplated and put back in the oven to keep warm. Meanwhile, “the skinny girl with the red hair” (Samantha) was selling the same two entrées that required the most labor-intensive preparation for the kitchen. These dishes, when ordered back to back, always bottleneck the kitchen, and delays in ticket times start to mount for all other tickets. Jerry’s take on the chaos was very different. “Geez, Eli, it’s like all of them [the Latino cooks] went out partying last night and were hungover this morning! Why was it taking so damn long in the kitchen today?!”

On one level, the profound disconnect between workers instigates service issues between those in the kitchen and those in the dining room.

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Xeno, for instance, still cannot believe how incompetent the gringos in the front of the house are. “Why didn’t that guy know not to order items we are out of? And why does the red-haired girl keep ordering only one item?” he asked, voice rising. Then, seeming to remember that I too was a server, he added, “Not you, Leche. You’re good. You ask first. But the rest? Ahh.” But servers in the dining room are equally baffled as to why the kitchen ever gets that backed up. To them, a cook’s job is simple: make the food on the ticket and leave the front of the house to deal with the complexity of customers. Jerry, Moore, and Samantha, three of the servers at Match that fateful day, have no work experience in the kitchen between them. They do not speak passable Spanish, the de facto language of the kitchen, nor do they know the names of the cooks who plate their orders on a typical lunch shift. This asymmetry transforms small misunderstandings into character judgments and negative stereotypes of the out-group. While Jerry is left to speculate about what caused the delay (“it’s like all of them went out partying last night and are hungover”), Samantha was near tears from the emotional strain it took to placate her frustrated customers and looking for someone to blame. But she failed to realize how she may have inadvertently contributed to the problem in the first place: the dishes that Samantha proudly recommends to all guests as her “personal favorites”—they are the most expensive lunch entrées, which boosts her tips—end up selling the most, and can quickly run out during busy lunches. Frayed interpersonal relations between cooks and servers make those on one side unwilling to go out of their way to help the other. While this does not always result in service delays, when it does, it has the effect of distancing the two worlds of work on social grounds. Every afternoon between lunch and dinner service at The Neighborhood, guests are allowed to order from a limited menu of tapas: a cheese board, seasonal olives, duck liver rillettes, and a farmer’s market salad. These items require little prep work, which allows the daytime cooks time to clean up and leave while the nighttime cooks set up their mis en place for dinner service. During this time a restaurant manager is rarely present: Carlton, the sous chef, usually goes out for a smoke behind the restaurant, and the floor manager on duty is in the office taking her lunch break. Servers complain that when they ring in a food ticket, it never gets made

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promptly. On one occasion, Farah, who works this swing shift, got so exasperated at the delay that she leaned over the kitchen pass and yelled, “Hey guys, helloooo? I ordered hummus and olives ten minutes ago!” Her voice was sharp and full of exasperation. “Who’s gonna do it, like today?” None of the Latino cooks responded with any urgency or enthusiasm. I watched as one cook took a full minute (it felt like longer) to wordlessly trudge over to the ticket machine, glance at the order and glare at Farah, then slowly begin assembling the item. He disappeared again to the back kitchen after the order was complete. Farah, fuming, said nothing. If interactions between servers and cooks are already taut due to lack of shared experiences, interpersonal issues that they attribute to race, class, and gender ratchet up these tensions. At Terroir, a white server named Dorothy complained that Carlos and Jorge, two prep cooks from Guatemala, were “talking shit” about her. Dorothy claimed that every time she had to drop off dirty plates at the dishwashing station, these two cooks would be staring at her, murmuring to each other in Spanish (Dorothy does not speak Spanish). When management dragged their feet getting involved, Dorothy took matters into her own hands. She announced loudly that she refused to enter the back kitchen for the rest of the shift because she didn’t feel comfortable being watched and talked about by “those two men.” Her boycott left the rest of the frontof-the-house staff scrambling to help bus Dorothy’s tables and bring dirty dishes to the dishwashing station. Juggling these extra duties, each server and server assistant had less time to attend to guest needs, which in turn irritated the chef on duty and the line cooks because of the delays it caused in running food out to tables. Other worker disputes result in deliberate service disruptions. A food runner named Antonio, who is second-generation Mexican American, told me he was going to “slack off ” on his job duties during brunch service in retaliation for the paltry tip-outs he felt he was receiving from a certain server, who was a white woman. He assured me that his diminished efforts would not be noticeable enough for management to call him out for poor performance, though his server-victim would have to work harder to upkeep her section. That day, I monitored the effects of Antonio’s clandestine attack—the tangible expression of his malcontent with his coworker. Without the same support from Antonio, the server was not able to turn

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her tables nearly as quickly. This caused fewer guests to be seated in her section, and the quality of service to be less crisp than usual: dirty napkins and empty plates were left unattended for minutes on end (a criminal offense in fine dining). When all the servers gathered together to count tips, the victimized server, clearly annoyed, ended up bringing in fewer sales and making fewer tips. Antonio had succeeded in his goal, though at personal cost, since his share of the tips declined proportionately. As workplace issues between immigrant Latino and white workers flare up, they can snowball into bigger issues as workers make attributions about their coworkers that speak to inequities that transcend the workplace.

Our Jobs, Their Jobs Restaurant workers with different positions clearly do not share the same labor conditions, but it is ultimately their social and cultural differences that infuse the worlds of work they operate within with divergent norms, values, and approaches. Behind the scenes, workers belong to one world of work or the other. George and Erin, who are servers, and Victor and Juan, who are support workers, spend every weekend brunch shift together in the dining room at Match. Yet a closer examination of their respective back stories illuminates the different experiences that they bring with them into each world of work. “It was my junior year at [midwestern state school], and I needed a job,” says George. We sit in the break room relaxing over lunch. “I thought working at a sports bar would be fun. I used to go there as a customer anyway—even when I was still underage. It was a big college hangout.” George was initially hired at the sports bar as a food runner. Two months later, management promoted him to waiting tables. “I made pretty good money in tips, especially on Saturday nights. Because I was working weekends, I wasn’t out there spending money at other bars, or on alcohol for house parties. I loved that,” he says with a laugh. “After I graduated college, I wanted to move to LA to see something new and exciting. So I figured, the easiest way to support myself and the move was to look for a serving gig there too,” he says. “But this is just for now, you know? Like, before I get my career going.” George first got hired at Match as a server in the summer of 2012. As a trim,

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twenty-two-year-old white man with sandy blonde hair and a BA in architecture, he found he made friends easily with the men and women on the front-of-the-house staff.

Erin, who is a white woman five years George’s senior, only works weekend brunch shifts nowadays. She is a full-time elementary school counselor during the week, and a recent Master of Social Work graduate from a nearby private university. Erin likes her current work arrangement: being part-time at Match keeps either job from getting redundant. “All my closest friends work here [at Match]—I even helped get some of them their jobs,” she says. “When I show up on the weekends, it feels more like social hour than work. Plus, I get to use what I make in tips as my ‘play’ money.” Victor often finds himself standing next to Erin and George at the kitchen pass while he waits to run food. When the two servers begin talking, Victor instead turns to joke with one of the line cooks in Spanish. Raised in Los Angeles by immigrant parents from El Salvador, Victor fell into restaurant work while in high school. “My first job was at Subway,” Victor says. “My mom worked there, and she helped get me the job. It was okay; I remember making minimum wage.” Victor’s older cousin, who also works at Match, helped get him a job as a busser a few months ago. He describes a tough adjustment in the early days: “At first, I didn’t know anything about restaurants, especially fancier ones. I had barely been to any in my life. But I was making a little bit more money here than I was at Subway, so that was good.” On the other side of the kitchen pass, Juan mans the egg station. It can be a nightmare assignment for even the most experienced cooks if all incoming orders involve different preparations of eggs—fried medium, over easy, boiled hard, scrambled, poached soft. “Cooking eggs, your timing has to be perfect,” Juan explains to me. “It doesn’t stress me out like it used to, but even after years of doing this, you gotta be on your game.” Juan has been doing this for over a decade, and he has his routine down. But none of this is what he intended to do for work; back in Mexico, he was all set to join the military before deciding to join his uncle in Los Angeles. George, Erin, Victor, and Juan each come from very different backgrounds, and were channeled into distinct types of restaurant jobs be-

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cause of these differences. Working in close proximity to one another means that they get to observe how these socioeconomic and cultural inequalities play out in real time. George, Erin, Charlie, and I have just finished rolling silverware. We take turns clocking out on the POS [point of sale] system. It is around 3:00 p.m. on an unusually warm Sunday afternoon. As we walk towards the rear exit, Charlie hoots about his cash tips, and does a playful little jig. “Let’s hit the bars, baby!” cries George. “I say Galley today!” (Yesterday, it was O’Malloy’s Pub.) Glancing in the kitchen, I see Juan and Xeno still hunched over cutting boards. They look at us, expressionless, and continue sharpening their personal knives in preparation for heading off to work the dinner shift at nearby restaurants. The knives give off a hollow, clanging noise. Charlie blithely opens the front door and strides outside; the noise of knives gives way to the sounds of the street.

Erin, George, and Charlie enjoy their restaurant lifestyles both on and off the clock: they go for afternoon drinks at bars, attend music concerts during the week, and think of their serving jobs as part-time gigs (I expand on this in the next chapter). Their privileged approach to working at Match is also highly visible and audible to others around them, which estranges them from their working-class Latino coworkers. Juan, like many cooks, cannot afford to treat his kitchen job with the same nonchalance. Nor can Victor, despite laboring in and out of the dining room and making some tips. Instead, both these Latino men sip on black coffee that the restaurant offers at no charge to the staff. After their daytime shifts, they bring out Red Bulls for a kick of energy. “Beer makes me too sleepy,” says Xeno. Whereas servers and bartenders clock out and embark on a busy social schedule, many cooks prepare to clock in at second jobs. The cumulative social and structural differences between workers impede what little rapport they may feel for one another, despite working together for hours at the restaurant. Put differently, spatial proximity has not yielded social closeness for these individuals. And this is of far greater consequence for workingclass Latino men stuck in marginal jobs in the workplace than for their white coworkers who enjoy easy access to relatively plush jobs within the same space.

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Erin and George also belong to different social networks than Juan, Victor, and Xeno. This is not altogether surprising: people with close personal ties to one another are more likely to possess social similarities of race, class, and age—a phenomenon that social scientists refer to as homophily.15 The social similarities within the front of the house and back of the house, respectively, shape characteristic tastes, activities, and experiences within each world of work. Charlie, for instance, is a college graduate interested in live music, theater acting, and craft beer—just like a number of other servers he socializes with on staff. Xeno watches Mexican League futbol during his precious off days with friends, family members, and acquaintances, many of whom also work service jobs in Los Angeles and are originally from nearby towns in Oaxaca, Mexico. Social connections within each world of work allow workers to treat jobs there as “our jobs” and help secure jobs for those within their network.16 Perla, a twenty-year-old woman who arrived in Los Angeles from Mexico as a child, first landed a job at Match through Xeno, her uncle. Six months after getting hired as a busser, Perla was able to help secure her younger cousin a job as a prep cook. When I met her in 2013, Perla was commuting to work by catching a ride with her younger cousin, since she does not drive. “I guess I’m lucky I have a big family,” she said. If Perla and other Latina/o workers are able to channel their network ties into back-of-the-house jobs at Match, a similar process holds true in the dining room for a different set of workers. A server named Farah explains how she came about her job at The Neighborhood four years previously: I met Margaret only briefly, the first time, through a yoga friend. And that friend was like, “You guys are both blonde, both actresses. You should hang out!” [laughs] I barely knew Margaret at the time. But she was in commercials, and my mutual friend was encouraging us to hang out. So we met up a few times. . . . One night she got too drunk on wine and passed out. The next day I told her, “Look, I’m an actress, looking for a restaurant job.” She helped me get a job at The Neighborhood.

Once the two befriended each other, it did not take much to get Margaret to recommend Farah for a server position (they are regularly referred to as “the twins”). White, young, and college educated, Farah fit right in

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with the rest of the server staff. Fitting in with the social and cultural norms in the dining room means not fitting in with those in the kitchen.

Reinforcing Social Boundaries Charlie, the free-spirited white server, and Xeno, the Latino cook with a sly sense of humor, struggle to find common ground amid the strong currents that pull them apart. They do different jobs, speak different languages, and generally approach their jobs in different ways. Slowly, and through micro-relations, these workers draw boundaries against one another that affirm how they are durably different. The compounded inequalities that come to separate Charlie and Xeno mirror a divide between two worlds of work that exist within the same service workplace. On most days, Latino kitchen workers and white dining room workers simply ignore each other despite their physical proximity and the conjoined nature of their labor roles. They engage in mutual ignorance within the workplace, a relationship across race and class defined by institutionalized noninteraction. I take my lunch meal to the break area beyond the kitchen. It is prime break time—right before the lunch rush—and two of the three large communal tables are already in use. Around one sit three servers, all white, who are alternating between texting on their cell phones and chatting loudly with one another. On the other table sit four cooks, all Mexican immigrants, three of whom are hastily shoving food into their mouths. The fourth is fast asleep with his head down on the table. I hear Charlie call out my name: “Eli, so glad you could make it to the party!” His voice booms directly over the heads of the cooks, including the sleeping cook. Charlie makes eye contact with me, and he beckons with his hand to join them. “Crystal and I were just talking about where to head for a beer after work!”

Charlie registers only his young, white coworkers as social peers. He makes this clear by including me in his ongoing conversation while blatantly excluding his Latino coworkers located between us, just one table over.

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A similar process cuts the other way. At Match, back-of-the-house workers come and go without anyone in the front of the house ever being aware of the personnel change in their midst. This is less often the case at Terroir and The Neighborhood because kitchen employees need to pass through the server area in order to access the POS to punch in and out. This does not stop interactions between coworkers from being extremely limited. At Terroir, Latino dishwashers would approach the POS without bothering to acknowledge any of the white servers and bartenders in their midst. One line cook is infamous among the server staff for his disregard of personal space (“he almost knocked me over!”) as he makes his way towards the POS to clock out and leave. After doing so, he would head straight back to the kitchen—his grimace turning into a smile—to slap hands and say goodbye to each of the cooks before leaving for the day. Both educated white workers and working-class Latino workers move through socially bounded physical space while at the restaurant. This causes them to register only half of the staff as colleagues. Dining room supervisors, who are predominantly white men and women, also have limited awareness of what is happening in the kitchen at any given moment, despite their managerial roles. As former servers and bartenders, they, too, participate in only one of two worlds of work in restaurants coded by race, class, and gender. The following occurred at Match on a Wednesday afternoon, traditionally a slow period between lunch and dinner service: “Where’s Xeno, I need that chicken sando on the fly!” Kyle, the floor manager on duty, yells. I watch him hustle towards the kitchen pass, brow furrowed. A guest has just complained about the wait time for his sandwich. It is near the end of the lunch shift, and there is no chef on duty until the dinner chef arrives in half an hour. “Xeno just left,” says Jose, looking confused. He has just arrived and is prepping his station for the night shift. Jose adds, “I didn’t see any tickets. I’ll fire a sandwich right now.” Kyle throws up his hands, exasperated, and walks back slowly towards the dining room.

While the botched order that afternoon may have been a simple accident, it points to a more fundamental disconnect at the restaurant. Xeno probably “checked out” with the kitchen manager, his direct supervisor,

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before leaving. Kyle, who is white and rarely speaks to any of the cooks, was left in the dark when the kitchen manager also left the area. Kyle’s obliviousness towards the kitchen personnel change reflects his own social membership among the white, English-speaking front-of-thehouse employees. What goes on in the kitchen is not only outside of his jurisdiction as a dining room manager; Kyle hardly registers what “they” are doing in the back of the house on a daily basis. Having managers who do not know what workers are supposed to be doing is obviously problematic for the restaurant as a business. But more importantly, the systematic ignorance of marginalized Latino workers by whites in positions of power within service workplaces can result in entrenched social inequality between these types of individuals. Stark instances of social distance between workers can also be illustrated by taking stock of who knows whose name. Even at this basic level of interpersonal acknowledgment, many servers do not, in fact, know the names of their coworkers preparing the food. On a Saturday afternoon at Match, Annabelle, the white server described in the opening vignette, confessed that she still had difficulty remembering who works in the kitchen. “There are so many of them,” she complained to me that day. “Besides, all I care about is that the food comes out quickly with no errors, you know?” At The Neighborhood, servers often exchange quizzical glances, mouthing “who’s that?” to each other after an unfamiliar Latino cook or dishwasher passes by heading into the kitchen. Few servers bother to ask. One day, following a shift on which this had occurred, I decided to see whether Fernando, the food runner, knew the identity of the mysterious kitchen coworker. “Yeah, that’s Enrique,” Fernando replied matter-of-factly. “He started last week. Cool guy. He’s Tony’s [food runner] friend.” Clearly, parallel and nonoverlapping social networks had informed a second-generation Latino man like Fernando of the arrival of a new cook to the team. Nor do cooks always know who is serving the food they make. Frayed lines of communication and interpersonal contact run both ways. At Match, several line cooks took to asking me—due to our rapport, built joking around in basic Spanish— to relay messages to “them,” referring to members of the front of the house. Jose, an immigrant Mexican line cook, would flag me down to ask who “the one with glasses” was (Jerry), or to relay a question to “the blonde girl” (Pamela) about her order

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ticket. “¡Leche [his nickname for me]! ¿Qué es esto? [what is this?],” Jose said to me, pointing at a food ticket (“SLMN NO GRLC & OL”). I translated Pamela’s shorthand scribble for him the best I could: “She wants the salmon cooked with no garlic or olive oil. ¿Entiendes, mi amor? [you understand, my love?].” The smaller scale of operation at Terroir eases the estrangement between front- and back-of-the-house workers without necessarily eliminating it. With about half as many workers at the restaurant at any given time, employees have more opportunity for personal contact across organizational lines (though, as described in the last chapter, servers avoid Chef Jeremy whenever possible to avoid humiliation). This has helped some members of the front of the house befriend their kitchen coworkers. Bobby, a tall, white server in his late thirties, is particularly well liked among the Mexican dishwashers and prep cooks for the deft sexual (homophobic) jokes he tells them every time he drops off dirty plates. “Did I hear you say you wanted my culo [ass], Papi?” He scrapes discarded chunks of steak into the waste basket and places the plate onto the dish rack. “Absolutely, I’ll give it to you. Can you wait until after work or should we head into the walk-in [fridge] right now?” Few other white front-of-the-house workers go to such lengths to establish rapport with their Latino kitchen coworkers. Spatial proximity does not necessarily breed personal closeness, particularly among coworkers separated by language barriers and divergent life and labor experiences. During one Saturday dinner service at Terroir, I overheard a server named Reggie chatting with one of the sous chefs at the kitchen pass about a new restaurant that had just opened up three doors down. Reggie, who is a stocky, twenty-eight-year-old white man and serious foodie (though he hates that word), was eager to check it out. Two line cooks, one Latino man and one Latina woman, stood in silence just feet away, concentrating on the objects on their cutting boards. Reggie leaned over to me and, turning away from the kitchen, whispered, “Hey Eli, our new line cook’s name is Rita, right? Did she, like, just start this week?” Reggie was partially correct: he got the new cook’s name right—aided, I suspect, by the fact that she was the only woman working as a cook at the restaurant. But Rita had already been working at Terroir for three weeks. The lack of meaningful contact between white workers and immigrant Latino workers allows each to draw group boundaries and circu-

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late generalizations about the other. Research shows that people tend to perceive in-group members as heterogeneous (“we are all different in our own way”) and out-group members as homogeneous (“they are all the same”).17 We also tend to characterize members of an out-group using negative stereotypes that fail to capture context.18 Within restaurants, assumptions that workers make about those “on the other side” are amplified by their lack of personal contacts across this divide. Few servers have ever worked in the kitchen, just as few cooks have ever worked in the front of the house. Servers are often bewildered at why the food takes so long to reach their guests, and are quick to speculate the true cause of the delay: so-and-so must be hung over again, “the new guy” must be stupid. By contrast, “we” are the competent, levelheaded ones. The realities of organizational delays in service are inevitably more complicated—and far less the product of personal deficiencies. “Ten steaks might come in at once and the cook manning hot side [the grill] will get behind,” explained a sous chef at The Neighborhood. “He’ll be playing catch-up the rest of the shift. That’s why we tell you guys to try to spread out your orders, and recommend different things. But no one—well, almost no one—ever does that.” The negative group perceptions that cooks hold of front-of-the-house workers are fueled by their own crude understanding about the world of work in the white dining room relative to the job that “we” do in the Latino and expressly male kitchen. Cooks are irritated to see their white coworkers standing motionless in the air-conditioned dining room while they hustle around a sweltering kitchen line. “I try not to think about it. . . . I try my best to focus on my own shit,” one cook told me. But the momentary actions of servers, just like those of cooks, are subject to similar kinds of misinterpretation by out-group members. For instance, at Match and The Neighborhood, servers are required to use their personal phones as calculators to estimate how much change to give back to customers and to fill out their sales reports and calculate tips. Given the social estrangement of front- and back-of-the-house workers, the racialized and classed boundaries that they draw to define one group against the other are built around differences that are both real and perceived, and grounded in the workplace. ***

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Managed distinctions between those in the front and back of the house already put employees who differ by social characteristics at odds with one another in terms of their job conditions. Further, in the workplace, everyday micro-relations between these individuals cement their sense of group difference, sealing off divided worlds of work within the same establishment. Front- and back-of-the-house workers enact symbolic boundaries that are racialized, classed, and gendered, framing distinct cohorts of “us” and “them” in the workplace. These boundaries draw from generalized social stereotypes (lazy gringo) and organizational conditions (tip inequities). This is why Charlie registers only his fellow white, collegeeducated servers as peers in a crowded lunchroom; why Manuel brings in just enough homemade tamales for his fellow immigrant Latino men working in the kitchen; and why Xeno and Samantha do not know each other’s names despite years of working together. When individual workers refer to “we” within these spaces, they rarely evoke everyone who is present, clocked in, and vital to the arc of service at the restaurant. The process of sharpening group distinctions through boundary making reminds me of what goes on in junior high school hallways. One social clique sees itself as different from another by their dress or physical characteristics or coolness and behaves in line with these beliefs, which carves up the larger social environment into factions. People learn to associate with particular people, practices, and spaces of belonging and not others. While restaurant managers play a foundational role in structuring group characteristics in the workplace, their actions alone cannot explain the durability of the social boundaries that result—or why class-privileged white workers and working-class Latino workers so often reinforce group boundaries even without any managers present. Examining the distinct labor perspectives of those who inhabit each world of work helps to clarify how workers approach their respective jobs. As the next two chapters detail, the perspectives of class-privileged white men and women and working-class Latino men reflect their sociocultural asymmetries; they also illustrate larger processes that sharpen everyday inequality within restaurant workplaces. While those in the front of the house are able to draw on their privileged social characteristics to leverage flexible employment, less educated Latino men navigate racialized careers that feature limited structural opportunities but also unexpected rewards.

3

Flexibility, Play, and Privilege in the Front of the House It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. One hundred percent. I was dating my boss, I was making tons of money, I was getting drunk whenever I wanted . . . and I was losing sight of anything that mattered to me. —Farah, server

Charlie and Farah each work four or five shifts per week—roughly twenty-eight hours—which management considers a full schedule for front-of-the-house employees. Their work schedules at Match and The Neighborhood, respectively, leave these young, white college graduates with ample time to pursue other hobbies and interests beyond restaurants. Charlie plays guitar and sings vocals in a local rock band that performs around Santa Monica and Venice. Farah is an accomplished local theater actor. Her current production, in which she plays one of the lead characters, is a neo-noir play about a young family going through troubled times. Farah sometimes brings her scripts into the restaurant to review during down times, stuffing them in a drawer underneath the POS station for safe keeping. Both Charlie and Farah have been doing this flexible labor routine for years now. They blend their serving jobs with side gigs, creative interests, school attendance, or other personal projects. While at the restaurant, they enjoy “being themselves” and socializing among work friends and diners. “It’s like a party in here every day,” Charlie says, talking about Match. Farah adds, “The fact that you never know who you are going to meet [in the dining room] at The Neighborhood is kind of exciting.” On the flip side, Charlie and Farah both face labor conditions that do not resemble the “professional” ones that they, as upwardly mobile young adults, once assumed they would be working under at this point in their lives. Despite working in fancier restaurants, both are paid mini82

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mum wage and rely heavily on tips for their earnings; neither has ever received a raise, a promotion, or any job benefits from their employers. When Farah fell ill in the fall of 2016 and could not work, she “gave away” her four shifts to other servers and did not see any sick leave pay. Charlie’s schedule changes constantly; he can expect to be “cut” from at least one shift a week if business dies down. During a dark and rainy November in 2012, Charlie’s tip earnings were slashed in half and there was nothing he could do about it. “Maybe it is time to get serious about my life and find a real job,” he told me at the time. By Christmas, however, Charlie had ceased all talk of quitting. Management screens people like Charlie and Farah into the front of the house because, as chapter 1 described, both fit widely accepted social and aesthetic ideals for customer service positions. Charlie and Farah fit seamlessly within the world of work they encounter in the front of the house, where they look and act similarly to their immediate colleagues and maintain only a tenuous connection to the Latino men operating in the kitchen or silently whisking away dirty plates. But if it is clear why Charlie and Farah find themselves working in certain capacities in restaurants and not others, it is altogether less apparent why these individuals would choose to be employed there, working unstable service jobs that they do not perceive to be “real jobs.” What does front-of-the-house employment offer to people like Charlie and Farah? And what does this tell us about how social inequality works in restaurants? Many workers see their serving and bartending jobs as longstanding gigs, not necessarily serious careers.1 But for the right kind of person, one who is usually young, white, and class privileged, joining the dining room team feels like joining “one big party, every day” (as several servers at Match like to say). By managing their labor conditions in ways that are buffered by their social resources, these men and women are able to secure flexible schedules, blend different job and hobbyist pursuits, and embrace a playlike work atmosphere within the workplace. As a result, employment as servers and bartenders complements their current lifestyles of privilege. If Charlie and Farah are the type of people whom managers seek to hire in the front of the house, they are also the ones best able to make service jobs that offer unstable—and decidedly not middle-class—working conditions work for them.

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Labor Instability in the Dining Room Even in higher-end establishments, front-of-the-house restaurant jobs commonly feature unpredictable incomes and fluctuating schedules. They also offer little job security or employer-paid benefits.2 Servers and bartenders are vulnerable to aspects of their jobs that they have little formal control over. An unexpectedly slow month of business, such as what Charlie and I experienced at Match, can leave dining room workers stressed and scrambling to make rent. So, too, can falling ill or getting injured—anything that causes them to miss out on their shifts. More so than in the kitchen, front-of-the-house workers face shift schedules that change on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. The busy season for restaurants—summertime in Los Angeles, when the weather is balmy and tourists flood the city—means more front-of-the-house shifts that need to be filled. The winter months mean slower business and a reduction in the number of shifts to go around for everybody. Either can be disruptive to those employed in the front of the house. Work hours also fluctuate on a daily basis. An unexpectedly busy shift can mean extralong hours for those working that day: dinner service stretching into the wee hours of the morning or a lunch shift extending past 4:00 p.m. and bleeding into happy hour. Even a single table of diners who linger to chat after closing their check, something I observed countless times, can delay the front-of-the-house staff ’s departure from the restaurant by half an hour or more. However, on a slow night, managers may choose to call off some workers, or cut them early. Some individuals, for reasons described in this chapter, are able to shield themselves from volatility in their restaurant work lives better than others. Nonetheless, all front-of-the-house workers must deal with unstable employment, their earnings and labor hours subject to change without notice.3 Few of the young, white, and college-educated men and women such as Charlie and Farah working in the front of the house are forging employment histories that resemble those of their parents’ generation. Many are still in their first decade of work and thus are more likely than older workers to engage in rapid job moves and wholesale industry switches.4 But the prospect of a stable and upwardly mobile career is less available today than at any time in the last half-century.5 The “precaritization” of the labor market means that even race- and class-privileged

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young adults are now forced to compete for an array of unstable jobs and nonstandard work arrangements. This landscape of work also makes it increasingly unlikely that young workers employed part-time in restaurants will be able to smoothly age out of stopgap service jobs to find more “professional” positions.6 For Charlie and Farah, spending years instead of months in front-of-the-house service jobs has shaped their career trajectories.7 During this time, they have also learned to favorably navigate this world of work by leveraging their privileged race and class characteristics. While Charlie and Farah do not want to work in restaurants the rest of their lives, neither feels stuck in them either. Without the promise of a stable career, more young adults today place greater priority on the noneconomic dimensions of their jobs, including flexible schedules, enhanced job autonomy (e.g., being one’s own boss or working remotely), social comradery, and the availability of job “perks.”8 Beyond wages and health insurance, an appealing job can be one that offers a glamorous lifestyle, opportunities to engage in “cool” and trendy activities, or the chance to receive discounts on popular consumer brands.9 Those interested in creative fields—recall that Charlie is a part-time musician and Farah an actress—may be particularly drawn to jobs that are eclectic, unstable, and nonlinear, seeing this kind of unpredictability as part and parcel of their chosen lifestyle.10 Front-of-the-house service jobs in restaurants offer social perks to go along with their unpredictable conditions. Sociologist Yasemin Besen-Cassino describes how college students working part-time at a local café relish the opportunity to “hang out” with friends who are both customers and coworkers while they are on the job.11 By “consuming” their work, Besen-Cassino argues, these students value the immaterial offerings of their workplace and—aided by the fact that they will seek other jobs after graduating—are less concerned about their meager pay and lack of benefits. Many of the front-of-the-house workers at Match, Terroir, and The Neighborhood also appreciate the social and symbolic benefits of their work. However, they do not approach or justify their jobs as explicitly short-term, ending on graduation day; many have remained employed in front-of-the-house restaurant jobs for years. They are able to do so by drawing on a variety of race- and class-exclusive resources that are circulated in ways that make them less available to their working-class Latino coworkers. As a result, Charlie, Farah, and many of

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their white, college-educated colleagues use a number of strategies that allow them to experience unstable service jobs as complements to their privileged lifestyles.

Flexing Shifts At Terroir, managers are supposed to make the new front-of-the-house schedule available to workers one week ahead of time. Few servers and bartenders are surprised when this fails to happen. Instead, managers post or e-mail the upcoming schedule just days before the previous one lapses, with hastily written notes like “sorry!” and “we were so slammed I didn’t have time.” The profound schedule uncertainty this causes workers can force them to scramble to rearrange plans: one server found out at the last minute that he had to “clopen”—close the restaurant down after dinner and open it back up the next morning—during the same stretch of time that he had a friend flying in from out of town to visit, a trip planned months earlier. In response, many young, white, and well-educated servers and bartenders deploy a variety of strategies to gain more control over their unpredictable work schedules. These strategies capitalize directly on their connections to other dining room colleagues and supervisors, most of whom share similar social backgrounds. Lily, a thirty-two-year-old, mixed-race (white and Asian) server at Match, explains her approach: “I keep a very strategic, super-friendly relationship with managers. It’s all for me, though. It’s ’cause, well, making friends with the hand that feeds—like the person who makes the schedule—it’s important for me.” Lily tries to stay on top of her work schedule by being proactive in her relationship with management, specifically those supervisors who set her schedule each week. According to her, fostering rapport with these individuals gives her the best chance to be scheduled on Friday and Saturday nights, the most lucrative shifts for tips. With this in mind, Lily doesn’t take any chances: she occasionally brings in small presents just for the managers, such as homemade cookies and bottles of craft beer that she brings back from her various travels. “I’d say nowadays I can usually get time off when I need it too,” Lily says. Sapphire approaches her relationship with managers in a similar fashion, though her schedule aims are different. As a twenty-five-year-old

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white server and part-time nursing student, Sapphire wants to ensure that she is penned onto a very specific schedule that fits with her classes. Her goal is to secure shifts that do not change each week—even if they are not necessarily the busiest and most lucrative ones. Having been hired at Match four years earlier, Sapphire is one of the most senior members in the front of the house. She leverages that seniority as a bargaining chip: “Nowadays, I can pretty much work when I want. And my thing is, I make sure I never work two days in a row. They give me three daytime shifts a week, spaced every other day, and a station that’s not so hectic. Then everyone is happy.” Other front-of-the-house employees rely less on strategic social ties with managers and more on their close relations with fellow dining room colleagues to ensure they maintain a desirable schedule each week. Workers use an extensive system of “shift switching” with each other to customize their assemblages of shifts. Each week after the new schedule is released, workers privately communicate with one another via phone, text, or in person to discuss, trade, drop, or pick up shifts. This haggling process over shift switching can stretch out over multiple days as some workers try to give away unwanted shifts (“who wants my Tuesday dinner?”) or pick up extra work as needed (“Eli, you know you’d rather be at brunch than working next Sunday, right??”). Several months into my tenure at Match, I realized that Antonio, the only immigrant Latino server at the restaurant, was one of the few front-of-the-house workers consistently left off group text message threads about shift changes. Unlike his white server peers, Antonio was unable to use this socially exclusive resource to adjust his shifts. As a result, he bore the brunt of management’s contingent scheduling. Formally, shift switching can only take place if two conditions are met: both workers involved are qualified to work the same position (hosts cannot fill a server shift), and the switch will not push either employee over forty hours a week (management does not want to pay out overtime). Informally, however, managers rarely intervene to prevent front-of-the-house workers from rearranging their schedule. “So long as we can check the books and know who is going to come in that day,” explained Kyle, the manager at Match introduced previously, “we know that you guys have lives outside of here. And we are happy to accommodate.” As a result of this leeway, well-connected white workers say that

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they can switch around shifts to customize their schedules with remarkable efficiency. According to Sean, “You can always—well, usually—get someone to work for you if need be. There’s jobs where that’s not an option. So it’s pretty cool that, say, a friend calls you and tells you he’s in town for the night and you can easily get the time off.” Sapphire adds, “And there’s always someone looking to give away a shift. So if you need the extra cash, you can just take them up on that.” Even with management’s laissez-faire stance on shift switching, workers find ways to bend the rules further. Coworkers offer up informal trades through private lines of communication just hours before the shift is supposed to begin. A different employee would simply show up to “cover” the shift—sometimes without explicit manager approval. Tammy, a twenty-eight-year-old white server, explains, “I might have an audition pop up last minute and I’ll need to get my shift covered in the next few hours. Like that day. I’ll text people [server-friends at the restaurant] and get multiple texts back telling me they’ll do it, and do I need anything else?” At The Neighborhood, a veteran white server named Julie relied on this last-minute tactic in order to take an impromptu five-day trip back home to New Jersey, booked just days in advance. After some finagling with fellow (white) servers—calling upon favors, offering new promises of future assistance—she managed to get her three shifts covered. Julie’s series of moves placed one of the servers who had agreed to work two of Julie’s shifts in violation of company policy: working six shifts in one week forced the company to pay overtime. When I mentioned this to Julie after her trip, she didn’t appear worried. “What are they [management] going to do, fire me? Psshhh. [flicks her hand in the air] They’ll live,” she said. Thus, some workers enjoy greater ability to adjust their schedules through trades and negotiations than others do. This is influenced by their position within white, class-privileged networks in the front of the house. Workers commonly execute shift switches among close social ties instead of coworker acquaintances. Julie’s server contacts who ended up helping “cover” her shifts during her vacation expect Julie to do the same for them at a later date.12 Because of the sometimes under-thetable nature of shift exchanges, workers selectively forward offers to those in their direct social orbit and not beyond. The following occurred at Match in the summer of 2012:

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Towards the end of our shift, Allison has taken to offering her fellow servers money to stay on for her. She approaches me while I input customer orders at the server terminal. “I gotta get to a friend’s birthday party and Lonnie [manager] won’t let me go. I’ll give you twenty bucks if you’ll stay for me, just tell him you’ll handle my tables. You can keep all the tips too.” I smile, looking over my shoulder to make sure no one else is listening. [Technically Allison shouldn’t leave unless Lonnie gives her the okay.] I pretend to think hard about the deal, but I know I don’t have plans after work. The payoff is potentially up to forty dollars extra in my pocket. “Go make your friend’s party, I’ll take care of it,” I say.

Allison and I frequently socialized outside of work, heading to bars for drinks with coworkers after our shifts and bonding over her shrewd insights about human nature (honed through years spent waiting tables). Desperate to leave work early that day, Allison turned to several of her server friends, all of them white, seeking assistance. In a blatant act of social exclusion, she made no mention of her situation to Antonio, who was working directly next to her section that day and thus in the best position to cover her. But as Antonio’s situation reveals, workers who do not possess developed social networks in a majority-white and classprivileged front of the house have limited ability to “flex” their schedules. This means they have fewer means with which to make unstable serving and bartending jobs work for them. To be sure, unsatisfactory schedules are a constant topic of conversation among all servers and bartenders because none of these individuals can ever fully control them. Management’s staffing decisions in restaurants can dramatically affect the extent to which front-ofthe-house employees can adjust their schedules. For instance, when Terroir had its grand reopening in a new location, managers scheduled a large number of servers and bartenders on each night, anticipating robust business. Instead, it remained slow for weeks. To our dismay, Jim, the general manager, continued to require “all hands on deck” for the front of the house during this time “just in case we get hit with a wave of guests.” Similarly, at Match, one server who had just been hired recounted her frustration with what she viewed as chronic overstaffing:

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“I don’t know what it is. I’ve been here like four months already, and they’re still giving me only two shifts a week! It’s like, how do they expect me to pay my bills working that little? I tried talking to Lonnie [manager] about it, but it’s the same story every week.” I suggest she should ask other servers if they would give up any shifts. To that she quickly replies, “I tried that, but everyone always seems to want their shifts. I think this place is waaay overstaffed, so it sucks for me.”

This server, who was white, was unable to convince management to give her more shifts and unsuccessful in “picking up” additional shifts from other servers. Feeling helpless, she quit after four months (“this place is waaay overstaffed”). Understaffing by management can cause similar involuntary scheduling issues for employees. When I first arrived at The Neighborhood in April 2015, two servers had been abruptly fired a month before. Yet no one had been hired since, and due to racialized and classed hiring standards, management chose not to extend offers to promote any of the Latino bussers, food runners, or cooks to fill the vacancy. The remaining service staff had been working long hours, and they were frustrated. On my first official shift after training, two of my server coworkers gave off visible sighs of relief. “Finally! They hired someone new,” said Margaret. “Now we can all stop working so damn much!” Possessing the right race- and class-coded resources provides a buffer against some of these issues. At The Neighborhood during the spring of 2016, six servers jockeyed for four coveted server shifts on Thursday and Friday nights, when the restaurant was packed and tips averaged over $250 per shift. Managers told the server staff that they would try to be as fair as possible about how these shifts were distributed (there was brief discussion of a merit-based reward system, but this proved too difficult to coordinate). All this created more suspicion among the staff around why Farah and Margaret, the “twin” blonde servers introduced in the last chapter, always ended up working those nights. Looking back, it should have been obvious: amid tight competition for shifts, Farah and Margaret’s potent combination of strong network connections, idealized appearance for customer service jobs (as young and conventionally attractive white women), and service experience made them a virtual lock for securing optimal schedules in the front of the house.

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Blending Pursuits Front-of-the-house workers also cherish what their jobs allow them to do away from the restaurant. While serving and bartending shifts may be more unstable than their back-of-the-house and support counterparts in restaurants, they are also shorter, higher earning, and more amenable to a changing schedule of activities (especially for socially privileged workers, as described above). Each of these job conditions allows the young, educated, white men and women who work in the dining room to pursue multiple jobs, serious hobbies, and leisure activities simultaneously. In short, the job allows privileged young adults screened into these jobs the ability to embrace flexible lifestyles.13 Sean first moved to Los Angeles from Las Vegas six years previously in order to pursue a career in comedy. With short-cropped brown hair, freckled fair skin, and a tall, skinny build, Sean brings a playful, if slightly nervous, energy into the dining room. He explains that his job as a server has always allowed him to mold his schedule around the next comedy gig. He doesn’t try to hide his order of priorities from management: comedy comes first and his restaurant job second (although he jokes that both are well ahead of his “bitchy” cat). For Sean, blending comedy and front-of-the-house restaurant work also comes with other natural advantages. “A lot of my comedy act, my material, comes from the shit I’ve seen or heard while on the [restaurant] floor. Plus, I can practice my comedy routines with customers at the table every day. It’s like having a captive audience! People love it when their server can make them laugh, so I’ll try out stuff, you know, have some fun.” Erin, the white server and school counselor described in the last chapter, also finds straddling two different occupational turfs unproblematic, and possibly even advantageous. As she sees it, clocking in as a server a few shifts a week complements her activities outside of the restaurant. Erin’s original plan involved leaving behind “the restaurant life” upon finishing school and finding a job in her field. Three months later, all the while waiting tables at Match, she got a job offer. Erin arrived at the restaurant that morning and came up to a group of us in the server station, beaming: she had been offered a salaried position as a high school counselor. Rather than quitting Match outright, Erin told management in the days that followed that she wanted to stay on to

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work only the weekend brunches. Confused, I asked her to explain her logic to me. “I make pretty good money [here], I can do the job with my eyes closed, and I get to work among good-looking people . . . you know, the kind of people I might hang out with outside of here,” Erin said, alluding to a recent date that she had gone on with a man whom she had met at Match. “So, I guess, why not [continue]?” With her relatively well-paying employment as a counselor secure, the option to blend her “professional” day job within her existing social lifestyle at the restaurant was attractive. That day at the restaurant, Erin was working alongside two of her best friends (both white women around her age), laughing with customers, and doing a job that felt effortless for her. The ability to realize flexible and potentially well-tipped jobs allows other white, class-privileged workers the luxury of “trying on” different types of work at the same time. This makes being employed at the restaurant feel more like a dynamic lifestyle decision than a crystallized career path. Over the years, I became accustomed to hearing that my dining room colleagues were part-time yoga instructors, live theater actors, tour guides, boutique clothing store associates, performing musicians, part-time models, and bartenders down the street. Of course they were. Many of the gigs that these individuals engage in involve skills similar to those they use in the dining room. On a daily basis, and possibly across multiple workplaces, they assist customers, sell products, make people laugh, and dress to fit the part. As a result, the alternate forms of employment that Sean, Erin, and other front-of-thehouse workers do flow easily into one another. In the process, these individuals improve their skill sets by developing new and complementary dimensions to customer service learned both within and beyond restaurants.14 A smaller number of workers fill out their weekly schedules by waiting tables or tending bar at nearby restaurants. This is particularly true of the younger adults. A twenty-one-year-old server named Rebecca, for instance, clocks in twice a week as a host at a popular marine-themed bar. She views Match as her primary job, with a caveat: “I love the fact that I can call up my manager at [other bar] and work whenever I feel like it.” One of Rebecca’s colleagues also tends bar at a high-end hotel on days she is not at Match: “Three months ago, my schedule each week

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was even busier, but at the same time fun, you know? I would work Mondays, Thursdays, and Saturdays over here, and Tuesdays, Fridays, and Sundays over there.” When I asked her why she didn’t just ask Match management for more hours, she responded, “Oh god no! Three shifts is enough for me. I’d get super burnt out with things over here if I worked more.” These workers stress that a change of job scenery is preferable to the monotony of one workplace. The similar emotional and physical requirements of their part-time restaurant jobs also ease the burden of transitioning between them. For Rebecca’s bartender colleague, going between jobs is relatively seamless, a way to stave off boredom while keeping things fresh (“I’d get super burnt out”). For others, the complementary appearance standards of their service and retail jobs are a plus. Sally, a peppy, twenty-six-year-old server, regularly arrives for her Friday night shift at Match fresh off working at a nearby beauty salon in Santa Monica. Breezing through the restaurant’s front door just before her 6:00 p.m. start time, Sally clocks in, ties her server apron over her clothes, and strides—smiling and laughing—towards the dining room. Farah, the local theater actress, arrives at The Neighborhood with dramatically different—though always eye-catching—makeup and hairdos. On one such occasion, I observed several regular diners (both men and women) swivel around in their seats to remark about her neon eyeliner and freshly permed tight blonde curls. “I just came from a photo shoot for a new play production,” she said, blue eyes twinkling. Farah seemed to enjoy the attention. “It was an eighties-themed shoot today. Hence, you get this.” Workers such as Sally, Farah, and Rebecca see their customized labor arrangements as a lifestyle choice, and their multiple pursuits as complementary to one another.15 From what I could tell, there may also be a gendered dimension to these clusters of jobs: women were more likely to see certain types of jobs (retail, nail salon) as complementary to frontof-the-house restaurant work on aesthetic grounds, while men focused more on the social alignment of their interests (recall Sean’s emphasis on deriving comedy material from customer interactions). Yet for both men and women, the labor hours they juggle between multiple jobs each week does more than hedge against financial unpredictability. It provides them with changing scenery, a chance to use complementary skills, and an opportunity to manage highly customizable lifestyles.

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A small number of front-of-the-house workers treat their restaurant jobs as their sole occupational focus. These individuals embrace a work life defined principally by the features of this setting, ranging from cash tips to malleable schedules, short hours, proximity to gourmet food and drink, and minimal take-home responsibilities. Those who embrace this position tend to fall into two types. The first type consists of those who see themselves as “passing through” restaurant work before moving on to more professional occupations. These individuals embrace restaurant work as a transitional phase rather than a long-term play. Charlie, the server introduced earlier, is one such example. At twenty-four years old, Charlie is uninterested in developing his proficiency at waiting tables; he rolls his eyes during pre-shift meetings when management talks of the need to hone one’s hospitality skills through continual training. Still, Charlie loves working at Match: “The way I see it is, we are going to work for the rest of our lives, right? And when we have families and mortgages and stuff then it will really kind of force our hand, right? So why rush it? Here, I get to work a few days a week, then go home and do whatever I want.” For Charlie, working in the front of the house is “great for now.”16 Being at the restaurant means being part of an exciting, youth-oriented world of work. Charlie’s short-term perspective also allows him to appreciate other aspects of front-of-the-house employment in unconventional ways, for instance by likening the unpredictability of tips to the thrill of gambling (“one day it could be bust, the next day a jackpot”). Moore, who shares many of Charlie’s views about restaurant work, told me that he has come to enjoy the fact that his schedule changes every week, even if these changes are beyond his control. “It is exciting, you know?” he said, after we had just finished working a Saturday brunch shift together. “Like, you just don’t know what you are going to get.” I suspected Moore was saying this tongue-in-cheek, but when I glanced at him, he already had his sunglasses on and was facing in the direction of the beach, his intended afternoon hangout spot. Those who embrace the “leisure” that front-ofthe-house work offers them tend to be some of the youngest and most socially privileged people I encountered working in restaurants. They are also more commonly employed at places where management attempts to produce a trendy, proximal service brand. At Match, where Moore and Charlie both work, the breezy nonchalance these men give off actively contributes to the ambiance managers wish to create.

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The second group of workers who embrace front-of-the-house labor are “lifers.” Rather than perceiving serving and bartending jobs as “great for now,” or as a strategic complement to other jobs (as Erin and Rebecca do), lifers see front-of-the-house labor as suitable to their long-term lifestyles, full-stop. Helen, a thirty-four-year-old white server, explains her attitude towards waiting tables: I flippin’ love it. Before, I had the career in stage production that I went to college for, and was doing it as a profession. I was making a living doing it . . . and it was a dream, exactly what I wanted to do. But this, being a server, is ten times better than that. Like, it Really. Doesn’t. Suck. [laughs] I make plenty of money, I live on the beach—like, on it—in my own apartment, with a car and health insurance. Totally self-sufficient. I can get time off when I want it. One hundred percent flexible. I say, “Hey guys, I want a week off,” and if management doesn’t give it to me, I just go to the employees and switch around my schedule that way.17

Helen appraises her serving job in light of her previous employment as a stage manager. Her perspective draws from work experience outside of restaurants rather than youthful enthusiasm (though Helen is hardly old). Greg is also a self-proclaimed “lifer.” At thirty-seven, Greg has a regal look about him: a trim, six-foot-two-inch frame with fair-colored skin, graying beard stubble, and a perfectly bald head. He splits time between waiting tables at The Neighborhood and at Veritas, an even more expensive fine-dining restaurant in the city. Greg has almost two decades of experience working in numerous Los Angeles restaurants. “You name a job, I’ve done it,” he said. Unusually, Greg’s industry experience ranges from front-of-the-house jobs to back-of-the-house jobs to management.18 These days he prefers to only wait tables. “I love the fact that, as a server, I have a low-stress lifestyle and can still earn enough money to have a degree of financial freedom. If my wife—who is also in restaurants—and I want to get out of town for a weekend, we can make arrangements and do so. Or we can work extra shifts to save up.” Despite the benefits of his current job, Greg is also aware that being a lifer in the front of the house elicits judgment from others who see waiting tables as a low-status job, and thus himself as “only” a waiter. Working exclusively

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in high-end restaurants helps him manage this critique: “When people say, ‘Where do you work?’ and I say, ‘Veritas,’ it’s not like, ‘I’m just a server.’ . . . [At] those high-end places, you can be a restaurant lifer and it’s not like, ‘Oh, why are you only waiting tables? What’s next?’ It’s not ‘What’s next?’ It’s ‘Oh wow, you’re at Veritas.’” Greg genuinely appreciates the craft of fine-dining techniques and products, and enjoys sharing this experience with guests.19 For similar reasons, industry-committed lifers are more commonly employed at Terroir and The Neighborhood, which emphasize professionalized skills and personalized hospitality. As white, college-educated, and relatively older (by industry standards) men and women, lifers such as Helen and Greg settle on front-of-thehouse jobs because of the stable perks that they see these types of jobs offering people like them.

Playing at Work Leroy, the server described earlier, loves his job precisely because he hardly considers it a job at all. In his words, “The first thing I do when I get into work is check the schedule to see who I’m gonna be chillin’ with today. And I get genuinely excited to see that so-and-so will be on with me. Like, we just get to hang out, have a good time together, and make some money.” Leroy cherishes his ability to casually socialize with other people in the dining room. He infuses his interactions with customers and coworkers with behaviors that blur work and play (or as Leroy calls it, “chillin’”). Little of how Leroy perceives his job resembles the drudgery associated with restaurant labor and other low-end service jobs.20 Instead, he and his white, college-educated peers interact with affluent diners in ways that draw on their embodied forms of class and culture, or “cultural capital.”21 This makes the service work that Leroy and many of his young, white, and class-privileged peers do feel effortless, not unlike “hanging out” at the restaurant.22 Managers at Match, Terroir, and The Neighborhood give those they hire in the front of the house substantial leeway to see to it that diners have a good time. Arlie Hochschild famously argued that because management routinizes the affective displays and appearances of front-line service workers, the latter end up feeling like cogs in a corporatized system of plastic smiles and practiced emotions.23 But the latitude that

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many servers and bartenders in this study are given by their immediate supervisors—coupled with the tip incentive for upbeat customer service—makes engaging in this line of work far from unsatisfying for many of them. Amid refilling water, scribbling down orders, and shuttling food to tables, servers traverse the dining room with few spatial restrictions or explicit forms of managerial oversight. As a result, workers develop personal styles. A server named Alexandra’s interactions with customers, for instance, are warm and relaxed. If the customers are a group of middle-aged men and women, she often presses up against the table, with one hand gently touching the shoulder of a diner, usually a man, while listening intently to his companions’ stories. Farah, meanwhile, darts around the floor when she works, dishing out sarcasm liberally and smiling sparingly (“my previous job told me I didn’t smile enough. Screw them.”). During a busy lunch shift at Match, a group of servers broke into song and dance along with the overhead music, Beyonce’s “Single Ladies.” Another day, Moore encouraged both staff and diners to sing along with him as he meandered between tables carrying plates of food and humming to popular songs by Vampire Weekend, Hot Chip, and Rihanna. “C’mon guys,” he called out, tilting his head upward and raising his voice, “let’s have some fun today!! Sing with me—.” In addition to engaging in flexible behaviors in the dining room, front-of-the-house workers show visible affection towards coworkers and regular patrons. One day at Match on a Saturday afternoon just before closing, I was taking down food orders for a four-top when I was interrupted by the sound of Betty squealing with excitement as two girls walked in the front door. Betty raced out from behind the bar and across the dining room to embrace both girls (I didn’t recognize them) in an extended group hug. Some of the diners she passed by seemed delighted, and continued to watch the prolonged hug occurring in their midst. Betty, who is a white woman in her late twenties, feels she has substantial flexibility to socialize and “be herself ” on the clock. Despite formal rules for service, she knows managers won’t write her up so long as customers leave satisfied.24 For Betty and other servers, the typical customer exchange they will engage in is with affluent diners, most of whom are white and slightly older than they:

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Today when I arrive at The Neighborhood, Margaret and Courtney are standing in the dining room talking with an older white woman. The restaurant is sparsely populated, but there are still about four tables finishing their meals. About five minutes later, my two server colleagues return to the bar area holding two cashmere sweaters. “Aren’t these beautiful?” says Margaret. She drapes the dark purple one over her shoulders. “Elizabeth said it was a present for both of us! Knowing her, they were probably really expensive.” “She thinks we are like her granddaughters or something,” chimes Courtney.

Social interactions that take place between workers and guests in the public spaces of the restaurant do not always reflect formal steps of service. Workers perceive this autonomy on the job to be enjoyable: it is a chance to express personality or develop a genuine connection with guests. The flexible routines they engage in feel like something other than robotic work. Farah offers her perspective: Hospitality . . . it is an energy, a relationship . . . whether the guest wants to be left alone, discuss wine for an hour, or be your best friend. And I have a really hard time with the last one—you don’t get that yet. [laughs] Then there is someone like Alexandra [fellow server], who focuses on building relationships above all else. She is giving people the experience of dining out, you know what I mean? But I also have my regulars. Like, this guy is taking me to the [Los Angeles] Rams game tomorrow. . . . You develop a relationship. A different kind of relationship. Because I will never get up and hug you.

For Farah, doing customer service on her terms can lead to an emotional payoff not only for the diners who sit in her section but also for herself. Many of her regulars are older men, with whom she has developed pseudo-flirtatious relationships over the years.25 Farah interacts far more casually with them than customers she does not know. Her variable service style has put her at odds with service procedures at other restaurants in the past, which in her mind require workers to display generic friendliness. I asked her to elaborate on this point and she said, “Ugh, that reminds me of my old colleague at [chain restaurant]. He was

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so fake. My regulars would say, we don’t want to talk to him, he’s not like you. He seems totally saccharine.” While Farah disagreed with her coworker’s cookie-cutter service style, she was fired from this chain restaurant while her coworker in question was promoted. It turned out to be a blessing in disguise when, weeks later, Margaret helped Farah get a serving job at The Neighborhood. There, Farah has found a dining room environment where she can act more “naturally” while waiting tables, and where her quirky and customized style is a boon for the restaurant’s personalized service brand. “Self-expression should be a good thing in service. Not a drawback,” Farah adds. Front-of-the-house workers at Terroir play around less conspicuously than their counterparts at Match or The Neighborhood. Under Terroir’s professionalized service regime, dancing in the dining room or being too intimate with one table and not others will get servers written up—or fired. Managers enforce rules that servers must “space the room” (stand in an open area, at attention) while adhering to fine-dining service protocols and ambiance. The seasoned servers and bartenders who work at Terroir say they cherish the opportunity to engage with, and educate customer on, sophisticated food and drink, which can be rewarding in its own right. These servers showcase well-cultured hospitality skills that allow them to curate a meal experience for wealthy diners. Michael, the forty-year-old “all-American” bartender at Terroir described in chapter 1, enjoys being able to guide diners through a multicourse meal paired with beers, wines, and cocktails that he personally selects. He loves the challenge—and the rush—of selecting the perfect vintage of Riesling from Rheingau to pair with a diner’s smoked trout, or an herb-infused gin cocktail to lead off someone’s meal. Playing the part of personal tour guide, Michael talks extensively about how the food on the plate has been sourced, and whether the newest beer on tap is dryhopped. He checks back in with diners often (unless he senses they prefer privacy), and pours them little samples of wine to go alongside the different courses. Management encourages him to “play around” with pairings and different ways of describing the products. Servers and bartenders at Terroir love being fully engaged in the process of making a meal be the best one that diners will have in months. “If I feel like it, I’ll join guests in exploring the pairing too,” Michael adds. “Just to be sure it works.”26

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Bernard, a twenty-seven-year-old white man from Boston, says he loves the experience of bartending at Terroir. While Bernard is loud and goofy outside the restaurant, he chooses to refrain from exhibiting this overt playfulness in the dining room. Instead, Bernard enjoys the dizzying pace and physicality of work behind Terroir’s long wooden bar: the more crowded the dining room is with customers, the better. Bernard arrives to work with his hair freshly gelled straight back; rolling up the sleeves of his pressed black shirt is one of the first things he does after clocking in. “I love the rush of trying to keep my head on straight when I have a zillion things to keep track of. I’ll have three people staring me down and waiting to order, a handful of new drink tickets waiting to be made, and two couples waiting for their entrées that need to be marked,” he says. Each signature cocktail at Terroir can take up to four minutes to properly make. When the restaurant is busy, the hours go by very quickly in a heady blur of motion, a constant state of social interaction, and a bit of sweat. It is the restaurant industry equivalent of what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow.” Bernard finds this flow state exhilarating, a job built for people like him. “I’m like a junky. I’ve tried to leave the industry, but I just keep coming back for more of that adrenaline,” he says, his eyes widening. “There’s nothing like that rush.” A number of Terroir’s servers and bartenders are drawn to the restaurant’s brand of skilled professionalism. Workers such as Bernard and Michael enjoy operating in a fine-dining environment, and playing with the gourmet products featured there. These individuals, who are disproportionately male and older, are also more likely to be lifers than their counterparts at Match and The Neighborhood.27 Rather than seeing front-of-the-house work as a complement to other occupational interests, Bernard and Michael enjoy the seriousness that comes with committing to high-end professionalized settings. They have learned to adapt to the instability that comes paired with it. If front-of-the-house workers at Match, Terroir, and The Neighborhood differ in the way they derive enjoyment from doing customer service work in the dining room, they frame these aspects of their job against the negative qualities they perceive in other work environments. Lily explains: “Now, I realize I’ve never really worked a true desk job before—so take this with a grain of salt—but I’d rather die. [laughs] Here at the restaurant, I get to be on my feet, meeting all kinds of great

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people. So, yeah, you’d have to pay me a whoooole lot of money to work a desk five days a week.” Lily recognizes that her positive assessment of her server job is based on a caricature of desk jobs that could be pulled straight from The Office. If desk jobs are slow, monotonous, and isolating, then working in restaurants is a social salve that keeps people like her constantly stimulated. Others say they have tried out other jobs only to find them disappointing and a poor fit. When I first arrived at Match in the spring of 2012, my new coworkers told me stories about Annabelle, the server featured in the opening vignette. Annabelle had left the restaurant only a month before I arrived in order to pursue a “grown-up” job at a nearby recruiting agency (“we had a really nice going-away party for her at a rooftop bar, thinking she had left the industry for good”). Five months later, while a group of us servers were doing closing sidework after lunch, Annabelle came through the front door. She was recruited back by a manager-friend eager to have her return to her former job. From the day she began (again), I marveled at how comfortable Annabelle seemed waiting tables: wearing a tight, white, long-sleeved shirt with her brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, she would parade around her section with a warm smile. When interacting with diners, she would crouch down slightly and, with an earnest expression on her face and her head cocked slightly to the side, gently touch them on the back or the arm while they talked. During a slow lunch shift, I asked Annabelle more about her interim job experience. “I just couldn’t do it anymore,” she said. “I’m a people person, you know? And that job was just so damn boring!” Front-of-the-house workers also favorably contrast their jobs with other restaurant jobs, including kitchen work and management. Greg, the white server described earlier, is highly unusual among the frontof-the-house staff for having previously worked as both a front-of-thehouse manager and a line cook in the past. He now sees working in the kitchen as “unsustainable” for someone like himself, raised in a middleclass household: “The lifestyle just grinds you down: the heat, the drugs, the pay . . .” Other race- and class-privileged servers and bartenders I talked to were equally dismissive of their prospects working in professional kitchens, despite never having done a day of work there. For them, the thought of willfully opting for a job that demanded strenuous labor,

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long hours, low pay, and little recognition held little appeal. It also provided a convenient rationale for why immigrant Latinos with less education do this work and not them. As one server put it, “They [immigrant Latino men] do it because they have to. Because maybe they don’t speak English or can’t get better work.” In framing the hierarchy of restaurant jobs as a color-blind, merit-based system for job attainment, this server ignores the role that his privileged social characteristics have played in lubricating his entrance into front-of-the-house jobs in the first place.28 Greg also realized that he much preferred operating not only in the dining room but in a nonmanagerial capacity. When I asked him why he left his job as general manager at a previous restaurant that still seemed to be doing well, he responded, “It just wasn’t for me. [pauses] I saw myself much more effective as a server, because I could be a little more casual and relaxed while talking about, and having, a high knowledge of food and beverages.” Greg appraises his customer service job as more fun, more social, and more relaxed than what his time as a manager offered him. In his view, while going into management offers slightly more prestige and job security, it saps the essence of what makes restaurant jobs enjoyable in the first place. “What is the use if all you are doing is trying to calm irate people down all the time?” he said, referring to his time managing a restaurant in Venice, a posh neighborhood with many upscale art galleries. For front-of-the-house workers, playing at work involves interacting with other people and being on stage in front of an audience.29 For this reason, many front-of-the-house workers feel that having a naturally outgoing personality type makes one a more natural fit for customer service. In separate interviews, Sean and Leroy, two self-professed extroverts, broke down their respective approaches towards a new table of diners. Leroy said, “The first thing I do is I read who my table is. Say it’s a group of guys about my age. I might choose to greet the table with, ‘Hey ladies how’s it going?’ I get a kick out of that, and so do they.” Sean said, “What you are trying to do is make a connection with your table. If you make them laugh, not only will you and them have a better time; they are also much more likely to give you a good tip.” Both of these servers feel that customizing their interactive approaches with diners puts the latter at ease. Because the jokes and informal exchanges Leroy and Sean engage in with customers often draw on their shared cultural back-

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ground as young and educated white men, their server routines do not need to feel put on. All of this makes working in restaurants feel more like playing around (“I get a kick out of that and so do they”), which can then feed back into higher tips at the end of the day. *** On one hand, working in the front of the house means contending with labor conditions that are inherently unstable. More than in the kitchen, servers and bartenders must navigate schedules that fluctuate weekly, earnings that rely on customer traffic and generosity, and jobs that lack traditional benefits or job security. None of these labor conditions should make service jobs in restaurants appealing to white, class-privileged young adults, yet the opposite is often true. Many of the men and women working in the front of the house at Match, Terroir, and The Neighborhood embrace their jobs as complements to their lifestyles in various ways. Charlie, Moore, and Erin all enjoy flexible schedules that allow them to maintain a desirable blend of pursuits while thriving in a highly social, playlike labor atmosphere. These individuals manage socially privileged lifestyles by staying in restaurant jobs, not by leaving them. For the right kind of worker, one who is usually white, young, and class privileged, joining the dining room team feels like “joining one big party, every day.” The embodied social characteristics of the individuals whom management hires as servers and bartenders frame the way they see and interact with their restaurant jobs. Socially privileged young adults are ideally equipped to “consume” highly unstable restaurant jobs, reframing the work as fun, flexible, and social.30 They look the part, have the right connections, and don’t want to work too many hours at the restaurant anyway. The small number of front-of-the-house workers at each restaurant who are nonwhite and from working-class backgrounds are less likely to engage with these jobs in such positive ways. Excluded from worker social networks, and less able to profit from embodied forms of upper-middle-class identity, they may be present in a privileged world of work, but they are not part of it. The individuals who commit to front-of-the-house jobs long-term (“lifers”) embrace different aspects of what these jobs can offer them. Lifers, who tend to be older and less uniformly college educated, revel

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in the corporeal hustle-and-flow of working busy nights at the restaurants, or cherish the art of recommending the perfect wine to pair with an ordered entrée. As well-tailored participants in this world of work, they have come to appreciate the various aspects of day-to-day life in the dining room that draw attention away from its employment instability. What these individuals show is that some people who seek customizable, self-directed, and build-your-own work careers are forging them within front-of-the-house restaurant work and perhaps other urban service workplaces.31 Other white, class-privileged men and women remain profoundly ambivalent about staying in “the industry” long-term despite having fun for now. It is this state of ambivalence that Farah and Charlie, the servers who led off this chapter, know too well. Despite enjoying the day-to-day flexibility, fun, and tip earnings in the front of the house, neither is willing to commit to building life-long careers in jobs they feel are not “real” jobs and do not represent their true occupational aspirations.32 Immigrant and US-born Latinos employed as cooks, dishwashers, and bussers within the same restaurants do not approach their jobs the same way as Farah and Charlie. These divergent approaches to working in restaurants are the product of both the structural characteristics of workplaces and the social characteristics of those who work there in different capacities. As I turn to examine the “brown-collar” back-ofthe-house world of work in restaurants, the divided and unequal nature of this work will come into sharp relief.

4

Brown-Collar Careers in the Back of the House

“I didn’t choose the kitchen life,” Geraldo says. “The kitchen life chose me.” We are sitting down to a roadside meal of Baja-style fish tacos, ceviche mixto, and Jarritos soda. It is Geraldo’s preferred meal on a precious day off from The Neighborhood. He goes in for the first bite, raising a flimsy Styrofoam plate up to his chin to catch the runaway lime and habanero salsa spilling out the back of the taco. He exhales and slumps back. “So good. You have to try,” he says. Things weren’t always this way for Geraldo. When he first arrived in Los Angeles “without papers” as a twenty-year-old immigrant from Oaxaca, Geraldo had never stepped foot in a professional kitchen. Nor had he eaten at many sit-down restaurants growing up. “I used to work at a machine shop in my hometown,” he explains. “I was pretty young. A couple of my cousins that were living here [in Los Angeles] came back to Oaxaca and asked, ‘Hey you want to come with us?’ There really was not too much for me over there [at home], so I left.” Geraldo’s first job in Los Angeles was at a small car wash near his uncle’s house, where he was staying. Back then, his English was “terrible”— but also not necessary on the job working alongside a group of fellow migrant men. “I spent a good amount of time at the car wash. There were two guys there that I liked to speak English to. Because they would always correct me.” Geraldo pauses for another bite. “They pretty much teach [sic] me how to speak English.” The car wash was also located across the street from the golden arches of McDonald’s. Two months later, seeking something new and looking to supplement his meager earnings, he applied for a job there. He was hired on the spot by a manager, a Mexican American man, to flip burgers and dunk baskets of fries. “They put me straight up in the kitchen. I learned how to work fast. I understand how important organization is in the kitchen. And how important it is for you to get things done faster and properly. Food-wise, I don’t like it [at McDonald’s]. But I’m definitely grateful that I learned how to 105

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work there. I worked at McDonald’s for four years I think.” Fourteen years after he began in the kitchen at McDonald’s, Geraldo is now the highest-paid line cook at The Neighborhood. He is responsible for “finishing” expensive grass-fed steaks and adobo-marinated lamb shanks on the large flatiron grill, a job reserved for the most skilled cook. He now works in a restaurant where diners routinely amass tabs equivalent to half his former paycheck at McDonald’s. “You name it, I can cook it for you—Italian food, French food, Japanese food, whatever you want,” he says with a smile. Years of hard work in multiple professional kitchens in Los Angeles have also accorded him respect among his kitchen colleagues. His fellow Mexican and Central American cooks—now some of his closest friends—see him as the informal leader of the “a.m. team.” He has also managed to gain the hard-earned trust of Chef Morgan, the restaurant’s head chef and culinary director. “Nowadays?” Geraldo says, using a spoon to scrape the final bits of ceviche from the bottom of a Styrofoam cup. “I love my job.” Despite his love for his back-of-the-house job, Geraldo still struggles to make ends meet financially. The sheer physicality of long hours on his feet, often hunched over cutting boards or grill pans, is also wearing at his body. He clocks in roughly fifty hours a week at The Neighborhood, but his wages are barely enough to support his wife and two kids in their small rental apartment in west Los Angeles adjacent to the 405 freeway. To augment his earnings, Geraldo has recently taken on a second job. Four days a week, at 3:30 p.m. sharp, he clocks out from The Neighborhood and rushes to catch the local bus towards Beverly Hills, where he is a food runner for the dinner shift at another high-end restaurant. Before leaving The Neighborhood, Geraldo makes sure to pour himself a black coffee in a to-go cup. “My wife says I work too much,” he says with a nervous chuckle. He shakes his head, staring blankly at the cars passing by as we finish our meal. *** Geraldo’s labor situation is not unlike that of many of the foreign-born Mexican and Central American men working in Los Angeles restaurants. Nearly one out of every two workers in the industry is foreign born, and two out of every three are Hispanic.1 Yet, these numbers do not capture how concentrated this population is in certain jobs within restaurants. As

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is the case at Match, Terroir, and The Neighborhood, the vast majority of cooks, dishwashers, bussers, and food runners in Los Angeles restaurants are immigrant and second-generation Latino men.2 Among the foreign born, an estimated one out of every three is undocumented.3 As I have detailed in earlier chapters, both organizational and interpersonal processes act to channel immigrant Latino men into bottomrung, manual-labor jobs in the workplace, and symbolic boundaries that workers themselves enact help keep them there. As a result, from the moment Geraldo arrives at The Neighborhood for his shift, he enters into a workplace strongly patterned by race, class, and gender, in which people like himself work in the lowest-paying and most physically taxing capacities. Nearly everyone Geraldo will come into regular contact with for the next eight hours aside from the chefs (who are white men with culinary credentials) will look and sound similar to him. Understanding Geraldo’s complicated relationship with his back-ofthe-house job—one that he has come to unexpectedly love in spite of considerable challenges—showcases the multiple dimensions of what these jobs come to mean to those who do them. Because of both the social and the structural inequities that separate them, the way Geraldo navigates his kitchen job differs starkly from the way Farah and Charlie, the servers who opened the last chapter, navigate theirs. This chapter provides an in-depth examination of a world of work in Los Angeles restaurants that exists beyond customer concern: performing routine work in kitchens, clearing crumbs from tables, and mopping floors in backroom spaces.4 Each of these tasks is deeply coded as an immigrant and Latino job in the city; they are working-class and male jobs too. Existing research explores how workers find value in manual-labor jobs despite low status and marginal pay. Many find solace in performing an honest day’s work, and in enjoying community and respect among their peers while doing so. Working-class men, in particular, find ways to express their masculinity on the job by demonstrating their toughness at rigorous physical tasks.5 Sociologist Gary Fine describes how, in restaurant kitchens, cooks emphasize the nuanced skills and strategies they have developed to execute dishes on a professional level, over and over.6 Anthony Bourdain, the late chef-writer, argues that the demands of kitchen labor sometimes lead workers to develop hard-charging lifestyles full of drugs and alcohol (I found this to be far less the case for immigrant

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Latino men like Geraldo, who doesn’t drink and is more interested in putting food on the table for his family).7 Nonetheless, few accounts of workaday kitchen labor, and those who routinely do it, capture how the racialized and gendered nature of these jobs becomes infused in this world of work.8 The way in which Latino cooks, bussers, and dishwashers at Match, Terroir, and The Neighborhood approach their jobs is framed not only by the organizational conditions they face but also by their social relations with their kitchen colleagues, dining room colleagues, chefs, and front-of-the-house managers. How do the everyday labor experiences of those in back-of-the-house and support jobs reflect both their marginalized labor market positions and their personal commitment to racialized and gendered careers? Likewise, how have immigrant Latino workers transformed the world of work they are relegated to into socially and culturally insider spaces? I show how cooks, dishwashers, bussers, and food runners infuse their jobs with ethnic comradery, an ethos of craftsmanship and hustle, and masculinity. As a result, many of these workers approach their jobs as longstanding commitments despite limited economic rewards for doing so. While both kitchen work and support work are coded as jobs for immigrant Latino men, there are important distinctions between what these positions offer, and come to mean, to workers themselves.

Brown-Collar Jobs in Restaurants Back-of-the-house and support jobs in Los Angeles have become, over the past few decades, racialized as “brown-collar” jobs associated with Latino immigrants.9 These jobs are also gender segregated: foreignborn men and women operate in different types of service jobs, with men working in more manual-labor capacities, and women doing care work.10 Studies show that US employers favor hiring foreign-born Mexican and Central American men for physically strenuous and less-skilled service jobs that most Americans find undesirable.11 Employers also see immigrant Latino men as less likely to cause trouble on the job.12 Given their structurally disempowered position in this society—especially those with an undocumented status—foreign-born Latinos may of necessity be more tolerant of marginal employment conditions than their US-born counterparts.

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Workers’ own actions to help those in their social network find that jobs in the workplace in many ways complement the racialized and gendered preferences of employers for these jobs. Incumbent Latino employees try to secure work for their friends and family, sometimes assisting them across international borders to do so. They recruit individuals from their social networks to get jobs in the same workplace.13 This process produces a concentration of one immigrant group in a certain line of work—what scholars refer to as an “ethnic niche”14—which subsequently alters the social and cultural composition of the workplace to reflect new inhabitants. If overlapping forces contribute to the racializing and gendering of back-of-the-house and support jobs, few studies differentiate the job experiences within this brown-collar and overwhelmingly male world of work. Organizationally within restaurants, cooking, dishwashing, and food running require distinct skill sets.15 They engender different social relations, nuance daily labor experiences, and place one within distinct internal workplace hierarchies. As a result, the men working in the back of the house and support workers do not necessarily have the same relationship to the job as one another. The racialization of “unskilled” service jobs as brown-collar flattens some of these distinctions. Race-typed labor stereotypes perpetuated by dominant groups in the United States draw together the experiences of those thrust into similar categories of socially coded labor. They can also render invisible distinctions of migration generation, or country of origin.16 Instead, brown-skinned workers come to contrast white or black ones; Latinos with otherwise distinct social and cultural outlooks find themselves in the same workplaces and subjected to similar labor associations.17 In this sense, brown-collar work at Match, Terroir, and The Neighborhood contrasts the type of work done by class-privileged whites in these workplaces. Yet the specific labor conditions that separate back-of-the-house and support jobs nuance the labor perspectives of Latino male workers.18

“The Kitchen Life Chose Me” Like Geraldo, the cook who opened this chapter, many first- and secondgeneration Latino men share a commitment to working in restaurants.

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In contrast to their white front-of-the-house colleagues, few of these individuals go out of their way to strategize customizable schedules, prioritize “passion” pursuits, or embrace a playlike work atmosphere. None of these characteristics are what initially drew them to restaurant work, nor are they what back-of-the-house and support jobs offer them. Instead, Latino workers exhibit commitment to jobs that offer them daily coethnic rapport, loyalty to chef-mentors, and the ability to display skill and masculinity in the world of work they know.

Comradery with “the Guys” Even though Geraldo arrived in Los Angeles with no intention of working in restaurants, the fact that he feels a close bond with his fellow cooks at The Neighborhood is hardly surprising. Five days a week, he and his “a.m. team” of line cooks work alongside each other for upwards of ten hours straight. They pause only for a quick bite to eat, something that can only occur when the steady stream of food orders dies down.19 These five cooks spend an immense amount of time together at the restaurant. “I see those guys more than my own family,” one cook, who works the salad station, told me. Geraldo and his kitchen coworkers operate in tight quarters, and in close physical proximity to one another.20 On the kitchen line during meal service, each of their primary workstations is no bigger than a jacket closet, a four-foot-wide area flanked by a waist-high heavy metal table on one side (prep area) and a cooking surface on the other (grill, fryer, stovetop). When one of the cooks needs to fetch an item from the walk-in cooler located thirty feet away in the back area of the kitchen, he places a firm hand on his neighboring cook’s back. Shuffling sideways, he scoots behind him and bellows, “¡detras!” (behind) in short, repeated puffs. The expression is both cautionary and a firm statement of fact. Bumping into one another—while volleying instructions back and forth over the hiss of the fryer and the sharp clang of knives and metal spoons—is to be expected—so long as no one gets injured and has to stop work. Cooks talk about their “team of guys” as another might an athletic squad or military unit. It is a membership steeped in trust and solidarity. Geraldo says he treats his “a.m. team” in the kitchen with uncondi-

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tional love. “I’d go to war for any one of them,” he says. Away from direct managerial scrutiny, Geraldo has forged bonds with his team organically as a result of hours upon hours spent together working symbiotically on the kitchen line. As another cook explained to me, “You know how they work. And you know they got your back if you need something. [pause] I just love those guys.” Different teams of back-of-the-house workers also develop group norms. At The Neighborhood, three line cooks, Andrew, Manuel, and Juan, have been working together on the dinner shift for the past ten months. “At this point, I know them so well, I know what will get on their nerves,” says Andrew. “So I’ll purposely try to do that.” Andrew is tall and heavy-set, raised in Los Angeles by a Salvadoran mother and black father. He, Manuel, and Juan constantly rib each other throughout their eight-hour-plus shifts. Usually, they wait for the coast to be clear before doing so, maintaining their professional front when in the presence of the chef, or in view of customers. When that moment passes, Juan, who handles the sauté station to the left of the main grill, proceeds to slap Manuel on the rear with his spatula. In retaliation, Manuel’s weapon of choice is his personal hand towel, a white rag often smudged with grease and food debris. He uses it as a whip, or “rat tail,” as he calls it. As Manuel winds up his rag-weapon, Juan and Andrew scurry away. This back-and-forth can go on for hours, weaving in and out of their regular kitchen duties and pausing during moments of surveillance. Andrew feels close to Manuel, Juan, and many of his back-of-thehouse colleagues for other reasons too. The overwhelming majority of cooks at The Neighborhood are much like them: first- and secondgeneration, Spanish-speaking, Mexican and Central American men. Most also have familial roots in similar areas of their respective home countries—such as the Mexican states of Oaxaca and Jalisco—and have found their way into Los Angeles kitchens due to network migration. Amid dinner service, these men share a common language; less explicitly, but perhaps more profoundly, they share a social bond threaded with mutual sociocultural understanding. On a daily basis, conversations between back-of-the-house workers make extensive use of kitchen slang peppered with Spanish phrases, especially those associated with men (e.g., “¡No mames, güey!” [No way, man!]21). Talking rapid-fire to one another while hunched over cut-

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ting boards and frying pans, they communicate almost exclusively in Spanish, except when addressing chefs, who are mostly white men.22 This includes the way they informally address one another. At Match, for instance, cooks playfully nickname each other “gordo,” “feo,” “barrigon,” and “bonita” (fatty, ugly, potbellied, pretty). These are names used as terms of endearment, a sign of in-group membership that is also guided by distinctly masculine norms. For example, “Gordo,” a stocky Mexican man in his midfifties, explained to me that everyone in the kitchen knows that he loves to eat and drink (he slapped his belly when he said this), hence his nickname. “Feo” has learned to laugh about his name: when a fellow cook called out to him using his nickname, Feo turned and made a face by crossing his eyes and scrunching his mouth to the side. Within seconds everyone was back to work, now smiling and chuckling. Nicknames that circulate among cooks rarely extend to servers, bartenders, chefs, and dining room managers. Publicly, cooks refer to chefs only by their formal title (“chef ”), a common practice in higher-end kitchens. In private, they refer to chefs by an equally general association (“el jefe,” “gringo”). The comradery that these cooks have with one another is between fellow Latino men and rarely extends further. As a case in point, the small number of Latina women working in the back of the house did not have nicknames. The two immigrant Latina women who wash dishes on the same shift as Andrew, Manuel, and Juan are rarely included in the primary flow of communication and gossip of the kitchen, or the physical horseplay among these three men. The core team in the back of the house is firmly male and Latino, with women scattered in peripheral positions (I elaborate on this in the next chapter). Workers etch shared histories and other forms of cultural similarity into the everyday kitchen practices they engage in. At Match, while the cooks prep their workstations in the morning before opening hour, they blast bachata and cumbia on a small portable radio. This continues, uninterrupted, when managers and front-of-the-house workers arrive at the restaurant to set up. (I learned to set up the dining room—glasses and napkin rolls on each table—with “El Pescador de Baru,” a popular cumbia song, emanating from the kitchen.) As soon as Match opens to the public at 8:00 a.m., all “kitchen music” must be turned off. When Xeno, the cook described in the opening vignette to this book, forgot

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to turn the music off, a chef or dining room supervisor would bark at him to do so immediately. I began to recognize the sharp break between “back-of-the-house music” and “front-of-the-house music” in the morning, with the former quickly replaced by the latter. All of this just causes the kitchen radio at Match to be driven underground, maintained in clandestine fashion. On several occasions, I would hear the radio on during meal service, away from chefs and audible only as one passed by the kitchen on the way to the dishwashing station. The volume would be turned down, the physical radio itself stashed between two large bags of potatoes. Playing the radio during meal service, as far as I could tell, was an everyday act of resistance to managerial strictures by cooks. It was a mundane strategy aimed at making the job a little more enjoyable and familiar. “We’ve had the radio taken away a few times,” one cook told me, a wry smile creeping to his face. “But it keeps coming back.” Cooks also have mixed feelings about the food they prepare every day at the restaurant. Unlike chefs and sous chefs, cooks do not generally have creative input on how dishes will be made or plated.23 They are given careful instructions on how to prepare the dish and expected to quickly digest the information and execute food “tickets” quickly, like foot soldiers expected to march to their leader’s grand vision. Still, most cooks I talked to seem to tolerate this chain of command, and appreciate the opportunity to expand their cooking repertoire (I discuss this later in the chapter). On the other hand, tensions can flare up when immigrant Latino cooks are asked to prepare what they see as “fake,” white-washed, Mexican American foods. This is particularly common at Match and The Neighborhood, which both feature seasonal menus peppered with “California” cuisine staples. For instance, at the tail end of a Thursday lunch rush at Match, I watched Xeno and Juan prepare the following plates in rapid succession: “fish fajitas” with a side of organic black beans, a twelve-dollar plate of “house-made” guacamole and chips, and a vegan “Tofu Scramble” burrito with chorizo-spiced tofu. Afterwards, Xeno jokingly referred to these dishes as “gringo Mexican food,” adding that he feels no personal connection to or affinity for these creations despite being from Mexico himself. Juan, who is also an immigrant, ridiculed Match’s “charred red salsa,” which he is personally assigned to make in huge three-gallon batches using only standard in-

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gredients purchased by a large national food distributor. He finds the recipe for this salsa insipid (“there’s no flavor!”), though—as if to protect the real thing—he feels no need to tell the head chef. Instead, Juan’s eyes light up as he says, “One day, I bring my salsa I make at home for you. It is so much better than this crap!” To Xeno and Juan, dishes like charred red salsa, gourmet guacamole, and tofu burritos are only Mexican because the menu says so. They are created by white chefs, for a white clientele in a wealthy part of the city. In striking contrast, cooks themselves strategize and prepare the daily “family meals” intended for staff consumption only. These dishes, usually made in large pots and oversize pans and comprised of older or unwanted food items in the kitchen, often reflect tastes closer to the cooks’ own palates. Many of these Latino men are proud to share their hometown specialty cooking for family meals—or the closest makeshift version of these dishes given ingredient constraints. Some cooks go a step further by bringing in special herbs and spices to give family meals their special touches: freshly dried ancho chilies, Mexican oregano, pork bones for stewing. None of these “ethnic,” homespun creations find their way onto the cosmopolitan menus at Match, Terroir, and The Neighborhood.24 Sometimes, if ingredients are particularly expensive or limited, cooks prepare a smaller serving of family meal just for the back of the house, then a more generic version for the rest of the staff. Jon, the kitchen manager at Terroir and a native of Veracruz, Mexico, is fond of making what he refers to as “fish stew” for family meal at the end of the night (usually just before midnight). It is a patchwork dish that he assembles using leftover fish and vegetable scraps from dinner service, spiced with an aromatic blend of seasonings inspired by his coastal hometown’s seafood cuisine. Other workers practice alternate food traditions that are circulated exclusively among their coethnic, back-of-the-house and support employees. During the winter holiday season in 2016, I arrived at work at The Neighborhood to find Enrique and Manuel, both natives of Oaxaca, passing around homemade tamales to the kitchen and support staff. They had brought in two different flavors: one with savory pork and the other with sweet corn and green chilies. Similarly, at Terroir, two immigrant Mexican dishwashers share a private stash of habaneros and tortillas that they store discreetly in the back refrigerator and bring out during staff meals for the kitchen. No

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one in the front of the house at either restaurant receives any of these items, much less is aware that such exchanges are occurring nearby. Because food and drink sharing among workers at each restaurant takes place along group lines, these exchanges provide a good indicator of who is a part of which social circle in the workplace. During the daily 3:00 p.m. “lunch break” at Terroir, Latino cooks gather trays of food and sit together at one of the long rectangular tables off to the side of the dining room. They often position larger dishes of food in the middle of the table, to be shared. At The Neighborhood, when Fernando (food runner) and Nacho (busser) arrive at the restaurant, they immediately greet the kitchen staff and inquire, in Spanish, whether any of them would like a latte or cappuccino from the espresso machine. After fielding coffee orders, Fernando proceeds to make these drinks on the espresso machine while Nacho begins setting up the dining room for dinner service. Fernando likes to place the drinks he makes for the kitchen staff in paper cups (no glass or ceramic is allowed in the kitchen) and pass them directly to the cooks; Nacho helps walk beverages to the side entrance of the kitchen, placing them discreetly on a lower metal counter. Later that night, these same cooks reciprocate the gesture: should there be extra food from the kitchen after dinner service, Manuel (sauté cook) and Juan (cold prep station) sneak edible “gifts” towards Fernando and Nacho first before making the remainder available to the front of the house. No evidence of this parallel workplace culture in the back of the house appears on the menu or in company manuals; few of their white, class-privileged colleagues are at all aware that these friendly exchanges take place.

Loyalty to Mentors The coethnic and male comradery back-of-the-house workers share with one another is not the only type of social bond they routinely evince in the restaurant workplace. Many of these men also maintain a strong sense of loyalty towards those they feel have mentored them on the job. This is particularly true in the case of non-Latino chefs and managers, who, because of their positions of greater authority and culinary training, are able to weave mentorship with potential job advancement. Jon, the Veracruzano kitchen manager mentioned earlier, has worked for the head chef and co-owner of Terroir—Jeremy—for the past ten

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years. When Jeremy initially told Jon he was thinking about opening a new restaurant in 2013, Jon instantly agreed to help him out should he be called upon. “Chef Jeremy gave me a chance to prove myself, and I’ll never forget. I’d follow him anywhere if he wants my help. Yes, he can be difficult [to work for]. But he is fair, and he has been good to me all these years.” Jon had no second thoughts about assisting Jeremy on his newest restaurant venture, even though it meant giving up his secure job at Jeremy’s first (and still most) successful restaurant. Jon has remained intensely loyal to “Chef Jeremy” ever since the latter made him a kitchen supervisor at the highest hourly wage he had ever received (“he gave me a chance to prove myself ”). Though Jon’s relationship with Jeremy has deepened through mentorship and growth opportunities, it has not been without challenges. “My friends always tell me, ‘Jon, why don’t you come work with me? We could use someone good like you,’” Jon says. “But I always say, ‘No, I’m staying with Chef.’ Sometimes when things between us are not good, I think about it. But I’ve never left.” Over the years, Jon has turned down several attractive kitchen job offers, usually facilitated by Latino cooks— former colleagues. “This one guy offered to help me start a food truck, but I told him no, I don’t have time to do that because I’m helping open a new restaurant.” At The Neighborhood, many veteran Latino cooks also feel a strong sense of loyalty towards the restaurant’s head chef, Morgan. When I asked a cook named Rodrigo what it would take for him to want to leave and find another job, he responded, “The only way I’m leaving this place is if Chef [Morgan] leaves. If he leaves, I’ll be ready to follow him. Otherwise, I’m here for the long run; I love working at The Neighborhood.” With Chef Morgan heading the kitchen, Rodrigo says he has received two raises in just over three years. He didn’t ask for either one. [My first raise] was pretty cool because everybody was telling me that when you get a raise at The Neighborhood it’s never more than fifty cents, maybe a dollar. It happened when Chef Morgan came. Because Morgan keeps in mind what his employees go through on a daily basis—how the job is not easy. Like when someone calls off, like . . . we’ve had situations where someone stops showing up for work altogether. And it kind of fucks up the line . . .

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Rodrigo now makes one of the highest hourly wages in the kitchen, at $14.50 an hour (in 2016). Morgan has also sat him down “several times” to tell him how valuable he is to the team. When Rodrigo told me this, I was surprised: with the front-of-the-house staff, Morgan is usually short on praise and quick to berate servers for subpar work performance. [The other cooks] joke around with me, saying “You’re like the golden goose of this line.” Morgan cannot afford to have me leave, and [previous head chef] told me the same before that. Morgan for months has wanted me to do p.m. service. But what keeps holding me back is how short staffed the a.m. shift is. I’ll cook plancha [flat metal grill], garde ma [cold station], even eggs if Geraldo is on break. I remember [sous chef] and I were fucking around on Monday, and there’s this new guy, Brian, who Tony the busser brought him in. And Monday was like his first day, and Morgan tells me, “That’s your ticket into p.m. If you train him to work garde ma the way you do, you’re in p.m.”

Rodrigo interprets his relationship with Morgan as one of mutual respect, where he has been rewarded for his dedication—which only deepens his commitment to the job. Rodrigo makes sure to arrive early to his shift and stay late. Sometimes, if his shift exceeds eight hours, Rodrigo voluntarily gets “off the clock,” then goes back to finish his kitchen tasks on his own time. Mentoring relations in the kitchen, usually among men, reflect tough love. Many Latino cooks I talked to say that the same mentor figures who have shown them the ropes in the kitchen have also driven them close to tears through sharp criticism and extra work. They defend chefs as “tough but fair”—Jon’s description of Jeremy—which in turn helps rationalize anything from verbal assaults behind the scenes to dumping an entire soup and demanding that the cook remake it if the soup tastes the slightest bit different. To foreign-born Latino cooks, few of whom completed high school in their home countries and have experienced the insecurity of working under the table in Los Angeles prior to their current restaurant jobs, a few verbal lashings or extra hours of work are small prices to pay. The loyalty oaths that Latino cooks swear to white male chefs and other mentor figures in management can be a double-edged sword. They

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restrict the former to subordinate positions, making them reliant on good-faith promises of advancement made by their superiors.25 Rodrigo and Jon illustrate the tangle of consequences that their loyalty has come with. Rodrigo puts in unpaid hours at the restaurant to show his “commitment” to the chef; Jon has supported Jeremy in his various entrepreneurial efforts at great risk to his own job security, much less his own attempt to gain recognition or break into the chef ranks himself. “Chef is kind, but very stubborn,” says Jon. “He always wants to do things his way, not willing to listen to anybody else. I’ve been by his side for almost a decade, but what do I have to show for it? My name is nowhere in Jeremy’s restaurants. You look at the menu, at the website. No Jon.” To be sure, white men working in the kitchen also feel loyalty to restaurant owners and managers. Given their greater access to betterpaying positions and personal resources, these loyalties do not run as deep. Nor are they as consequential for their subsequent employment prospects within the industry. Timothy, the former sous chef at Terroir, is a case in point. Just weeks after he got the job, Timothy, a baby-faced white man in his late twenties, told me that this restaurant wasn’t the right fit for him. However, he dragged his feet on leaving for the next two months because he did not want to “abandon” Chef Jeremy so quickly. He continued putting in fifty-hour weeks at the restaurant, growing more withdrawn in the workplace. When Timothy found another sous chef job at a top restaurant in the city, I expected him to depart quickly. To my surprise, he gave an additional thirty-day notice, well above industry standards. “I feel bad for Chef [Jeremy],” he explained to me, regarding his decision. “I mean, I’m out of here, but I’d honestly like to see him succeed.” Away from the kitchen, bonds between Latino support workers and their dining room supervisors are less commonly characterized by intense loyalty and tough love. Part of this is structural: bussers and food runners work fewer hours than cooks and are not in such constant contact with their immediate bosses. Nonetheless, the bonds that some support workers forge with their dining room mentors can follow similar patterns. Following the death of his father, a food runner named Manny left The Neighborhood to return to Mexico, where he was born. Manny had been a food runner there for two years, all the while learning the dining room ropes from a manager named Michael. When Manny came

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back to Los Angeles six months later looking for work, he reached out to Michael: “I was working on Sawtelle [Boulevard] at a Japanese restaurant as a dishwasher at the time. I used to work nights, from 4:00 p.m. on, but the last bus ended at eleven. So it was hard getting home. Then I received a call from Michael telling me, ‘Come back home.’ That was it. I put in my two weeks, and came back to The Neighborhood.” Before his return to Mexico, Manny said that it was Michael, a French immigrant with lightly tanned skin and a bald head, who helped him learn the techniques of fine dining—something his fellow Latino support workers could not do. Michael taught him how to set a dining room properly, and more importantly, why doing so mattered (“guests come here for an experience; they notice if small things aren’t right”). “Where I’m from,” says Manny, “I had never heard that stuff before. Michael was the one who taught me everything.” Manny appreciates how Michael, who left The Neighborhood before I started, went above and beyond to mentor him in a way that he has yet to experience again. Manny has also experienced a transition of his own: when he returned to The Neighborhood, he surprised Michael and many of his old colleagues by asking to work in the kitchen. He says he doesn’t regret the switch. “I love it here,” says Manny. “But if Michael came calling again? I don’t know what I would do.” Mentorship loyalties in the back of the house reveal the complex social ties that Latino cooks, bussers, and food runners maintain in the workplace. These ties go beyond ethnic networks to link cooks to white chefs and dining room managers, spanning across the restaurant hierarchy and sometimes contributing to the modest occupational rise of men like Jon (“Chef Jeremy gave me a chance to prove myself. I’ll never forget”). In other ways, these same relations can reinforce the racialized and subordinate position of Latino men vis-à-vis the white and more educated men in management.

Masculinizing Back-of-the-House Work The Latino men who work as cooks, bussers, and food runners reinscribe the daily jobs they do in restaurants as accomplishments of fortitude, skill, and hard work. Doing so helps them enact masculine occupational identities despite low wages and long hours. As with their

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mentoring relationships with managers who are more race- and classprivileged than themselves, the strategies these workers use to reframe their jobs are individual-level ways of making do within an overarching system of labor subordination that marginalizes them.26 Manny and Anthony, a young, second-generation Mexican American man, love to brag about their ability to withstand the physicality and stress of their kitchen jobs. They treat these aspects of being a cook as badges of honor, worn proudly. “Being in the kitchen, you gotta be able to get shit done—do what you need to do, you know?” says Anthony. “It is pressing a finger to a steak right on the grill to see if it is done. It is holding a pan steady even when the oil is flying out and burning your arm.” Many back-of-the-house workers have physical scars and cuts from years of physically taxing labor working in kitchens, where hazards are never far away. Yet rather than view these marks as grounds for worker’s compensation, they treat them as evidence of their card-carrying membership in a hypermasculine world of work. During a slow dinner shift at The Neighborhood, I asked Anthony about the reddish-brown protrusions on his forearms. “To make it in the kitchen, this is what it takes,” he explained. “Not everyone can stand it.” He rolled up his white chef ’s coat, which was stained brown in parts and littered with oil patches, to show me his “collection” of dozens of scars and bruises dotting his forearms, legs, and hands. “Took some hot oil here last Tuesday,” he said, tilting his head to the side and pointing to a discolored spot dotting the right side of his neck. Sensing my horror, Andrew became even more enthusiastic about talking on the subject of kitchen injuries he had endured. In the back of the house, cooks are less interested in preventing injuries from occurring—as every restaurant employee handbook demands they do—than “sucking it up” when they happen. As Rodrigo puts it, “Front of the house? I’m sorry, but you can’t do what we do. The shit I’ve gone through in the past—the thing is, no one or no thing at The Neighborhood bothers me at all. A grown man screaming at me about a [food] ticket? That’s nothing. I’ve seen some fucked up shit, that’s not about to scare me. But I’ve seen other people kinda wilt under the pressure.” Latino back-of-the-house workers such as Rodrigo treat their ability to tolerate stress and borderline verbal abuse as a sign of masculinity and

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toughness at work. These are traits they find notably absent among their coworkers in the dining room, men or women. Manny, who previously worked as a food runner, explained, “Once you enter the back of the house, you learn so much.” When I asked him to elaborate, he said, “Different feelings.” He paused. “Feelings don’t really exist in the back of the house. You have to leave your feelings at home. Like a soldier going to war. Like, when a soldier goes to war, it’s either killing or being killed. In the back of the house, it’s, ‘get it done, get it done.’ That’s the mentality.” Through such dramatic descriptions of back-of-the-house labor, Manny genders kitchen work as an expressly masculine trade. He emphasizes the machismo needed to withstand a “kill or be killed” environment, one where emotions are better left at home (save for stoicism, perhaps). Some of Manny’s coworkers, such as Hernan, are more explicit about the fact that women don’t belong in professional restaurant kitchens: “You scream at me, I get pissed—that’s it. But I take it. You scream at a woman? She walks off the line, starts crying in the bathroom. Now, there are times that we might get a female chef that is hard-core, like Chef Coryn. It’s like she has no feelings!” Hernan laughs. “Well, she has feelings, but I guess she keeps them inside.” Women, or perhaps more accurately, femininity, threatens a core source of occupational pride for these male cooks. According to the cook quoted above, only women able to “soldier up” and “leave emotions at the door” may be accepted into the hardy occupational fold of the back of the house.27 Chef Coryn, a former sous chef at The Neighborhood, affirms the requisite masculine traits needed in the kitchen despite her appearance (“it’s like she has no feelings!”). She probably had to earn this reputation working among men over time, and through repeated displays of toughness. Women who attempt to navigate kitchen jobs find that they receive special treatment that sets them apart from the social fold. Kylie, a twenty-three-year-old white woman, was one of only three female line cooks I worked with in six years. She describes her experience working in an all-male kitchen surrounded by Latino cooks and white chefs: I don’t like that I get treated differently, but I think I do. Like, when [Chef Eric] is in his random good moods, he’ll be like, “Oh here, eat this.” And be really nice, not give it to anyone else. And I think it might be because I’m a girl. Or Chef Morgan will be like, “Try this,” and I’ll be like, “Okay.”

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But I really wish I was just not treated any differently. But I feel like it’s because it’s me, and I’m a girl . . . um . . . a lot of people think I need help carrying stuff too. And I’m like, no, I’m good. When I first started here, it’s funny, the [male] prep cooks in the back would be extra nice to me. They would be like, “Oh I’ll put away all this stuff for you. Don’t worry.” And I was like, literally, “Shut up, I can do my job.” And they would be . . . “Ohhh, ohhhh.” . . . But seriously, I can do my job!

In light of the structurally disempowered position within the restaurant hierarchy that Latino men experience, treating women who attempt to enter this space differently may be deliberate. For Kylie, the paternalistic treatment she received from her male colleagues in the back of the house, many of whom were also older than she, made her feel as though she wasn’t accepted as a true equal. It reaffirmed to her that she was in a man’s domain. So, too, did the physical horseplay between Andrew and Juan (introduced at the beginning of the chapter) that occurred on a nightly basis. Kylie was in the middle of it. “Chef would leave the line and the other cooks would start screwing around,” she said. “They’d be flicking each other’s ears, rat tailing each other. I just wanted to go home.” Kylie was never included in the horseplay—not that she wanted to be anyway. The chef on duty, should he stick around, is often of little use in curbing such roughhousing among cooks at closing hour. From what I observed, they themselves promoted a degree of horseplay, treating it as a needed release after a long night of pressure-packed cooking. On one busy Saturday dinner service, Chef Morgan brought in a six pack of canned beer for the kitchen staff to drink while they were cleaning up; twenty minutes later I peered into the kitchen to see him arm wrestling with Anthony near the back kitchen sink while Manny and Juan looked on. While such horseplay in the kitchen is clearly intended to be goodnatured, it also demarcates a world of work replete with institutionalized masculinity. These daily acts make it clear that women are the social outsiders in this space, and femininity the cultural antithesis of the toughness that its male inhabitants celebrate. Kylie finds these characteristics and others surrounding kitchen work difficult to handle: I have some friends that have gone to culinary school but they refuse to work in restaurants because they don’t like the stressful atmosphere. But

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I’m like, well if you are not going to push yourself to do that. . . . I don’t know. If you are not going to do that, then it’s kind of like, an education experience [instead of a more permanent job]. . . . I want to do something food related, of course, but like, I look up to Chef Morgan, Chef Eric—people whose lives are revolving around the restaurant. And that’s not what I like. You lose time for your family, your back hurts, your feet hurt, your physical body is tired all the time. You don’t have time to be a person, so . . . yeah.

In a male-dominated world of work, Kylie understands that she must either deal with the conditions she encounters or get out. Many of the aspects of this work that make it uncomfortable for her to operate in this space—the bravado (“no emotions”), the sexual jokes, the long hours, the physical dangers—are exactly what make her male colleagues call it home.

Differentiating Brown-Collar Jobs The working-class Latino men hired into racialized and gendered jobs approach their restaurant employment as a longer-term commitment. But the nature of this commitment—and what it means for workers— looks different in the kitchen versus the dining room. Whereas cooks strive to build skills and acquire different labor experiences over time, food runners and bussers emphasize how their jobs allow them to economize their work lives. The approaches these workers take towards their respective jobs showcase significant differences within a brown-collar world of work that can look uniformly marginalized to those on the outside. In all three restaurants in this study, cooks invest in their own kitchen equipment and view having personalized tools as a requirement for any self-respecting professional kitchen worker. Many arrive to work carrying specialized canvas bags that contain several high-grade knives, tweezers, tongs, specialty spatulas, and other accessories. For immigrant Latino men making scarcely over ten dollars an hour, purchasing kitchen equipment to do routine kitchen tasks can amount to a serious financial burden. Enrique, a line cook at Terroir, told me that he saved up for months to finally buy a high-quality, Japanese-made chopping

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knife. He purchased it used, on eBay, for $150. He cleans it, sharpens it, and carefully puts it away in a personal knife carrying case after every shift. At The Neighborhood, Rodrigo spent two weeks borrowing Chef Morgan’s high-end German designer knife when he was first assigned to julienne vegetables at the garde manger (cold prep) station. As soon as he could open a credit card, he bought his own knife—and spent the next two months paying it off. “It was worth every penny,” he added, holding the handle of the knife in one hand while gently stroking the gleaming blade with the other. He has yet to use this knife anywhere but at the restaurant. Expending limited personal resources on knives and professional cooking gear furthers the level of commitment cooks make to kitchen careers.28 Purchased gear represents what economists call “sunk costs” in a line of work: an up-front investment that compels an individual to stay the course (in theory, expensive knives wouldn’t be purchased by those who expect to leave the industry in the first place). Other cooks demonstrate a commitment to their craft by seeking incremental opportunities to improve their cooking abilities. Geraldo, the cook described at the start of this chapter, offers the following narrative of his career progress: At McDonald’s, I learned to go super fucking fast. Boom, boom, boom [makes a quick chopping motion with his hand]. Then when I went to the barbecue place. They started telling me, it is really important for you to care [about the customers]. And I also started understanding—funny, I didn’t realize this until now—I started understanding timing.29 Then when I was at the hotel, that’s where I started learning better technique: how to make Italian food, French food. Now here at The Neighborhood, where the food is fancier, I’ve learned much more about plating. How to make food look beautiful.

The way in which Geraldo describes his string of jobs showcases the cumulative knowledge and specific skills he has gained moving from job to job. Different restaurants have provided him with unique opportunities to hone his repertoire of skills in different ways, improving his speed, technique, timing, and plating in the kitchen.30 Acquiring new skills in the kitchen does not always require jumping jobs. Some workers develop their abilities by staying within one estab-

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lishment and waiting to advance to different kitchen stations over time. Pedro, who is a twenty-nine-year-old Mexican American man with short-cropped black hair, says this about his restaurant career thus far: “Simple. Begins and ends at Match, man,” he says. In little more than one year’s time, Pedro has enjoyed several step promotions that have expanded his knowledge of the kitchen operation. He first moved up from washing dishes to prepping basic food goods (e.g., peeling potatoes, chopping onions), then to making dressings, stocks, and sauces. After six months, he was allowed to assemble salads on the main kitchen line. His most recent promotion, which came with a small hourly raise, was to grilling big-ticket items such as steak and pork chops on the line. “If I were to leave? I’m pretty sure I could walk into any restaurant in the city and be in the running for a line job,” he boasts with a nod of his head. For many Latino cooks, the benefits of honing kitchen skills go beyond mere job obligations to become a point of personal pride that they carry with them. Rodrigo started working in the kitchen having had no prior experience cooking whatsoever (he says his mother did all the cooking at home). Here, he recounts his hiring interview with Chef Morgan: I told [Morgan], “I’m not going to lie to you, tell you that I’ve been doing this for this amount of time. I don’t even know how to properly hold a knife.” That’s what I told him. I thought I’d be honest with this dude from the get-go. Or else he’s going to expect way too much of me, way too soon. I told him, “I don’t know how to hold a knife, but I’m a quick learner. You show me how you want something done and I’ll make sure it’s done that way every single time.” So he just told me, “What’s your schedule like?” I said, “I have no job, I don’t go to school. I’ll work seven days a week if you want me to.” He was just like, “Well, come back tomorrow. You’ll work with [sous chef] for a few hours, then we’ll go from there.”

When he was in high school, Rodrigo says he was a troublemaker hanging out with the wrong crowd. Working in restaurants has given him discipline and a specific skill set. Last year for his mother’s birthday— and after two years of working at The Neighborhood—Rodrigo prepared her a grass-fed ribeye steak dinner—perfectly seasoned, seared medium rare, with a side of pomme puree. “Chef gave me a really good discount

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on the steak, and some tips about cooking it on a home stove. When I made it, my mom was like, ‘You made this?!’” He laughs. “She was so impressed.” In higher-end kitchens such as those at Match, Terroir, and The Neighborhood, workers spend months, even years, improving their ability to knead pizza dough, cure porcetta, make soft-scrambled egg omelets, and operate the sous vide machine. Amid discerning chef-mentors and coethnic male peers, developing culinary know-how gives structure to the work, and respect from one’s community of peers.31 Andrew and Geraldo explained this, in separate interviews.32 Andrew said, “For me, the perfect moments in the kitchen are when I can catch one of the chefs, Morgan or Eric, when they want to talk about the food. Like how it is put together, really talk about a dish. That’s really the perfect day. It doesn’t happen very often. Like the other day I got to pick Morgan’s brain about this sauce I was making, and he talked with me about it. Because they are really busy, but they also know so much.” Others had told me that working with Chef Eric can be difficult. When I asked Geraldo why he seemed to enjoy it, he responded, “Because the guy is super fucking talented. He presents his plates in a super nice way. I really love the way he works. I do. And I really want to . . . I would like to reach that level someday.” Both these Latino men find value in the subtler aspects of their craft. Andrew yearns for fleeting mentoring moments with a head chef who is mostly preoccupied with other tasks; Geraldo puts up with a chef whom many of his coworkers, both at the front and at the back of the house, find highly unlikeable due to his gruff personality and propensity to lash out verbally (“he may be an asshole, but the guy is super fucking talented”). Cooks’ devotion to, first, proving, and then subsequently improving themselves on the job is a testament to their long-term commitment to kitchen labor. Yet, few of the skills they display have recognizable value in the broader labor market. Nor are these kitchen-specific skills likely to garner them much prestige in society at large.33 Because the incremental forms of up-skilling that cooks achieve in kitchens do not necessarily come with official certifications, in-house promotions, or even offers of higher wages, it takes the right set of opportunities to display these abilities for workers to even have a chance to capitalize on them (I return to this theme in the next chapter).

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Not all Latino men who work in restaurants are willing to accept the daily grind and the precarious rewards of kitchen labor. Alternately, many bussers, food runners, and barbacks express a commitment to support jobs in restaurants for very different reasons. A thirty-year-old Mexican immigrant named Edgardo told me that Andrew’s idea of seeking a “perfect” moment in the kitchen—with a surly white chef breathing down one’s neck the rest of the time—is not worth his time. He would know: Edgardo worked for years as a line cook at another fast-paced restaurant in the city prior to running food at The Neighborhood. Now with three young children at home, Edgardo says that his current job suits him much better. “I work less hours a week now. And I earn more. ¿Por qué no?” (why not?), he says in broken English. Then, holding his nose and smiling, “And my wife hated the smell when I got home.” Support workers such as Edgardo do not necessarily aspire to climb restaurant job ladders any higher than the rung where they currently are. This reflects where they’ve been and whom they compare themselves to. Relative to their friends and coworkers in the kitchen, they feel that clearing tables, carrying plates of food, and restocking glassware at the bar allow them to maximize their return for time spent at the restaurant. Today, Edgardo enjoys shorter shifts, tip-supplemented earnings, and far less stress. Many of the Latino men who work support jobs at Match, Terroir, and The Neighborhood also have extensive experience in the back of the house. For each, opting out was a calculated decision made with their personal interests in mind. Julio, a fifty-year-old Mexican immigrant, has been bussing tables three days a week at Match for the past two years. He splits time between Match and another Los Angeles–based restaurant, where he has been working as a food runner for the past eight years. Naturally broadshouldered and with tanned brown skin, Julio always arrives to work at Match wearing a plain black polo shirt tucked into faded jeans. It is an outfit that he says he can wear to both jobs. Julio spent the previous decade as a line cook at another restaurant near the Venice boardwalk. When I asked him why he left the kitchen, Julio made a face. “It is so hot in there,” he said, “and my back was always sore.” He said he also struggled to balance work life and family life, as someone in his thirties, father to a young infant. “I’m not going back there again,” he added. Since leaving the kitchen, Julio has also taken to preaching the merits of work-

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ing as a busser or food runner to his former kitchen colleagues, many of whom he still sees regularly outside of work. He has gotten some of them to make the switch. Among the holdouts is Julio’s now-grown son, who, following graduation from high school, has been reluctant to give up his dream of opening his own restaurant in Los Angeles. Julio is far from alone in encouraging his fellow Latino male friends working in restaurants to seek jobs outside the kitchen. At The Neighborhood, a thirty-year-old food runner named Fernando explains his repeated attempts to talk to his kitchen colleagues: I’ve actually tried to tell some of them [Latino cooks] to come work in the front of the house with me before. Like, Jorge especially. Jorge, I see him drinking so much coffee in the kitchen each day, like six or seven cups. And he looks really stressed. So I told him, “Quit all that, and come work out here!” He said he didn’t want to. Same thing with Raul and Geraldo. I told them to work out here [in the dining room]. I’ve told them many, many times. But Raul told me his English isn’t good enough, plus he doesn’t like people. [laughs] He said he wouldn’t know what to do if a customer complained. I told him he could just find me, but he said he’d rather not try. Geraldo—I don’t know why he doesn’t.

Fernando is confident that he has found a better long-term position working in restaurants outside the kitchen. “I have to support my family here. And my parents back in Mexico,” he says. “I try to send them money every month.” Fernando feels he can better support those he cares about by working a job that nets higher earnings per hour and leaves him less physically exhausted at the end of the day. Instead of pulling grueling ten-hour shifts in a hot kitchen, Fernando can bus tables during the brunch shift and have enough energy left to run food at another restaurant for dinner service if he has to. By doing so, he can earn twice as much as a cook working a full day at one restaurant. With their steadfast commitment to working in the restaurant industry, why don’t more Latino men aspire to jobs beyond the browncollar world of work that would offer either higher earnings (serving) or greater stability and benefits (management)? Enrique, a forty-year-old Latino immigrant, provides perspective on the issue. Unlike most of his fellow support workers, Enrique, who speaks fluent English (with an ac-

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cent), had a brief stint working as a restaurant manager and bartender at an upscale gastropub in west Los Angeles. I was making pretty good money, but it was so stressful. Funny . . . the only problem—so crazy—I was so frustrated. When I was working as manager, there were just so many things to do, everybody needs something. This one wants one thing, this one, another. . . . And I had to be like [mimics serving a guest], “Oh, you want me to do this one thing for you?” So, yeah, the money was good but it was so stressful for me, I didn’t like it. I worked as a host too for a while, but it was the same thing. And most people were nice, but then they would get mad every now and then. . . . Eventually, I told the owner I just want to bus tables again. I want to just say “Adios, bye bye” to customers. And so they said sure, and moved me back. Now, if there are any problems with the customers, I just say, “Talk to your server.” That’s it. God bless. [laughs] And that is what I am trying to do at Match too, not have any contact with customers. Because that was what was so stressful.

For Enrique, the challenge of navigating a socially and culturally foreign world of work proved daunting on a daily basis. Moving first into bartending, then into management, garnered him a substantially higher income than he was used to. But it also came with a role of high visibility and responsibility in a dining room full of affluent white people. Structurally, it meant switching from shuttling plates of food out to tables to providing hospitality to the diners sitting at them (which he had far less experience doing). More importantly, the move meant shifting his primary work-based interactions from fellow Latino immigrants—in his native tongue of Spanish—to white diners and front-of-the-house workers. Normally an easy-going person, Enrique found nearly every moment working in this capacity to be stressful (“everybody needs something”). Enrique’s short-lived tenure as a dining room manager meant crossing the social divide in restaurants from a predominantly Latino back of the house to a predominantly white dining room. Each of these worlds of work maintains unequal social and cultural norms from those found in the other. For Enrique, navigating affluent “white space”—to borrow sociologist Elijah Anderson’s term for areas dominated by white

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people—on an everyday basis proved too much to handle over the long run.34 Despite years of familiarity working within restaurants, interacting directly with affluent white guests and coworkers made him constantly feel out of place. In wanting “to just say adios, bye bye” to customers, he, like many of his coethnic, immigrant colleagues in the back of the house, expresses greater comfort within the familiar confines of brown-collar work—albeit at a direct cost to his earnings and future mobility prospects. *** A number of common threads characterize the labor experiences of working-class Latino men employed in the back of the house and in support positions. For one, laboring in structurally subordinate positions that are highly racialized and gendered means that individuals such as Enrique, Andrew, and Manny are surrounded each day by a group of socially similar peers. This in turn shapes the way these workers relate to their jobs. Unlike their front-of-the-house coworkers profiled in the last chapter, many of the cooks, bussers, and food runners in this study are committed to careers within the restaurant industry. They do so despite the low wages and persistently difficult conditions their jobs offer them.35 These same jobs also offer less visible perks, such as strong coethnic camaraderie, the opportunity to display masculinity, and a rewarding sense of loyalty to workplace mentors. Although few of these workers began their restaurant tenures with the intention of pursuing them long term, this is indeed what many first- and second-generation Latino men at Match, Terroir, and The Neighborhood find themselves doing. In the process, restaurant labor provides these individuals with community, skills, and occupational pride—each of which they sharpen through favorable comparisons with their “lazy” and feminized front-of-the-house coworkers. This chapter shows that not all brown-collar restaurant jobs are the same, and workers gravitate towards them for different reasons. Many who work in the back of the house exhibit long-term commitment to building their culinary skills and advancing to higher kitchen posts; those in support jobs say they prefer a less demanding version of restaurant work where they can receive an earnings boost in the form of tips.

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To be clear: the luxury of choice between the two is not always theirs to make.36 Already confined to less desirable, brown-collar restaurant jobs—and excluded from front-of-the-house and management jobs on the basis of their social characteristics—many Latino bussers, food runners, and barbacks have endured working in kitchens in the past. They are also well aware that at any moment they may find themselves out of a job and forced to reconsider toiling in similar capacities again. The story of Enrique suggests that when working-class and foreignborn Latino men attempt to move to more desirable positions beyond brown-collar subworlds of work, the results are mixed. While some find success in doing so, and for particular reasons that I describe in the next chapter, many others are unwilling to navigate jobs that involve constant, stressful interactions with affluent whites who occupy roles as both diners and front-of-the-house workers. In this way, the highestpaying and most visible jobs within restaurants remain firmly white and class-privileged, framed initially by managerial hiring preferences sealed through group boundaries enacted between workers themselves. Working-class Latinos find themselves reconsidering the relative costs and benefits of attempting to operate on the other side of a deeply divided workplace. The past two chapters have revealed how working-class Latino immigrants and class-privileged whites approach their distinctive labor conditions within the same workplace. But at the threshold between these two worlds of work, the barriers that separate them are also selectively porous. The final empirical chapter of this book examines the fraught organizational pathways to mobility that Latino workers at Match, Terroir, and The Neighborhood experience. Under the logic of upscale service expounded by management and reinforced by workers, what allows some Latino workers to forge new mobility pathways and not others?

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“This beer is super-interesting,” says Matías, stroking his beard gently as he holds up a tulip-shaped glass for inspection. “I’m tasting dark chocolate, coffee, and something else I can’t put my finger on. . . . Is that black tea? Yes. And the mouthfeel has a nice chewiness to it.” He pauses. “Damn that’s good.” Matías and I sit at a craft beer bar unwinding after our serving shifts. Matías is twenty-seven years old with slicked-back hair and soft brown eyes. He is a second-generation Mexican American, born and raised in San Diego. He recounts his early experiences working in restaurants: My first job at a real restaurant was as a host at Denny’s. My mother was working there at the time, and she helped get me the interview. I guess you could call it a version of nepotism. Within my first year at Denny’s I got promoted twice. I went from the host stand to bussing tables, then later to serving at a different Denny’s location. Back then, I worked hard—which I think the managers were impressed with. But I was a little shit who also couldn’t stay in school. And I loved being at the restaurant making money.

Matías left Denny’s after two years for a higher-end restaurant in Orange County. There, he worked as a food runner on a support staff full of immigrant Latino men. The job was technically a downgrade from waiting tables, but Matías didn’t mind. The restaurant was fast-paced—much more than Denny’s—and I was learning a lot. I would be shouting out orders to the kitchen in Spanish, talking in all slang, calling each other nicknames like “Cochino” and “Perro.” [laughs] At the same time, I’d be marking off tickets and directing traffic, giving servers instructions on where to go with the food. It was bustling, and I was in the middle of it. Which was really cool. 132

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It was at this restaurant where Matías first became fascinated with “highend” food and drink. He didn’t just learn to identify them coming out of the kitchen and from the bar; he learned to appreciate their flavors while hanging out after the restaurant closed with servers and bartenders who were white men and women roughly his age. “That’s where I learned to tell an IPA from an Amber, a ribeye from a New York strip, and a scotch from a Canadian whiskey,” Matías says. Today, Matías balances his time between bartending and managing a boutique beer and wine store. He is also studying to become a beer sommelier (a Certified Cicerone ). “At first, my mom didn’t understand what I was doing,” Matías says. “She wanted me to go to college like my brothers, not work in restaurants like her. But she saw I was making more than she does, and that I enjoy my job. So I think now, she, and my father too, support what I want to do.”

®

*** As Matías’s case reveals, although Latinos face formidable challenges to their advancement up job hierarchies within restaurants, these challenges do not weigh equally on all such workers. Working-class, immigrant Latino men bear the brunt of the consequences of a workplace divided into two unequal worlds of work. Confined to a brown-collar world of work by both managerial actions and coworker relations, these individuals find themselves laboring in either low-paying kitchen jobs or subordinate roles within the dining room. However, these workplace conditions can also be a source of unexpected opportunity for individuals able to leverage their social and structural position within them. Matías, for instance, has developed ties to front- and back-of-the-house workers, and has gained valuable resources from both groups. As a result of these benefits, coupled with his own personal ambitions, he has received offers to join the front of the house or become a supervisor. Meanwhile, his foreign-born mother is still at Denny’s earning meager wages that have not changed for years. What allows some Latino workers to move up within occupational hierarchies and access higher-earning restaurant jobs while others remain confined to low-level jobs? Part of the answer lies in the social context of this workplace. The estrangement between immigrant Latino cooks and white, college-educated servers at Match, Terroir, and The Neighborhood poses significant problems behind the scenes. It creates

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what sociologists call a structural hole—a gap in network connectivity where communication and resources cannot flow.1 People who can link together disconnected clusters of workers within the workplace increase their value to management—think of why people pay translators. Managers need workers who can function as “bridges” in order to keep their operation going smoothly. The more culturally assimilated that worker is within an organization—knowledgeable about how things work and able to move fluidly among those who work there—the more power they gain within this environment: coworkers, too, may appreciate the value of having others around who can lubricate social relations in the workplace.2 By contrast, workers who are socially isolated within an organization can find themselves cut off from the flow of information and opportunities. They risk becoming moored in place and excluded from the very types of material and social resources that would help them improve their labor situation.3 Some working-class Latinos also enjoy greater access to higherearning and more visible jobs in restaurants based on their personal characteristics. While managers continue to use race (whiteness) and class-coded (upper-middle) ideals as powerful screening mechanisms when hiring for more desirable, customer-facing jobs, they also seek individuals who represent a good fit for their particular service brand. In establishments that cater to a young, professional clientele, as is the case with Match and its brand of proximal service, this can give prospective hires who embody of-the-milieu tastes, fashionable appearances, and “cool” sensibilities an edge for these jobs.4 Matías may not be white and college educated, but managers might still believe that he “looks good and sounds right” for front-of-the-house jobs for reasons that go beyond racialized and classed criteria. Later-generation Latino workers also bring different attributes to the workplace compared to their foreign-born Latino colleagues. This, too, may help them access higher-paying positions within the organizational hierarchy.5 The vast majority of second-generation Latinos, for instance, are bilingual in Spanish and English—a linguistic skill that proves particularly advantageous in labor markets with large foreign-born, monolingual populations.6 For example, Villa and Villa found that 62 percent of employers in a New Mexico border region either required or strongly preferred those with Spanish-English bilingual abilities.7 Employers per-

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ceived bilingual workers as able to better communicate with not only their Spanish-speaking customers but also Spanish-speaking employees within the workplace. Later-generation Latinos average substantially more years of education than their foreign-born counterparts. This makes them eligible for new types of positions that pay more within the same workplace.8 Beyond linguistic proficiencies, those who come of age in the United States are more likely to possess Americanized demeanors, appearances, and sensibilities that employers value, especially for customer service roles.9 US-born Latino workers enjoy a greater range of opportunities at Match, Terroir, and The Neighborhood than their foreign-born counterparts. By leveraging in-betweenness in the workplace, comprised of bilingual skills, bicultural sensibilities, and diverse network ties, some of these individuals have advanced to positions beyond a brown-collar world of work. Many of their foreign-born colleagues, by contrast, circulate within back-of-the-house and support jobs where they must rely on a series of lateral moves to attempt to improve their employment situation. Those confined to bottom-rung service jobs—or as I put it, “stuck in the back closet”—suffer from compounded forms of disadvantage within restaurants. These individuals are more likely to be foreign born, undocumented, female, Spanish monolingual, and lacking professional kitchen skills. Any one of these characteristics alone would challenge a worker’s ability to advance to better-quality jobs. But when these characteristics are coupled together, workers become dramatically less desirable to management and estranged from their coworkers. By closely examining who gets ahead and who remains stuck in place within Match, Terroir, and The Neighborhood, the final empirical chapter of this book draws together issues of social inequality, skills, and occupational mobility within the production of service.

Leveraging In-Betweenness Accessing Jobs through the Back Door Perla, a Latina woman who arrived in Los Angeles at the age of six, recalls looking for a job after graduating high school without a clue what she wanted to do.10 She knew she needed to start making some money.

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“My uncle Xeno was working as a cook at the time [at Match],” Perla explains. “He said, uh, why don’t you come work with me at the restaurant? So I was like, I don’t know, sure!” Xeno, who has been described in previous chapters, did the rest. Two weeks later, she arrived for her first day of work at Match. Victor’s entrée into restaurants was similar. Then a skinny, nineteenyear-old, second-generation Mexican American, he relied on help from his older cousin to get him a restaurant job. His cousin was a food runner at Match at the time, and would tell Victor that the work was easy, and the money was good. When Victor expressed interest, his cousin did him a favor by telling management, “He is a good kid and a hard worker.” Perla and Victor were able to bypass formal hiring channels to land their restaurant jobs by tapping into social connections to the Latino men who work as cooks, bussers, and dishwashers. Drawing on their coethnic networks—uncles, cousins, brothers—both these young adults received informal job training from the incumbent workers who helped them secure the job. “When I got there, all management said to me was, ‘Wear a black shirt and shadow your cousin,’” says Victor, recalling his first few days at Match. His cousin showed him how to clear tables, carry more than one plate at once, and move around the dining room quickly without bumping into people. After demonstrating to management that he could perform these tasks sufficiently, Victor joined the full-time support staff at Match. He was penned into the schedule for four lunch shifts the following week. Perla remembers first training at the dishwashing station. She was eighteen at the time and working alongside Xeno, whose job back then consisted primarily of chopping heaps of potatoes and onions before meal service. Xeno showed Perla the basics: how to scrub excess food off plates, how to operate the automated dishwashing machine (without getting burned by the steam), and how to clean up the station afterwards. “Most of all, he taught me how to move fast, because I didn’t know what I was doing back then,” she laughs. Her first few weeks flew by as a trial-by-fire. While later-generation Latinos such as Victor and Perla enjoy insider access to restaurant employment and informal training through their coethnic ties, leaning so heavily on these resources comes double edged.

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Drawing on ethnic resources all but guarantees that the children of immigrants will begin their restaurant employment at the bottom of the workplace hierarchy: in brown-collar back-of-the-house and support jobs. These workers find themselves constrained by what sociologist Mark Granovetter calls “embeddedness”: social networks with limited range and few linkages to valuable resources.11 Victor and Perla, through no fault of their own, were fast-tracked into marginalized restaurant jobs alongside immigrant Latino men with low levels of formal education. Social ties provide the children of immigrants with an initial foothold of employment that might otherwise be challenging to secure with no prior experience. But these same resources alone do not help them advance to better-quality jobs.

“I’m Not about to Just Keep Doing This”: Strategizing Advancement With few exceptions, later-generation Latino workers at Match, Terroir, and The Neighborhood do not want to stay in lower-rung restaurant jobs for very long. Despite the initial perks of working alongside family members and childhood friends, many soon realize that the work is hard and monotonous, and the pay too low by their standards. This was the case with Jorge, a twenty-three-year-old, second-generation Latino cook: Jorge: After working garde manger [pantry station] for, like, a year and a half, I kinna got irritated. EW: Why? J: I just felt like I wasn’t learning anything new. I knew the entire station already, and I told [the head chef], am I ever going to get trained on something else? Because this is making me kinna want to leave, if I’m not going to learn anything else. EW: Good for you for speaking up. J: Yeah, I thought they were going to move me up on their own. But when they never did, I was like, aw fuck this, I’m not about to just keep doing this. And I told [sous chef], too, I don’t want to work garde ma any more. . . . Then I got my raise and I was still like, I want to do something else. So I told him, “Put me on something else.” Because if I do the same thing over and over again, I’m just going to get bored and want to leave.

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Jorge aspires to employment in restaurants that will offer him better pay and more prestige. He is willing to work hard and put in the time—so long as he keeps moving up the ranks. While Jorge’s current job as pantry cook (overseeing the garde manger) is several notches above the one he started as (prep cook), he views it as a stepping stone to the kind of positions in the kitchen that are central to the operation, such as that of lead grill cook or kitchen manager. The same goes for Pedro, an affable, twenty-nine-year-old man born in Los Angeles to immigrant Mexican parents. Pedro was first hired at Match as a dishwasher after spending years working odd jobs for underthe-table cash at a nearby marina. “Before here, none of my other jobs lasted more than like eight months. Or they were just summertime gigs, you know?” he says. “I wanted something—anything, at first—that was more permanent.” In spite of his rickety resume and lack of industry experience, Pedro landed a job as a dishwasher. He explains what happened next: They asked me, “Do you want to learn to cook?” I said, “For sure!” And they let me start handling food. Three months later, [sous chef] comes up to me when I was prepping and asks me what I would think about working pantry. And I said, “Hell yeah.” They knead the pizza dough, do the salads, handle the porcetta. And once you accomplish that, then you move to making pizzas. Right there, that’s the top of the heap, you know? That’s where I wanted to be.

Pedro has a clear grasp of the kitchen hierarchy, and has set his sights on reaching the top. During his rise up the back-of-the-house ranks, he has passed a number of his foreign-born coworkers along the way. He argues that it is ambition that sets him apart, his drive to become the best now that he has made a commitment to the kitchen life. In order to reach his goals, as Pedro told me somewhat ominously, he is willing to “do what is necessary.” For other later-generation Latinos, getting ahead in restaurants means leaving the confines of the kitchen or support roles in the dining room. Victor, the food runner described earlier, has no intentions of reaching the top of the kitchen hierarchy. Instead, Victor wants to become a certified car mechanic. It is something he is currently working towards when

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he is away from the restaurant by taking part-time classes at a nearby technical college. Victor and I talk while we wait for the next series of dishes to run at the kitchen pass adjacent to the dining room. “I’m trying to make the most out of working here,” Victor says. He explains that he sees himself working as both a line cook and a server at Match. “I’d really like to alternate between the two jobs. I figure, to learn how to cook while I’m here? That’s probably a good thing to know when I get older,” he says. “So I told Chef Eddie that I want to work the line, you know, work some shifts as a cook, some as a runner.” He has also talked to a front-of-the-house manager about becoming a server. “Serving is where the money’s at,” Victor muses. “The servers here make a bunch of money in tips.” Given his ambitious goals at Match, I am surprised to hear that Victor doesn’t expect to stay in restaurants very long. “I wanna be out of here in less than a year, that’s for sure. No way am I gonna stay here long term. I should have my mechanic’s certification by this summer [2013], then hopefully I can work in a shop after that.”

Like Pedro and Jorge, Victor sees his current job as a stepping-stone to greater opportunities. Unlike them, he feels these opportunities are outside the restaurant industry. Victor maintains short-term, opportunistic goals for his time at Match: learning to cook would be “useful,” and serving tables would yield quick cash. Neither interferes with his longer-term plans for stable employment at a local car repair shop. Despite their relative advantages, later-generation Latinos have had mixed success accessing jobs in the white world of work after beginning their occupational journeys in back-of-the-house or support jobs. The struggles that Antonio faced are a good example of this. When I first met Antonio in 2012, he told me he wanted to become a server at Match. At the time he was twenty-three, the oldest son of two Mexican immigrants. Like Victor, Antonio was quickly promoted from bussing tables to running food—he was, by all accounts, a quick learner, and his in-betweenness allowed him to socialize well with both cooks and servers.12 Within six months, Antonio began speaking to management about joining the ranks of the servers he worked alongside every day in the dining room. The general manager seemed open to it. “He kept tell-

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ing me, okay, okay, just be patient,” said Antonio. Yet, on two separate occasions, Antonio watched helplessly as management hired new servers who were uniformly young white men and women. No offer to train him was made. Antonio grew increasingly impatient at being passed over. Facing repeated “delays” to his promotion, he began looking for serving jobs elsewhere. Two months later, and after I had arrived back from a trip out of town, I found out that Antonio had abruptly quit. He had also gotten hired as a server just down the street. While Antonio was able to get the job he wanted, doing so meant leaving behind Match and all of his connections there. The ambitions that later-generation Latino workers bring with them to restaurant jobs are indicative of their cultural in-betweenness. Coming of age in Los Angeles, Victor, Pedro, and Antonio are less willing to tolerate low-paying service jobs as workaday line cooks and bussers than their foreign-born colleagues are.13 Instead, many later-generation Latino workers adopt a “move up or move on” career mentality. As Antonio most clearly demonstrates, they are willing to look for better opportunities elsewhere should their advancement within a restaurant be deemed insufficient or frustratingly slow.14 The ways in which later-generation Latinos view their jobs are both similar to and different from those of their college-educated, white coworkers. Victor’s loose commitment to restaurant work, for example, resembles that of his front-of-the-house coworkers who blend various pursuits alongside their serving jobs and don’t want to be seen as “just” a restaurant worker.15 Neither they nor Victor would want to work as a busser or line cook for decades. Yet Victor’s career aspirations are also far more working-class and blue-collar (car mechanic) than his socially privileged, front-of-the-house colleagues’, which range from actor to entrepreneur to architect. Victor’s approach to restaurant work is conditioned by his upbringing in a poor, immigrant household, not by middle-class institutions in the suburbs.

Brokering Communication Later- generation Latinos draw on their social and cultural inbetweenness to interact closely with different groups of workers at the restaurant. Many socialize easily with members of the front of the house

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and back of the house, and can broker communication between the two. At Match, for instance, Antonio and Anthony (cook) are among the few Latino men who eat lunch alongside the white servers and bartenders. When they finish eating, Antonio and Anthony trade English for Spanish to join a group of middle-aged Mexican cooks who often take a quick breather just around the corner from the back kitchen, in an area where diners (and managers) do not see them. The social currency that many later-generation Latinos possess in the workplace comes with substantial advantages. During meal service, it allows them to aid management by functioning as everyday cultural brokers, lubricating interactions between the front of the house and the back of the house. Part of the reason why Pedro, the line cook described earlier, has enjoyed a rapid series of kitchen promotions despite no prior restaurant experience has been what he is able to do away from the grill. He is a connector. During busy lunch rushes, Spanish-speaking cooks seeking to communicate with the white chef (whose Spanish is limited) turn to Pedro first. Pedro calmly listens to the cook—while remaining focused on the food—and translates his colleague’s statement into English for the chef (“Chef, Carlos says the fryer is running too hot, that’s why the french fries keep burning”). Pedro plays a similar role brokering communication between servers and cooks who do not speak the same language. On multiple occasions, I witnessed white servers bypass managers and other monolingual Spanish-speaking cooks to approach Pedro directly with a customized food order. Hardly looking up, Pedro would shout out to the other line cooks and relay the message in Spanish. Through his inbetweenness, Pedro quickly gained a reputation as one of the informal leaders of the kitchen. As one of my server colleagues aptly put it, “Pedro is the point-man who can hook you up when you need something.” Judging by his promotions, Pedro’s value has not gone unnoticed. Perla also operates as a social bridge at the restaurant. When she is around, Perla’s workstation in the hallway, which connects the server station to the kitchen pantry, turns into a buzzing social hub. Cooks and servers exchange jokes and pass bites of food or shots of orange juice (occasionally, beer) with one another. For once, the workplace feels communal and not divided. Perla is at the center of all this. Much like Matías, who led off this chapter, Perla facilitates social interaction by translating jokes and compliments between Spanish and English, de-

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lighting everyone with her carefree laughter. On her days off, these same employees rarely interact, finding it altogether too difficult to manage their social, linguistic, and occupational asymmetries. Other later-generation Latino workers act as go-betweens for Englishspeaking managers who need to communicate with Spanish-speaking back-of-the-house workers. At The Neighborhood, two Los Angeles– born bilingual employees function in this capacity. Felipe, a twenty-twoyear-old, second-generation Latino cook, accompanies Chef Carlton when he needs to talk with the morning dishwashers, who do not speak English. “The woman who works back there reminds me of my mother,” he told me. “So I try to be really patient with her.” A Mexican American woman who works as a host offers similar services: on one occasion, I witnessed this woman sitting in on an interview between Chef Morgan and a potential back-of-the-house hire. The interviewee was a Latino man who was speaking in Spanish. So, too, was Chef Morgan—albeit in short, broken sentences. “He likes to have me there [listening in] if I’m working that day, just in case,” she said. Later-generation Latinos such as Pedro, Perla, and Matías play an invaluable role brokering communication between two estranged worlds of work in the workplace. They help foster a more cohesive employee culture while simultaneously bridging organizational communication for managers. Nonetheless, the material payoff for their in-betweenness is uneven. While Pedro and Matías have enjoyed a series of promotions in the kitchen and into the front of the house, respectively, Perla remains uncompensated for her contributions. In a workplace where managers are prone to seeing these individuals as a fit for brown-collar jobs and little else, brokering communication is often not enough to guarantee that Latino workers will be given a chance at occupational mobility.

Displaying Coolness Later-generation Latinos who work support jobs in the dining room recognize that making “good money”—to borrow Victor’s expression— means accessing highly tipped server and bartender positions. Because of the racialized and classed standards that management expounds for these jobs, the children of immigrants face similar barriers of access as their foreign-born colleagues do. Managers expect that successful

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front-of-the-house workers will not simply recite the daily specials, but perform them with ease when with wealthy, white diners. This in turn favors college-educated, white men and women (as detailed in chapter 1). But later-generation Latino workers possess other sociocultural traits that, when coupled with the characteristics described earlier, give these individuals an advantage in accessing restaurant jobs outside of the brown-collar world of work. Management expects servers and bartenders to be conversant about the latest in pop culture, able to dress and groom in fashionable ways, and able to speak English confidently. Arturo got a job serving tables after working a decade as a busser and food runner at a handful of different Los Angeles restaurants. Arturo, who was raised in the city, always arrives to work wearing a white collared shirt, neatly pressed with sleeves rolled up to his elbows, exposing brawny forearms. According to servers I talked to, Arturo has mastered how to “read tables,” industry-speak for tailoring one’s service to the unique needs of each group of diners. He engages some guests by leading off with jokes and an easy smile, laughing about last night’s Dodgers game. With others, he remains reserved, speaking in quiet tones while deftly whisking away dirty plates. Despite being born in Mexico to parents who never graduated high school, Arturo’s command of American dining etiquette, his unaccented English, and his LA-inflected social knowledge afford him a rich cultural “toolkit” from which to perform dining room service.16 Other later-generation Latinos have also advanced to customerfacing positions by embodying ideals for specific service brands that go beyond whiteness and middle-classness. For example, Antonio, the second-generation Latino man who left Match for a serving job elsewhere, has a taste for the “hipster” fashion popular in nearby Venice Beach. When I worked with him, Antonio used to arrive at the restaurant wearing colorful plaid button-down shirts draped over brightly colored fitted t-shirts, ripped jeans, and Vans-brand skater shoes. While other bussers and food runners would settle in chatting with cooks during meal breaks (in Spanish), Antonio would hang around with servers to talk about exciting new bar openings in the area. Before Antonio left Match, many servers felt that he possessed the right characteristics to fit in on the front-of-the-house staff at Match despite the color of his skin and his working-class background. According to a server named

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Mary, “[Antonio] has what it takes. He just knows how to treat customers. Like, he speaks perfect English. And he does the little things well [she demonstrates setting a plate down on a table gently]. He even looks the part, you know? I think it’s only a matter of time before he gets promoted” (my emphasis). Antonio did not, of course, get the promotion to the front of the house that Mary expected him to. But the fact that he was offered a server job at a similar restaurant blocks away illustrates how Antonio embodies—or at least closely approximates—the social and cultural characteristics that management seeks for trendier service brands in ways that his immigrant Latino coworkers do not. Antonio had to be specially invited to join this privileged world of work, and for reasons that ultimately help maintain its exclusivity. Sally, the affable Latina server introduced in chapter 1, is a staple on the breakfast and lunch shifts at The Neighborhood. Unlike Antonio, Sally does not speak Spanish, nor does she dress in a way that screams “cool.” She embodies The Neighborhood’s brand of personalized luxury service in other ways. Sally pairs her upbeat demeanor in the dining room with an encyclopedic and instinctual knowledge of guests’ names, favorite tables, and typical orders. Tableside, she kneels down next to kids, addressing them by name and offering them little gifts such as orange juice (in a plastic cup), portable games, and occasionally a cookie from the restaurant’s bakery. “It is easy for me to connect with the parents of these children because of my son,” she explains. Guests love Sally’s warm presence in the dining room, and in turn, management loves her. Despite never completing her associate’s degree in cosmetology from a local community college, Sally possesses the right demeanor and soft skills to succeed in her customer service role at The Neighborhood.

Profiting from Diverse Ties Later-generation Latinos use in-betweenness to foster meaningful ties with individuals outside the brown-collar world of work. These diverse connections help them gain powerful advocates in the workplace who can provide them with the tangible and intangible resources that are key to their advancement. As a food runner, Victor spends his down time waiting for finished plates of food to arrive at the expeditor station near the kitchen pass. It

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is an area that servers frequently occupy, looking to help bring food to their diners faster. As a result of his spatial proximity to the front-ofthe-house staff, Victor has overheard, and occasionally participated in, numerous conversations about the high tips servers and bartenders receive each day. This has made him increasingly frustrated with his paltry share of the tips. Victor calculates that he takes home roughly a third of what servers make in tips at the same restaurant. Being around the white men and women in the front of the house has also provided something else: it has allowed him to carefully study how these individuals do their jobs. Victor has gained confidence in his own ability to wait tables in the process. “It’s pretty simple what they do,” he told me after work one day. “I mean, I can do that for sure: just bullshit with customers, get them what they want, then make a bunch of tips.” This is, of course, what he perceives Charlie, Erin, and Moore to be doing on a daily basis. Observing these servers at work has helped peel back the layers that make this labor difficult to understand for many of Victor’s immigrant coworkers in the back of the house. Working in direct proximity to individuals who operate in more lucrative and visible capacities at the restaurant has helped Perla in similar ways. Throughout her two years working at Match, she has befriended many servers, especially women, who enjoy hanging out and talking with her during their shifts. Annabelle and Susie regularly suggest that Perla ask a manager to see if she can become a server herself. One afternoon I overheard Annabelle saying, “Practice approaching me with drink orders, Perla!” Perla shook her head with a sheepish grin, her cheeks turning red. Susie was unrelenting. “You can do it!” she said. “C’mon, you’d be great. It’s easy! Just watch me.” Perla has yet to follow her server-friends’ advice in inquiring about a front-of-the-house opening. But the positive reinforcement and ad hoc training she receives through her connection to these class-privileged white women could influence the way she chooses her career path. The same goes for Manny, the food-runner-turned-cook described in the last chapter, who benefited tremendously from his relationship with Michael, his former dining room manager. Manny views many of the lessons Michael taught him about fine-dining service as invaluable, and nothing like what he had learned after years working as a busser in other restaurants:

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When I first started, I didn’t know how to grab three plates, how to bring food to the table. I didn’t know any of that. Serve from the left, pick up from the right. Basically, manners. That kind of etiquette of dining. That is what Michael taught me. I didn’t know nothin’ about tannins, a nice sauvignon blanc, rosé, pinot noir. Michael was a brother of mine. He taught me how to serve food, describe a dish. Say different words about a plate when you serve it. Instead of saying, “These are chili fries,” saying, “These are some hand-cut fries with a house-made cheese.” Stuff like that.

Manny’s fond recollection of Michael illustrates how he feels he personally gained from his “cultural apprenticeship” with this veteran fine-dining manager. Unlike many of Manny’s front-of-the-house colleagues—for whom dining out at a “fancy” restaurant is a special occasion—little of this higher-class socialization was part of Manny’s childhood. Moreover, few formal opportunities (e.g., training, workshops) exist at any restaurant he has worked at to develop the “right” social and cultural comportment necessary to access front-of-the-house or supervisory jobs. Without Michael’s guidance, it would have been hard to conceive of management offering Manny the chance to become a daytime server at The Neighborhood (Manny declined the offer, opting for a kitchen job instead). Later-generation Latinos such as Manny benefit from their diverse social relations with both coethnic and non-Latino workers in the workplace. Finding support from individuals with higher social, cultural, and human capital can be a critical factor in helping them advance to more desirable jobs. This is especially true for Latinos from working-class backgrounds who may otherwise lack the intangible resources to navigate the cultural standards of higher-end institutions.17 Unfortunately, these opportunities rarely exist for workers who remain confined in the brown-collar world of work in restaurants.

The Immigrant Ceiling Unlike their later-generation counterparts, many foreign-born Latinos are confined in a brown-collar world of work enclosed by a racialized and classed ceiling to their occupational mobility. These individuals lack the attributes that would allow them to forge inroads to more prominent

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positions occupied primarily by class-privileged whites. They possess neither the measured “etiquette” that Manny now understands (courtesy of Michael) nor the valuable ability to function as a cultural broker, as Pedro does (cultivated through his bicultural upbringing in Los Angeles). Instead, many foreign-born cooks, dishwashers, bussers, and cleaners have circulated within the same kinds of jobs for years. Facing constrained opportunities, immigrant Latino men at Match, Terroir, and The Neighborhood do their best to increase their earnings by looking outwards, beyond the restaurant, instead of upwards within them.18 Many back-of-the-house and support workers acquire second and third jobs elsewhere rather than attempt in vain to access more lucrative positions within the white, class-privileged world of work in their midst. As a result, the daily work routines these individuals maintain can be exhausting. One cook, a thirty-seven-year-old Mexican immigrant, estimates that he works over eighty hours a week between his two jobs. He is employed as a full-time cook at The Neighborhood, where he works breakfast and lunch; he is also a full-time cook at another nearby restaurant during dinner service. He arrives at The Neighborhood at 6:00 a.m. and works until 2:30 p.m. with one break. He tries to take a quick nap in his car before heading to his second job at 4:00 p.m. “If I am lucky, I’ll get out just before midnight,” he said. “Then do it over again tomorrow.” Edgardo, the busser introduced in the last chapter, puts in similar work hours, albeit arranged differently. Edgardo arrives early for the dinner shift at The Neighborhood four days a week, fresh from having completed hours of maintenance work at a large apartment complex in central Los Angeles. It is the same complex where he and his family rent a small, three-bedroom unit. “Because I do repairs at the apartment, the landlord makes my rent only half. I like it. Here? [points down] This work is easy. And I’m still healthy,” he says, raising his arm and making a muscle. To be sure, a number of immigrant men at Match, Terroir, and The Neighborhood say they have received small promotions in the back of the house or hourly raises from managers.19 But they feel these modest perks do not match the considerable skills and experience they have gained over the years. These skills now make them valuable additions to any kitchen team or support staff, a point that some workers have been

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able to capitalize on. Geraldo, the line cook who began his restaurant career at McDonald’s, offers perspective: “Nowadays, I know what I’m worth to the company. I didn’t get that when I was younger, I just wanted any job. [laughs] I was stupid. Now I know what experience I bring in the kitchen. And I want to get paid for it.” Geraldo understands that it can be challenging for chefs to find and retain skilled and hard-working back-of-the-house employees.20 In the summer of 2016, he decided to test just how important he was to The Neighborhood, and Morgan, the head chef, more specifically. He threatened to quit his job in order to join some former coworkers at a new restaurant that had opened nearby (headed by one of The Neighborhood’s former sous chefs). “When I said I was leaving—especially to that place—Chef Morgan begged me to stay. He said, I’ll give you whatever you want. Just don’t leave.” Morgan offered him an extra dollar an hour (to sixteen dollars per hour, the highest wage of any cook at The Neighborhood in 2016), as well as the freedom to choose what shifts he worked each week. Geraldo accepted the counteroffer—and learned more about his market worth in the process. Other cooks, bussers, and food runners use strategies to squeeze more earnings out of their restaurant jobs without leaving the world of work they know. As Jacqueline Hagan, Ruben Hernández-León, and Jean-Luc Demonsant argue, job jumping can be a viable strategy for Latino immigrants who lack formal skill credentials to obtain better offers to do similar work.21 One cook told me that despite being at The Neighborhood for three years, he still gets calls “every week” from former employers and kitchen colleagues asking if he would be interested in leaving his current job to come work with them (I could not verify whether this was true). So far, he said he had turned them all down, professing loyalty to The Neighborhood and its team of chefs. “It is good to know that I have options. Who knows what will happen in the future,” he said. The cases described above illustrate how immigrant Latino workers are able to secure incremental wage gains and small promotions within a brown-collar world of work. Geraldo, Edgardo, and others have all managed to make the most out of their circumstances in ways that require hard work and learned skills mixed with entrepreneurial savvy.22 Their cases also illustrate the racialized and classed occupational ceiling that immigrant Latino men face in a workplace where management views

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them principally as a source of subordinate labor. Fifty-cent wage gains and internal job title changes aside, these workers struggle to access jobs earmarked for people who do not look or sound like them. Jon, the Veracruzano line cook at Terroir, has secured his place as Chef Jeremy’s “right-hand man” through years of loyal service and hard work. It is a role of responsibility and authority that he is very proud of: Jon now helps Jeremy translate during interviews with all prospective back-of-the-house hires who don’t speak English. Lately, however, Jon has grown frustrated with his circumstance. He feels he is stuck. “I’ve been with [Chef] all these years, cooking his food, making his reputation,” Jon explains to me, “but where is my name, after all? It is nowhere on any of [Chef’s] restaurants, not even as sous chef or chef de cuisine or something. It’s like I don’t exist.” Jon’s situation illustrates the limits to brown-collar mobility within the workplace. It also illustrates the social credentials that often accompany formal ones surrounding honorific kitchen titles (“chef de cuisine”) at high-end restaurants, which are filled overwhelmingly by white men.23 Jon’s status as the chef’s “right-hand man” has proven to be an internal, and informal, designation (Terroir’s lone sous chef was a white man, who left after two months). His years of helping lead Chef Jeremy’s acclaimed kitchens, mentoring countless Latino cooks along the way, has amounted to little professional recognition for himself that could have helped secure his own career advancement. Geraldo may have also hit a similar snag at The Neighborhood despite his recent raise. Similarly to Jon, Geraldo has made it near the top of the line in the cook hierarchy by exhibiting leadership and considerable culinary skills. But after three years of his heading “the a.m. team” of cooks in the kitchen, the only workers above him are the restaurant’s two sous chefs and the head chef. All are culinary school–trained white men who, on a spatial and functional level, spend more time standing outside the kitchen directing traffic than cooking. Geraldo, meanwhile, labors directly opposite these chefs while he mans the grill, head angled downward in concentration. At sixteen dollars an hour, Geraldo is making a much nicer living than he was over a decade ago flipping burgers at McDonald’s for minimum wage. He respects the kitchen hierarchy, but fears he can advance no further, stymied by an occupational ceiling etched with race and class traits he does not possess. Before I left The

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Neighborhood in April 2016, Geraldo described to me his increasing frustration with one of the sous chefs, a white man, at the restaurant: My thing is, you as a sous chef, I know that you are holding a bigger level [of responsibility], but you also have to show how you got there. And you have to be able to teach, to mentor. To approach people in a different way other than being a fucking dick. And that was what pissed me off. He will make himself a sandwich while we are busting ass setting up all the stations. And he’ll make that sandwich for himself and be a dick, then yell at us for not being ready! And so when he would do that, I would yell back at him many, many times. But right now, I let him be, I don’t see him as a sous chef. How he got named sous chef, it’s a question on my mind. [shrugs] Why is he a sous chef?

As Geraldo sees it, if promotions within the kitchen were based on skill and leadership, there would be little reason why he should continue to take orders from the man he describes above. It is not that he expects one of the sous chefs to step down, or that he alone is deserving of a promotion among the dozens of Latino cooks working at The Neighborhood, for that matter. Instead, Geraldo feels he has no choice but to bide his time. Doing so may be fruitless, if Jon’s situation is any indication. In a workplace where desirable jobs are earmarked for white men with expensive culinary degrees, the blockade for immigrant Latinos with low levels of formal education is systematic, not circumstantial. It is not one that Jon and Geraldo are likely to overcome by simply “waiting it out” or trying harder. As a case in point, three months after Geraldo and I spoke on this topic, a sous chef position at The Neighborhood did open up. Geraldo, to his disappointment (and my own), was not considered for the job. A similar occupational ceiling exists for immigrant Latino men working in the dining room. Regardless of their proficiency as bussers, food runners, and barbacks, few penetrate the ranks of the frontof-the-house staff—jobs reserved for class-privileged whites by both management’s discriminatory hiring standards and workers’ own enactment of group boundaries. In the dining room, managers, customers, and even fellow workers perceive that immigrant Latino men

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simply “belong” in lower-level positions. One manager, for instance, was fond of referring to support workers as “eses,” Spanish slang used in this context as “bros” or “dudes.” He meant it playfully, even affectionately. Yet by categorizing bussing tables and running food as jobs done by “eses,” this manager invokes social categories of labor that sharply differentiate brown-collar work from middle-class white work. Bringing out food to diners may be only a small step away from assisting diners with ordering, but rarely over the course of six years did I witness management consider an “ese”—always a Latino man—for promotion along these lines. Comparing the work trajectories of immigrant Latino men to those of class-privileged white men and women in restaurants illustrates the divergent pathways each takes to get there. Young, college-educated white men and women obtain front-of-the-house jobs in one of two ways. Some get hired directly into the front-of-the-house ranks, having worked in similar capacities at other restaurants (Charlie and Farah, the servers discussed in chapter 3, are good examples of this). For others with more limited restaurant experience, management may offer them an entry-level customer service position, such as barista, host, or cashier, or ask them to spend a short stint working a support job. These job pathways are also gendered. White men more often start as dishwashers and food runners before quickly moving up to front-of-the-house jobs (though not necessarily at the same restaurant), whereas white women enter the industry as hosts and baristas prior to becoming servers (and, less commonly, bartenders). The ease with which white, class-privileged men and women gain access to front-of-the-house jobs sharply contrasts the experiences of the few immigrant Latino men employed as servers and bartenders at Match, Terroir, and The Neighborhood. Rudolfo, a forty-seven-year-old Mexican immigrant, has been a server for one year at The Neighborhood. He regularly works weekday lunches, five shifts a week (“I never miss a day of work,” he says). Prior to this job, Rudolfo worked at several other restaurants in the city as a busser, food runner, and—for the past decade—a bartender at a high-end Italian restaurant called Deluca’s. Despite his years of front-of-the-house experience, every time Rudolfo looks for a new job, he is offered only support jobs. He explains his recent work history this way:

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Rudolfo: After Deluca closed, I started working at this place up the street as a busser called Biletta. EW (surprised): As a busser? R: Yeah. EW: But weren’t you used to more money as a bartender at Deluca’s? R: It was hard. It was hard. It was like starting from the beginning. Because at Deluca’s, I had my beautiful schedule, had my TV at the bar, a chance to taste wine and food, blah blah blah. . . . Deluca’s closed after twenty-two years. I worked there for eleven years. And in fact, Katie [manager at The Neighborhood] saw me working at another restaurant afterwards, and she was the one that eventually helped me get a job here at The Neighborhood. I was a busser over there. EW: Couldn’t you have told the manager that you were previously a bartender? R: Like I said, every restaurant is different. That’s the reason. I mean, my goal was to be a bartender eventually, you know. But I wanted to see how they work first, if they make good money . . . EW: What position did you apply for? R: Bartender. But they said, “No, we don’t have any available. Would you like to work as a busser instead?” And I took it. Then six months later, Katie saw me, and told me, “Would you like to come work over here?” The position they had open was busser too. So I started as a busser at The Neighborhood three days a week.

As a bartender at Deluca’s, Rudolfo was used to making two hundred dollars in tips per night while working a schedule custom-fit for his needs. Since Deluca’s closed, hiring managers at other restaurants have all tried to steer him back into the brown-collar world of work for which he appears to belong. It has taken Rudolfo almost four years across two different restaurants to get the opportunity for front-of-the-house employment again. Should he leave The Neighborhood, this reversion to subordinate jobs in the dining room will probably repeat. Ever the optimist, Rudolfo frames his tenuous work history more positively: by returning to bussing tables, he gets to “see how they work first,” assessing the tip potential at that restaurant while also learning the menu. Yet none of his front-of-the-house colleagues seem to share this logic. One day, I casually asked a group of white servers whether they would be willing

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to accept a job bussing tables. They looked at me as if I were crazy. One scoffed, “Would I do that? Hell no!” I tried to describe Rudolfo’s logic about the value of learning how a new restaurant works. More quizzical expressions from my server colleagues: “Isn’t that what orientation is for?” Restaurant customers can also reinforce the occupational ceiling for immigrant Latino workers through their expectations about who should be interacting with them, and how these workers should behave in the process. Consider the following scenario from dinner service at The Neighborhood: A middle-aged white couple is sitting at the bar while I am bartending. I have seen them in here before. They ask me about my “school project,” and we begin talking about the issue of immigrants doing jobs in restaurants that no one else wants to do. Just then, Edgardo interrupts us to set down two entrées and one side dish in front of the couple. I leave to attend to other tasks. A few minutes later, I swing by to inquire about the food (they had ordered my recommended dishes). The man resumes our previous conversation. “You know, at the same time, there’s a reason you are in the position you’re in, and he [pointing at Edgardo, who is facing the kitchen] is in the position he’s in,” the man explains. “When he came over here, he said [imitating Edgardo], ‘This is the chicken. This is the potato. This is the cabbage.’ Now when you just described the dish, there was a lot more detail, a lot more knowledge.”

In some respects, the diner was right: Edgardo and I probably described the plates of food differently. While both of us are required to be familiar with the menu, it is my job as a server to know the food in more detail than food runners and bussers need to.24 I also get dozens more opportunities than Edgardo each shift to practice this service script with different groups of diners. However, the main “skill” that I, as a highly educated white male, display to guests has little to do with rote memorization. My presentation of self within the service interaction, steeped in middle-upper-class cultural capital and honed from years of dining out in upscale restaurants, is precisely what diners, many of whom are affluent and white, expect from all front-of-the-house staff. It is not that their

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perception of Edgardo is negative. It just follows a different logic: immigrants are good at hustling, whites are better at hospitality. Customers, much like managers and coworkers, reaffirm the social hierarchy of labor through their commonsense understanding of who belongs where.

Trapped in the Back Closet Within the brown-collar world of work in restaurants, the specific jobs of dishwashing, cleaning, and prepping are the bottom rungs, or what I refer to as the “back closet.” These jobs are the lowest-earning positions of least authority, often spatially located at the very back of the restaurant (The Neighborhood actually has its cleaning crew stationed in the basement of the building while they fold kitchen towels and iron chef coats). Most foreign-born and second-generation Latino men do not stay employed in these marginal jobs for very long before receiving small promotions up the back-of-the-house hierarchy or into support positions in the dining room. These promotions bring them into the main occupational community as cooks and support staff. A small number of workers at each restaurant find themselves stuck in the back closet indefinitely, sealed off from others and with bleak prospects for advancement in the workplace. Those trapped in the worst jobs tend to be individuals with compounded social and structural disadvantages within the workplace. They are more likely to be women who are also undocumented, non-English-speaking, and lacking in professional restaurant experience.25 Each of these characteristics on its own makes it harder to access desirable jobs in restaurants, or better jobs in the US labor market more broadly. But when these obstacles are taken together—as compounded sources of disadvantage in socially segmented, hierarchical workplaces—these workers are unable to match even the modest occupational gains enjoyed by their male and Latino colleagues who are seasoned restaurant veterans. For instance, as detailed in the last chapter, women who attempt to navigate professional kitchen work contend with physically taxing labor and pervasive machismo within this occupational subculture. As a result, women, even Latina women, are largely excluded from social membership in the back of the house—a fact worsened by the spatial isolation of jobs in the back closet.26 Workers who are undocumented, of course, also

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face structural forms of precarity in their employment lives. Undocumented immigrants are statistically more likely to remain in low-rung service jobs compared to their coethnic peers who are able to regularize their work status.27 In other words, undocumented Latino workers have historically been driven into workplaces like restaurants that have low educational requirements, and specifically into jobs at the bottom. However, solely lacking work authorization does not necessarily rule out a worker’s ability to climb job rungs in a brown-collar world of work. Geraldo and Edgardo, the cook and food runner mentioned earlier, have both worked “without papers” for over a decade in Los Angeles restaurants. The lack of English-language abilities or professional cooking skills also can impair a worker’s prospects for moving up the hierarchy in the back of the house, or accessing support jobs in the dining room. Lacking either of these skills is a common reason why managers say they are unable to promote a given worker beyond a certain point. On the other hand, both skills can—to a point—be developed on the job for many Latino men employed in the back of the house. Through daily interactions with Spanish-speaking colleagues, these individuals learn how to cook, prep food, or speak rudimentary English.28 Four undocumented immigrant women, two from Mexico, one from Guatemala, and one from El Salvador, make up four of the six full-time dishwashers at The Neighborhood.29 None of these women speak English comfortably or have ever worked on the kitchen line despite years spent within Los Angeles restaurants. Each makes scarcely above minimum wage with fluctuating hours and no benefits. Most days of the week, Carmela and Maria quietly arrive at 8:00 a.m. for their morning shifts. They disappear into the back corner of the kitchen, out of sight from both the main kitchen and the dining room. While the two of them talk among themselves, softly giggling as they fold stacks of kitchen towels into neat squares, they are rarely part of the boisterous conversations among Latino male cooks that rise above the white noise of the kitchen. Around 3:00 p.m., both women are relieved by two other “porters,” who work the dinner shift until close. These two workers, one Latino man and one Latina woman, alternate between cleaning pots, restocking plastic storage bins, and wiping down the back kitchen walls until 11:00 p.m.—midnight if the restaurant is busy.

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At Terroir, two undocumented, middle-aged Mexican men—Horacio and Hector—take turns manning the dishwashing station for the lunch and dinner shifts. Hector emerges from the back kitchen, walking with a slight limp, to wordlessly drop off a tray of clean glassware to the server station adjacent to the kitchen. Neither Hector nor Horacio speaks English beyond a few simple words. Chef Jeremy, who doesn’t speak Spanish, hired both men on the spot following a hasty fifteen-minute interview in which Jon was present to help translate only the basics. For the six months I worked with Horacio, I did not see him perform any task other than washing dishes, restocking them, and occasionally peeling vegetables when one of the prep cooks called out sick. Meanwhile, several cooks were hired above him to work the kitchen line, some of them second-generation Latino men, others bilingual immigrant men with years of cooking experience. Neither Horacio nor Hector received a raise or promotion while I was at Terroir. *** Though most Latinos working at Match, Terroir, and The Neighborhood begin their employment in similarly racialized, classed, and gendered jobs, their occupational trajectories soon start to differentiate. The immobility of foreign-born Latino men contrasts the steady gains made by later-generation Latino men on the job. Workers such as Matías, Pedro, and Victor leverage their social and cultural in-betweenness in a divided workplace to help them gain a leg up to “something better,” which can mean ascending to higher rungs within the back of the house or potentially accessing more lucrative front-of-the-house jobs. Immigrant Latino workers such as Geraldo and Edgardo are unable to navigate the workplace with the same ease. They are left to contend with a constrained selection of brown-collar jobs enclosed by a glass ceiling beyond which white, class-privileged workers dominate. Decades of work in restaurants have brought these men a sense of stable employment, and they have developed savvy strategies to bolster their earnings. But their economic prospects are modest at best in a labor context that systematically disadvantages them. The social organization of work at Match, Terroir, and The Neighborhood plays a direct role in the relative advantages of some employees and the disadvantages of others. Later-generation Latinos, for instance,

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are able to get ahead in the workplace in ways that stem directly from the presence of foreign-born, monolingual Spanish coworkers. Perla and Pedro profit from their ability to serve as brokers on the job, lubricating relations between socially divided workers. Their organizational prominence as what Laura Lopez-Sanders calls “embedded cultural brokers” may, ironically, contribute to the marginalization of Spanish-speaking workers in this setting by way of normalizing the latter’s lack of direct communication with their non-Latino peers.30 Pedro, who relays Spanish-to-English messages to the chef, absolves management of the need to institute protocols that could allow more foreign-born workers the opportunity to gain new skills, apply for promotions, or learn English for themselves. As this chapter has detailed, powerful social codes frame who has access to certain jobs, with class-privileged whites occupying the most desirable positions. But the boundaries separating unequal worlds of work in restaurants are also selectively porous. Some Latino workers find ways to leverage these boundaries advantageously; others experience them as impenetrable mobility ceilings and suffocating back closets of marginal employment. Individuals enter the complex terrain of service work on unequal footing; their subsequent job pathways reflect, and often exaggerate, their social distinctions.

Conclusion Serving across the Divide

Back at Match, Annabelle continues to chat with the four diners reclining in their chairs post-meal. She pulls up a chair to sit, glancing briefly in the direction of where Kyle, the dining room manager, was standing earlier. “Have you been to Catch yet? The rooftop bar? Super cool. But it is so crowded these days since Beyonce instagrammed that picture of her hanging out there . . .” I catch up to Diego as he passes Annabelle’s table heading towards the dish pit. Seeing me approach, he slows his pace. “She is always talk talk talk, every day,” he says, rolling his eyes. “She is nice, but—” He imitates Annabelle, bobbing his head side to side and mouthing words. I let out a soft chuckle; Diego falls back into silence. Diego has never moved up from bussing tables. For two years now, he has sat in on pre-shift meetings in the dining room and dutifully tasted the new menu selections. He knows that Annabelle, like the rest of the servers (including me) will “walk” with twice as much in cash tips as he will before we all clock out. Still, he has no interest in switching places with her in the dining room. He cares little about Catch, rooftop bars, and Instagram photos of food—the stuff that he hears his white coworkers talk about with customers and among themselves. “Better her than me,” Diego says, glancing backwards. I can’t see the expression on his face. We pass by the long kitchen counter. Around us, the complexion of Match changes. Calvin Harris’s hit song “Feel So Close” fades in the distance, as does the sing-song cadence of Annabelle’s valley girl speech. Both are replaced by the clang of pans and deep voices uttering directives—“eighty-six this,” “on the fly that,” “I need manos now,” “service please.” We brush by Chef Andy, who is standing just outside the kitchen where the air is still cool. Opposite him, Javier turns over an 159

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order of caramelized brussels sprouts in a small sauté pan with a flick of his wrist. He says something in Spanish towards Xeno that I cannot make out over the noise. By the time we round the corner to the dishwasher station, the smell of lemon-scented cleaner grows stronger. Diego scrapes the food off each plate into a large trash bin using one of the dirty forks he has brought back from the dining room. Despite the heat and humidity, his posture is more relaxed. Diego nudges the dishwasher, an older, foreign-born Latino man, with a spare elbow and a smile: “¿qué pasó, gordo?” The two of them talk for a moment, laughing. Water splashes onto the ground, bouncing off stacked bowls at the bottom of the metal sink bed. Diego pivots to his right, rubbing his hands together with soap and hot water. He uses his elbow to hit the lever of the paper towel dispenser. “Let’s go back,” he sighs, turning to me. *** What takes place at dishwashing stations, on kitchen lines, and around dining room tables mirrors the polarized cityscape that surrounds the restaurants described in this book. Diego and Annabelle work at Match together; they use the same computer system to clock in and out of their shifts. But they were hired for distinct service roles for very different reasons. What they experience every day within the workplace only exaggerates these differences. I have argued that managers and workers coproduce durable forms of social inequality within restaurants. Many of the ways they do so feel taken for granted, more like business as usual than anything overtly discriminatory. Managers initially frame distinctions among workers through hiring processes and supervisory policies that sort people into different jobs on the basis of their race, class, and gender characteristics. They draw on socially coded ideals for front-of-the-house jobs that favor young, white, college-educated men and women. They also expect that working-class Latino men, most of them foreign born, will fill backof-the-house and support jobs. Once these individuals are channeled into unequal worlds of work, managers establish policies and practices that reflect their socially coded expectations for different types of service jobs: chefs pass out mandatory kitchen meeting notes in Spanish, and dining room managers pass out wine tasting notes in English. To

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management, such actions make practical sense regardless of the social segregation of jobs they help to instill. Employees subsequently reinforce these inequalities by drawing group boundaries against one another. These boundaries gain in thickness as workers imbue them with both social differences and divergent workplace conditions. This is why Rodrigo, the cook, mutters that “gringos are lazy, all they do is stand around and talk all day,” and why Alexandra, the server, opines that “Latinos are hard workers, but they don’t understand what we do for guests.” Put differently, the daily microrelations between class-privileged white men and women and workingclass Latino men in the workplace pulls them into distinct groups of “us” versus “them” that have overtly racialized, classed, and gendered associations. While some workers are able to use these same cleavages to their advantage, as described in the last chapter, the way that Rodrigo and Alexandra interact in the workplace ultimately makes each feel a sense of belonging to nonoverlapping worker “teams” within the restaurant as well as to divergent social worlds. Examining the micro-sociology of restaurant labor contributes to our understanding of everyday forms of social inequality that can feel mundane and go unnoticed in service environments. What goes on behind the scenes in restaurants in Los Angeles, but also in retail shops, hotels, and beauty salons in the city, refracts back outward as durable forms of social difference and hierarchy, with class-privileged whites occupying the most desirable positions.

Upscale Service Brands and the Management of Difference Many of the desired traits that restaurant managers look for when hiring different kinds of workers are socially ascribed instead of achieved.1 Acting as gatekeepers, managers at all three restaurants rely on divergent standards for front- and back-of-the-house jobs that are racialized, classed, and gendered. They seek to bolster the upscale service ambiance they hope to offer customers by channeling class-privileged white men and women—along with a “sprinkle” of diversity—into customer-facing roles on the grounds that these types of workers will “look good and sound right” when interacting with customers.2 Meanwhile, managers seek willing subordinates to put up with labor-intensive

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and lower-earning positions in the back of the house and in support roles. That immigrant Latino men such as Diego, Javier, and Xeno find themselves laboring as cooks, bussers, and dishwashers in Los Angeles restaurants reflects management’s use of “brown-collar” hiring standards to select workers for low-wage service jobs (as well as the liberal use of coethnic social networks to recruit these individuals). Managers’ subsequent use of racialized, classed, and gendered supervisory policies and practices reflects socially coded expectations for two distinct worlds of work. In the front of the house, Kyle, the white manager, accommodates Annabelle’s desire for a flexible, part-time schedule and encourages her to interact loosely with guests. In the back of the house, chefs schedule long hours in a highly structured environment for Javier and Xeno as if they operated on a food service assembly line. Match, Terroir, and The Neighborhood also reflect specific sites of upscale service labor that vary in the way management seeks to organize them. These variations nuance the opportunities and barriers that workers experience. Producing unique service brands, as I have described, helps managers appeal to a target clientele and stand out against stiff competition in the city.3 Proximal service prioritizes peerlike interactions that occur at the point of service. Managers strategically hire a front-of-the-house staff that “all looks the same”: servers and bartenders adhere to a narrow set of physical and sociocultural ideals that favor not only whiteness and middle-classness but also youth and coolness. At Match, these standards ensure that public-facing workers look and act like the restaurant’s young white professional patrons rather than the “help” (which more closely approximates the Latino support staff in terms of race, class, and subordinate jobs). These hiring standards also curtail the mobility prospects of Latino and other nonwhite workers into desirable front-of-the-house positions. Moreover, because what happens in the back of the house—namely, food production—is of secondary importance to a trendy service ambiance, the Latino men in the kitchen find themselves engaged in low-paying, repetitive, and invisible assembly line labor. Professionalized service—the closest to traditionally formal service— places greater value on the need for skilled veterans with industry experience to work with a decorated chef-artist. Following the brand of professionalized service, managers encourage continual skill and knowl-

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edge acquisition among staff both in the front and in the back of the house. This is why support workers at Terroir are referred to as “server assistants” instead of bussers and food runners—and required to learn the same food, drink, and service steps as servers—and a revolving door of stages (interns) works in the kitchen. Management thus cultivates professionalized service in part through ongoing training and mentoring opportunities for workers. While this opens the door to relatively more advancement opportunities for working-class people of color, managers also continue to fall back on traditional “high-end” industry standards that favor educated white men for the most desirable front-ofthe-house and managerial positions.4 Personalized luxury service emphasizes “have it your way” hospitality for wealthy guests. Managers require that front-of-the-house workers anticipate VIP patrons’ every need; back-of-the-house workers must be willing to adjust their workflow should customers demand something special of them. At The Neighborhood, management’s exhaustive effort to cater to wealthy customers takes a toll on workers. It jeopardizes the standing of any employee (or supervisor) whom customers do not perceive as consistently likeable and endlessly accommodating. Relative to the other service brands, this loosens management’s use of whiteness and middle-classness as implicit hiring standards for front-of-the-house jobs (The Neighborhood, for instance, has the most racially diverse front-of-the-house staff of the three restaurants). The logic of personalized service may also heighten feminized ideals for interactive service by favoring servers such as Sally, the later-generation Latina woman with a high school degree, who interacts with customers using an overtly caring and intimate approach.5 Each of these service brands complements wealthy and white areas of Los Angeles, where residents remain a steady clientele for personal services and consumption. However, given the rise of racially and ethnically diverse, middle-class neighborhoods in the city, a wider range of service brands may be on the horizon, packaged with alternate logics of hiring, training, and supervisory practices. These managerial decisions will inevitably affect the social organization of the workplace in different ways. I would not, however, expect that these service-brand variants would upend well-trod industry norms that prioritize whiteness (or at least lighter skin) and middle-class comportment for the best-paying

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and most visible jobs. Over the course of this study I patronized many restaurants, coffee shops, and cocktail bars all over the country that felt remarkably similar to Match, Terroir, and The Neighborhood. Peering behind the scenes, I knew what I would find.

Racialized and Classed Boundaries If management frames the unequal worlds of work that employees come to inhabit by controlling the front door into the workplace, what seals workers apart? Beyond the front door and behind the scenes, interpersonal cleavages between class-privileged white men and women, on one hand, and immigrant, working-class Latino men on the other deeply affect everyday work life. Workers enact symbolic boundaries against one another that are etched with race, class, and gender distinctions.6 These boundaries draw not only from stereotypes of members of other social groups but also from everyday relations within the workplace. I have described how the divergent skills and labor routines of front-ofthe-house workers and back-of-the-house workers contribute directly to the way class-privileged whites and working-class Latinos understand each other. Despite operating in close proximity, these individuals are cleaved into organizationally distinct, hierarchical, and socially coded jobs that factor into the way workers perceive groups of “us” and “them.”7 The symbolic boundaries that workers enact also “do” things of their own in the workplace: they close one world of work off from the other on social and cultural grounds. This has both organizational and social implications. Organizationally, racialized and classed boundaries between workers can challenge the flow of service within the restaurant. Coworker cleavages can spill over into myriad problems, ranging from severed lines of communication in the workplace to strained relations and disruptions to the flow of food from the kitchen to the dining room. But more importantly, the way workers enact boundaries against others further reduces the likelihood that Latino workers in low-wage and invisible jobs will be able to advance to more desirable opportunities within the workplace. As noted earlier, some white chefs and dining room supervisors do extend offers of mentorship to Latino cooks and support workers that could potentially help them advance up job ladders. But in these cases, the race and class divides separating front- and

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back-of-the-house work can still repel Latinos who aspire to move up. In this sense, the symbolic boundaries that workers enact can quickly become social boundaries of exclusion that prove difficult to penetrate. The social and structural distinctions within restaurants pattern the way different workers navigate their respective jobs. This in turn etches divergent cultures within these two worlds of work; workers, on the basis of their particular social characteristics, find that they fit into one or the other. The relative youth, whiteness, and class privilege of customer-facing workers enables them to “consume” their otherwise unstable jobs. They draw on personal resources (networks) and frontof-the-house labor conditions (tips and adjustable schedules) to manage their work lives as desirably fun, flexible, and social.8 Many of the young, educated, and white men and women working as servers and bartenders embrace the temporal seductions of their jobs (“it’s great—for now!”). Meanwhile, their slightly older colleagues with otherwise similar race and class characteristics emphasize the type of lifestyle this enables them (“lifers”). Back-of-the-house workers do not approach their jobs the same way. Many of the immigrant and second-generation Latino men are committed to brown-collar jobs that are low-wage, invisible, and physically taxing. This does not mean these individuals see their jobs as especially demeaning. Workers such as Rodrigo and Geraldo enjoy strong bonds with their coethnic male colleagues and mentorship relations with white managers such as chefs and dining room supervisors. They are proud of the considerable culinary skills they have honed within reputable kitchens, as well as the brazen acts of machismo they are able to display in this male-dominated world of work (recall Andrew’s “battle scars” that litter his forearms). Much of this positive self-concept derives from social comparisons beyond the kitchen. Their gringo coworkers prove a convenient scapegoat and source of self-worth: “Here in the kitchen, so-and-so might be faster than me, but all of us work harder than any of them.” Meanwhile, women in the back of the house represent a threat to the masculinity of this space—unless, of course, they affirm the requisite stoicism of these jobs (as Manny described Chef Coryn doing in chapter 4). Members of this brown-collar and male world of work sharpen their sense of groupness by observing the veritable strangers laboring in their

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midst. Yet, for Latino men who already occupy structurally disadvantaged positions within the workplace, drawing social distinctions against perceived racial and gender outgroup members can be particularly damaging when the latter systematically hold better-paying and more visible jobs than they do.

In-Betweenness and Situated Opportunities The same organizational conditions that disadvantage certain Latino workers in service workplaces represent opportunities for others. Although most Latino restaurant workers enter restaurants in backof-the-house jobs, the steady gains made by later-generation Latinos contrast the immobility and lateral job circulation by their foreign-born counterparts. As I have shown, this is the case because US-born workers such as Pedro and Rodrigo are able to leverage in-betweenness in a socially and culturally divided workplace. Although these individuals do not possess college degrees that would otherwise help them access higher-quality jobs in the labor market, within their places of employment they possess the ability to broker social ties between front- and back-of-the-house workers. Later-generation Latinos also embody traits that managers desire for front-of-the-house positions, such as youth and coolness. These characteristics have helped several Latino men and women access front-ofthe-house and supervisory positions that are otherwise dominated by their white, college-educated peers. However, because these resources are situational and to a degree subjective, the gains these workers have made are inherently fraught. Unlike their credentialed peers in the front of the house, later-generation Latino workers struggle to sustain their position in a workplace hierarchy where managers rarely see them as option A. Those trapped in the most marginalized service jobs, or what I call the back closet, are disproportionately undocumented, female, monolingual Spanish-speaking, and lacking appreciable restaurant experience. Women struggle to fit into a male-dominated work world; monolingual Spanish speakers struggle to communicate with English-speaking coworkers and customers; undocumented workers endure legal powerlessness that makes them less willing to work in more publicly visible,

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yet higher-paying, capacities. Because they are vulnerable and socially isolated, managers can more easily exploit these workers by confining them to jobs that pay minimum wage (or worse) and offer the least desirable conditions. Moreover, some of the very processes that enable later-generation Latino workers to get ahead in the workplace can also indirectly contribute to the disadvantage of their foreign-born colleagues in bottom-rung jobs. Pedro and Matias, for example, have made themselves valuable to management by translating for their monolingual coworkers. They have also been promoted over them in the process. Facing a deeply divided and unequal workplace that offers few mobility pathways for working-class Latinos, one worker’s only source of advantage can stunt another’s prospects.

Future Trends What goes on within restaurants and many other everyday service environments reflects existing social hierarchies; it also refracts these hierarchies back out into society in ever-changing ways. Several trends are under way in the restaurant industry that point to the nature of employment inequality and opportunity for years to come. The growth of second-, third-, and fourth-generation men and women of color in the labor market is already reshaping the demographics within many restaurant workplaces. This is true in established immigrant gateway cities like Los Angeles and New York, but it is also an emerging pattern in new destinations such as the South.9 The number of later-generation Latinos, for instance, now exceeds that of their foreignborn peers in some regional labor markets. This could have several implications for my findings.10 First, managers today face more darkerskinned, nonwhite job applicants of mixed immigrant generation than in the past. Many of these individuals are more than capable of doing a wide variety of restaurant jobs, including customer service and management. Managers thus have the opportunity to rewrite or even move towards eliminating the racialized rubric used to exclude people of color from the most desirable jobs. Alternatively, managers may place more emphasis on classed traits, such as proper speech and comportment, or gender, when hiring for customer-facing jobs—choosing to maintain embodied ideals for the front of the house that have been business as

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usual for decades. Other standards are less likely to budge. One such standard is management’s preference for poor, foreign-born laborers in the least desirable jobs.11 Furthermore, within workplaces with shifting demographics, will workers draw boundaries against one another in new ways? As this book suggests, organizational conditions—say, the hierarchical arrangement and distance between different types of jobs— can exacerbate any social distinctions between those who work there. The way workplaces are set up has direct implications for the way social inequality takes place. Management will always have a fundamental role in shaping this process, but workers will make their relations with others their own. Second, as net migration from Mexico flatlines, the shift towards coethnic, monolingual English communication in the workplace could diminish the advantages associated with in-betweenness. If managers do not derive value in staffing and promoting workers who can serve as cultural brokers for otherwise isolated worker groups, this dilutes a secondgeneration structural advantage in the workplace. In-betweenness is not a formal credential—it is precariously constituted in the sense that it must be demonstrated to managers and other coworkers rather than listed on a resume. Later-generation Latino workers are thus better off using their situated opportunities to access new positions, skills, and resources that will help them achieve more permanent labor market gains. On the other hand, the US restaurant industry has for decades employed foreign-born, undocumented Latinos in the back of the house with no signs of abating. There is job security in being able to bridge communication with those for whom Spanish is their primary language. In Los Angeles and other global US cities, the growth of middle-class and upwardly mobile consumers of color will invariably affect the nature of service establishments. This could mean changing tastes for not only food but also service and ambiance. Savvy owners and managers may reformulate their service brands to accommodate this clientele, at least in select neighborhoods. From hiring practices to supervisory policies, how might managers attempt to produce proximal service for middleclass Latino consumers? How might enacting personalized luxury in Fremont, California—home to an affluent and sizable Asian American community—involve different embodied characteristics of those in visible roles?12 Even if the hegemonic ideals of upper-middle-class white-

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ness in upscale service spaces are difficult to supplant, they may alter standards in other ways. For instance, managers may seek out individuals with lighter-colored skin and other physical features that approximate Euro-American beauty standards to staff customer-facing jobs and supervisory positions (I’m thinking about the casting of Henry Golding, who is half-white and half-Asian, as the male lead of the movie Crazy Rich Asians). As sociologist Charles Tilly warned, time and time again those in power preserve the existing social order by creatively reinventing its standards and unequal categories in all-too-familiar ways.13 The restaurant industry is also undergoing a period of upheaval. Worker advocacy groups such as Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROCU) are expanding the public discourse on eating out from concern about what is on people’s plates to concern for the workers who put it there.14 Recent campaigns by ROCU are squarely aimed at improving labor conditions for restaurant workers. In many ways, these campaigns seek to address the gaping void in labor empowerment and advocacy in an industry where unions have been minimally present for decades.15 Kathy Hoang, director of the Los Angeles chapter of ROC, explained the following to me in an interview: When we think about the moment we are in, there is such a consciousness about worker issues, and around inequality and poverty, what it really means to have a fair society. And we’ve been able to really capture that cultural moment in history and push forward our issues. So the past year, ROC was really involved with the effort to pass the minimum wage increase, as well as linking the minimum wage campaign with the wage theft campaign. Because it is a dual narrative. Let’s raise the wage, but let’s also make sure that workers actually receive that wage. So that there isn’t this widening gap between workers that are actually paid that wage and those that are not.

In addition to engaging in city-level efforts to raise the minimum wage, ROCU has been heavily involved in a nation-wide movement known as One Fair Wage to raise the federal minimum wage for tipped workers from its current rate of $2.13 per hour, where it has stood for nearly three decades.16 As of 2019, this effort is still ongoing, resisted by major industry power players such as the National Restaurant Association (NRA).

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In an industry notorious for “bad” jobs and exploitative labor practices, other advocacy initiatives by ROCU target a wide range of issues, ranging from providing legal support to workers victimized by employment violations (for example, withheld wages, no breaks, discrimination) to hosting skill training classes for members to creating a public list of restaurants that use “high road” labor practices.17 What we find is that when we start talking to these workers, there are a whole host of issues that they didn’t even think there was a way of dealing with. Like they might have come to ROC with a wage theft issue, then find a workplace injury. Maybe it’s a shoulder injury from BOH work. They may know it’s an issue, but not see it as a practical route to fixing it or suing the employer. There are even more common problems that people definitely don’t deal with at all. Stress and mental health. Huge problems in the industry that are not talked about at all.

According to Kathy, ROCU has its hands full fighting for the basic well-being of employees in the industry. ROCU is not alone. A growing partnership of restaurateurs, labor advocates, and industry personalities has emerged that is outspoken in its criticism of “low road” restaurant labor practices that hurt workers. Easy fixes, however, have been difficult to come by. One recent example revolves around tipping. Critics have for years taken issue with America’s tipping culture, which deeply affects the earnings of those who work in restaurants as well as many other hospitalityfocused workplaces. Altering tipping practices by changing either the way tips are received from customers or the way tips are distributed among workers could have a major impact on what it means to work in restaurants. As this book reveals, tips are a fundamental reason why some jobs are relatively lucrative and others remain among the lowestpaid jobs in the country. At the time of this writing, proposed changes to tip policies have made their way into legislative debates and onto federal courtrooms with mixed outcomes; the politically charged battle lines typically feature employer-led groups trying to expand management’s control over tips, and worker advocacy groups trying to fend off these challenges (in 2018, the federal government affirmed that tips belong exclusively to workers, thereby prohibiting owners and managers from col-

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lecting or retaining tips).18 The earning inequality that tipping engenders between front-of-the-house workers and back-of-the-house workers has already been blamed for the recent “crisis level” shortage of qualified restaurant cooks in large US metropolitan centers.19 Would-be cooks are disincentivized, this line of thinking goes, to spend considerable time and money learning culinary skills when they could make three times more money in the front of the house. There are also the social consequences of tipping within the workplace that link up to broader social inequalities: it is not just servers and bartenders who make the lion’s share of tips, but white and class-privileged men and women employed in these positions, leaving many of their nonwhite and working-class colleagues excluded from an opportunity for higher earnings.20 Some restaurateurs have attempted to do away with tipping entirely. Perhaps the most prominent example is that of Danny Meyer, an author and star restaurateur in New York. In the fall of 2015, Meyer put his actions behind his words: he announced the rollout of “no-tip” policies and higher base wages for his employees, to be phased in at each of his seventeen restaurants along with substantially higher menu prices.21 Other restaurants have sought to manage the impact of tips instead of eliminate them. In Los Angeles, some chefs and restaurant owners have been adamant in their calls for a lower legal minimum wage for tipped employees as they grapple with a rising minimum wage over the next ten years.22 A Los Angeles–based restaurant called Scratch Bar made news by retooling the food-service workflow of their establishment to allow cooks to earn tips legally. “We don’t have any servers,” said the chef-owner of Scratch Bar in a published interview, just prior to its opening in 2015. “The cooks and the chefs will be our servers.”23 By eliminating a front-of-the-house staff entirely—a controversial move— Scratch Bar’s service model allows cooks and other back-of-the-house workers to interact with customers and accrue tips. The need for such dramatic changes may have been short-lived. In 2018, the federal government amended labor laws to allow tips to be shared between all workers who are paid at least the full minimum wage by their employer (without a tip credit). This move could potentially impact the earnings of millions of restaurant workers—including those at Match, Terroir, and the Neighborhood. However, it remains to be seen if workers will push to change their restaurant’s tip policies, which are established in

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part by informal norms. Many workers may not be aware that this is even a possibility in the first place. It will be difficult to supplant the business-as-usual inequality deeply embedded within restaurants. So many stakeholders—managers, workers, and customers alike—have something to gain from keeping things just the way they are: managers, facing razor-thin margins, make hiring and supervisory decisions that lean heavily on racialized, classed, and gendered industry standards; workers slotted into these jobs struggle through their workdays as best they can, making sense of their jobs and each other in the process. The mechanisms that reinforce social hierarchies in everyday service settings all around us have a soft and familiar ring. *** It is now 11:00 p.m. at The Neighborhood. Farah, having removed her server apron, places the rosemary-scented wax candles from each table back on top of two black trays. I help her blow out each flame while setting the trays down on a shelf next to the kitchen pass. One of Farah’s regulars is still sitting in the bar area, drinking a glass of red wine and looking on. “Long night?” he calls out. Farah nods. She joins him, sitting a couple of stools away, and pulls out an envelope full of cash with names scribbled on the front. She starts to divvy up the evening’s tips. A wine glass appears before her; the floor manager wordlessly inverts the remainder of a bottle of 2014 Zinfandel blend from Paso Robles that was opened the day before (eighteen dollars a glass on the menu). Farah takes a long sip, closing her eyes. She begins making stacks of twenty-dollar bills for each server and bartender, then smaller stacks—fives and ones—for this evening’s busser, food runner, and host. Meanwhile, Geraldo and Rodrigo are scrubbing the tile walls in the kitchen using a degreaser and thick sponges stained the color grey. Geraldo still has his Big Gulp of Sprite, half full, sitting next to the grill. Five feet away sits tomorrow’s soup stock, which Rodrigo has been preparing for the past two hours, cooling on ice in the kitchen sink. Twenty minutes pass of scrubbing, mopping, sweeping. Geraldo stretches his tired back, tilting his torso side to side. The walls are clean, the rubber floor mats are up, and all the dirty kitchen pans have migrated to the dish pit

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where Maria is still busy loading trays of plates and silverware into the dishwasher (she will be the last person to leave). Geraldo slaps hands with Rodrigo, and heads towards the exit. He passes by Farah, myself, and the floor manager, sitting at the bar. “’Bye” he says softly, continuing towards the door and looking straight ahead. “Did you make sure to put away the stuff in the back sink?” asks the manager. “Yes.” “And does Paola know she needs to finish before midnight? I don’t want any overtime tonight.” “Paola is in Mexico, so Maria is working. Yes, she knows,” replies Geraldo. “Okay, see you tomorrow then,” says the manager. “Hey—are you sure you don’t want some wine?” says Farah, pointing at two half-full bottles on the counter, one red and one rosé. “We got all this leftover stuff left to drink.” Geraldo shakes his head, glancing quickly at the piles of tips that sit next to Farah on the counter. He knows that he needs to be at his other job at 7:00 a.m. for the breakfast shift. Besides, he prefers beer.

Acknowledgments

“Hands! I need hands, please! Hands!” To servers, hearing the chef shout “hands” means that help is needed. The cooks have nearly finished an order and now someone needs to transport the plate(s) out to the dining room so that the task can be marked complete. Once hands arrive, the chef can turn his or her attention to the next task in the cue. When I clocked out for the final time at The Neighborhood, I thought this would be the last time I would hear the ubiquitous call of “hands.” I ended up with many hands assisting me in the completion of this project. None were more instrumental than the people I worked alongside at Match, Terroir, and The Neighborhood. Many generously shared their personal stories with me. Others provided zany entertainment to pass the hours in the dining room, kitchen, and break areas. Some shocked me with their honesty about working in the industry; some did their best to make sure that I did not fall on my face working in a “real” restaurant (my prior experience was mostly in bars or quick-service food establishments). I want to express my deepest thanks to all the restaurant workers whom I met over the last six years, many of whom I am proud to call friends today. I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to my former professors and graduate school colleagues in the Department of Sociology at the University of California–Los Angeles. In alphabetical order, thanks to Deisy del Real, Saskia Nauenberg Dunkell, Neil Gong, Jack Katz, Kyle Nelson, Casandra Salgado, Michael Siciliano, Phi Su, Ariana Valle, Emily Yen, Hajar Yazdiha (USC), and Amy Zhou. Special thanks to Roger Waldinger, Chris Tilly, Abel Valenzuela, and Kyeyoung Park for their enthusiasm and constructive critique of my work. As I was completing this book, the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment provided a year-long home for me as a Visiting Research Scholar during the 2017–2018 academic year. In addition to 175

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| Acknowledgments

funding support for this project, the IRLE offered up a vibrant intellectual community of scholar-activists passionate about issues of labor advocacy and real-world change. I was able to make important strides on this manuscript while there. Special thanks to Abel Valenzuela, the institute’s director at the time, and Julie Monroe for their support. As a visiting research scholar at IRLE, I was also able to deepen my ties to the Restaurant Opportunities Center Los Angeles (ROCLA), a restaurant worker center that provides crucial resources for employees, especially undocumented immigrants, who are most vulnerable to employer abuse. I thank Kathy Hoang, the director of ROCLA, and Sophia Cheng, for welcoming me to member meetings, and for sharing their insights on the local and national regulatory environment surrounding the restaurant industry. Thank you to my colleagues in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at the University of New Mexico, who have encouraged me through the process of putting the finishing touches on this book manuscript. Special recognition goes to Elizabeth Korver-Glenn, Nancy Lopez, Owen Whooley, and members of the race working group for reading select chapters from this manuscript and providing feedback. During this same period, my editor at NYU Press, Ilene Kalish, injected a fresh round of energy into my writing and editing process. Ilene gave these pages scrupulous attention (particularly the early ones), pointing out several key areas where I could refine my argument. NYU Press’s excellent production team also made sure I didn’t embarrass myself as someone with a tenuous understanding of the rules of English grammar. For that, I am forever grateful. Finally, I appreciate the ongoing support of Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo and Victor Rios, editors for the NYU Latina/o book series. During dinner rushes, every restaurant worker knows the feeling of trying to manage tasks that need to be done NOW, but only after attending to tasks that should have been done yesterday. It helps to have a small group of special people around to keep you calm, organized, and motivated to brave the “weeds” that threaten to derail the process. To this end, I cannot thank Ruben Hernández-León enough. Ruben pushed me to pay serious attention to the micro textures of restaurant workers’ lives—the stuff that really matters to them—while also teasing out connections to larger sociological patterns and theories. Ruben has been

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a patient, insightful, and surprisingly humorous presence throughout both the rushes and lulls of this project. My parents, Christine Yano and Scott Wilson, provided me with invaluable love and support during the research and writing of this book. They were also frequent discussants for its ideas (if not always the harshest critics!). I am spoiled to have such sharp minds on speed dial. My mother’s influence on this text has been particularly pervasive. Although she was completing a book project of her own at the same time, she always managed to lend an ear to my own writing issues and offer advice. Finally, my wife, Laura, deserves heartfelt appreciation for sitting at the chef ’s table nearest to the live action of this project. She encouraged me unconditionally throughout the years of fieldwork, data analysis, and writing. Most recently, she read my full manuscript cover to cover, offering numerous suggestions about not only substance but style. She remains the more talented writer in our household. In life, as in the world of restaurants, I feel so fortunate to be able to end every “shift” with her by my side helping to put things back where they should be in preparation for a fresh new day.

Appendix A Glossary of Key Terms

All Day: the total count of a single food or drink item on order. Four chicken salads all day, Chef. Back of the House: the behind-the-scenes operations within a restaurant, where food is prepared, cooked, plated, and stored. Barback: the assistant to a bartender. Barbacks are usually responsible for restocking glassware, keeping the bar top clean, and performing other bar duties that require minimal customer contact. Chef: a manager in the back of the house responsible for overseeing food production and kitchen staff. The head chef is sometimes known as “chef de cuisine” or “executive chef.” Clopen: being scheduled to both the evening shift (closing down the restaurant) and the opening shift the next day. I might as well sleep here tonight since I got scheduled to clopen—I’ll have to be back here in the morning anyway! Comp: to provide something free of charge. Comp table five an appetizer, the guy at seat one used to work here. Cover: one paying customer at the restaurant. How many covers have we done today? Eighty- six: a term used for when something is out of stock. My manager told me to eighty-six the black cod for the rest of the night. Expo: someone who operates the expeditor station, an area adjacent to the kitchen used to direct traffic of ready plates of food to the appropriate table of guests. The person handling expo can vary from a floor manager to a chef to a designated worker, depending on the restaurant. Family Meal: a special meal prepared for the staff to consume free of charge during their shifts. Family meals are usually prepared by a designated cook using discarded or low-cost ingredients deemed unfit to serve guests. 179

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| Appendix A

Fire: an order given to commence assembling a food item. In the case of multiple courses on a food ticket, “fire” is usually accompanied by the appropriate course that the kitchen should begin making: Fire appetizers. Food Ticket: the food order for all the diners at a single table. At higher-end restaurants, food tickets are usually separated into different courses (e.g., appetizer course, entrée course, dessert course). Front of the House: areas of a restaurant that are open to customers, including the bar, dining room, and waiting areas. Hands: A call for assistance, typically used by the chef or floor manager to alert front-of-the-house staff that there is food ready that needs to be brought out to guests. Hands please, I need hands. Garde Manger: French for “keeper of the food.” In restaurants, this is the cook responsible for overseeing the preparation of food items such as salads and terrines that do not require heat. Sometimes known as the “cold station” cook or pantry chef. Maître d’: a traditional French term for a front-of-the-house manager (also known as “maître d’hotel”). Since none of the restaurants in this study used this term, I refer to this position as front-of-thehouse supervisor or manager. Mis en place: French for “putting in place.” “Mis en place” describes the preparation and organization of ingredients in a cook’s kitchen station prior to the start of meal service. On the Fly: a food, drink, or service item that needs to be produced quickly, usually while workers are engaged in other tasks simultaneously. For example, food orders made “on the fly” usually take priority over other food tickets in the kitchen cue. Get me that potato salad on the fly. POS (point of sale): the place at which goods are retailed. In most higher-end restaurants, the POS involves a computer program where workers clock in and out, servers input food and drink orders, and customer checks can be printed. Refire Ticket: a food order sent to the kitchen that needs to be remade. Refire tickets typically involve a sense of urgency: Table four got their food, but I need to refire the salmon burger, which they said was overcooked. Section (for servers): a designated cluster of tables in the dining room that a server is responsible for attending to on a shift. Depend-

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ing on the restaurant and the level of expected business, a section can range from as few as three tables to half the restaurant. Sidework: non-guest-facing duties that front-of-the-house workers are required to complete during or after their shift (“closing sidework”). Sidework may include refilling sauces, folding napkins, restocking glassware, or polishing silverware. Sous- chef: a chef who works under the command of the head chef. Sous-chefs are generally considered part of kitchen management, the equivalent of a front-of-the house supervisor. Stage: an unpaid intern in restaurants. Traditionally, workers hoping to gain valuable experience at higher-end restaurants will inquire about staging there. Management can sometimes require that new hires stage for one or two shifts in order to evaluate a prospective hire’s suitability for the job. Station: a designated area where a certain type of restaurant worker operates. In the kitchen, these include the grill station, sauté station, and fry station. In the dining room, a server station is where items needed for table service are stored, usually out of sight of customers and adjacent to the dining room. Support Staff: workers who operate in supporting roles within the dining room, such as bussers, food runners, and barbacks. Support staff are sometimes considered front of the house. However, they do not actively interact with customers as a requirement of the job (they are not “customer-facing”). Table Service: customer service that designated workers (e.g., servers) provide to customers seated at tables in the dining room. Table service contrasts with counter service or self-service. Timing: in the kitchen, a term used to describe the skill of coordinating the preparation sequence for a food order so that the food will be ready at the same time. In the dining room, “service timing” refers to the sequence of service tasks over the course of a typical meal, for example, (1) greet guests and drop menus, (2) take drink orders, (3) serve drinks, (4) take food orders, and so on. Tip- out: the portion of tips that servers and bartenders share with support workers, usually based on some preestablished formula. Walk- in: a large storage refrigerator that workers can enter. Walk-ins are usually located near the main kitchen where preparatory foods can be stored.

Appendix B List of Interviewees

Table A.1. List of Interviewees Pseudonym

Gender

Age

Race

Position

Restaurant

Abigail

female

44

white

MGMT

Neighborhood

Alexandra

female

44

white

FOH

Neighborhood

Amy

female

28

white

FOH

Match

Andrew

male

30

Latino

BOH

Neighborhood

Andy

female

28

black

FOH

Match

Brady

male

23

white

FOH

Terroir

Brian

male

22

Latino

BOH

Neighborhood

Carlos

male

27

Latino

Support

Other

Carlton

male

33

white

MGMT

Neighborhood

Charlie

male

24

white

FOH

Match

Chuck

male

38

white

FOH

Terroir

Courtney

female

28

black

MGMT

Neighborhood

Danny

male

24

white

FOH

Neighborhood

Dwayne

male

26

black

BOH

Match

Edgardo

male

37

Latino*

Support

Neighborhood

Eduardo

male

34

Latino*

BOH

Other

Enrique

male

38

Latino*

Support

Match

Erin

female

26

white

FOH

Match

Farah

female

32

white

FOH

Neighborhood

Fernando

male

41

Latino*

Support

Neighborhood

George

male

22

white

FOH

Match

Geraldo

male

34

Latino*

BOH

Neighborhood

Helen

female

34

white

FOH

Match

Horacio

male

40

Latino*

FOH

Other

Jon

male

38

Latino*

MGMT

Terroir

Josh

male

33

white

FOH

Other

183

184

| Appendix B

Table A.1. (cont.) Julie

female

38

white

FOH

Neighborhood

Julio

male

50

Latino*

Support

Match

Kathy

female

38

Asian

Other

Other

Kevin

male

37

white

FOH

Neighborhood

Kylie

female

22

white

BOH

Neighborhood

Leroy

male

28

white

FOH

Match

Lily

female

32

mixed

FOH

Match

Lori

female

25

white

FOH

Match

Manny

male

33

Latino*

BOH

Neighborhood

Mark

male

32

white

FOH

Other

Matias

male

28

Latino

FOH

Other

Melanie

female

27

white

FOH

Match

Monica

female

26

Asian

FOH

Neighborhood

Moore

male

26

white

FOH

Match

Nathan

male

23

white

FOH

Terroir

Paul

male

30

white

BOH

Neighborhood

Pedro

male

28

Latino

BOH

Match

Peter

male

30

white

MGMT

Neighborhood

Rafael

male

29

Latino*

Support

Neighborhood

Rafael

male

34

Latino*

BOH

Other

Rodrigo

male

24

Latino

BOH

Neighborhood

Rudolfo

male

47

Latino*

FOH

Neighborhood

Ryan

female

19

white

FOH

Match

Ryan

male

28

white

BOH

Neighborhood

Sally

female

25

white

FOH

Match

Sally

female

27

Latino

FOH

Neighborhood

Sapphire

female

25

white

FOH

Match

Sean

male

30

white

FOH

Match

Tammy

female

25

white

FOH

Match

Tom

male

45

white*

MGMT

Terroir

Victor

male

20

Latino

Support

Match

Wally

male

34

white

MGMT

Neighborhood

Ages listed at time of interview. FOH = front of the house BOH = back of the house MGMT = management * = foreign born

Notes

Introduction

1 Richard Ocejo (2014) has written on the recent “upscaling” of downtown neighborhoods in New York City. At the street level, much of this process involves higher-end service establishments and night-life venues moving into urban areas that were previously working-class or immigrant neighborhoods. See also Lloyd 2010. 2 See National Restaurant Association 2019. The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics (2016) had the number of workers in “food and drinking places” at 12.2 million in May 2019. 3 See Phillips 2016. 4 The sustained, countrywide boom of the restaurant industry has led several journalists to begin speculating about when it all might come to an end. Two recent articles featured in the Atlantic and Thrillist, respectively, are “The Paradox of American Restaurants” (Thompson 2017) and “There’s a Massive Restaurant Industry Bubble, and It’s About to Burst” (Alexander 2016). 5 Cantazarite 2000. 6 The Bureau of Labor Statistics consistently lists cooks, dishwashers, and hosts as three of the ten lowest-paying jobs in the country (United States Bureau of Labor Statistics 2016). For more on “bad jobs,” see Kalleberg 2011. 7 Jayaraman 2014. 8 See Ehrenreich 2001; Jayaraman 2014. 9 Krishnendu Ray (2016) notes that in 1900, 67 percent of restaurant owners in New York City were foreign born, most presumably operating small operations that did not require much capital investment. 10 A good rule of thumb for higher-end restaurants would be Yelp’s “$$$” ($31–60 per person) and “$$$$” (over $61) category restaurants. I opt for “higher-end” instead of the more conventional “fine-dining” because the latter tends to signify white tablecloths and formal service—standards that, as of 2019, were rapidly disappearing in many of the trendiest and most popular restaurants around the country. 11 Restaurant Opportunities Centers United 2014. 12 According to a 2016 survey, cooks in Los Angeles said they averaged between ten and thirteen dollars an hour while some servers reported making over thirty dollars an hour in tips and wages combined. See Maddaus 2015. Since there is no tipped minimum wage in California, both types of workers are subject to the 185

186

13

14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30

| Notes

same minimum wage ($10.50 in 2017). Other states feature a tipped minimum wage that allows employers to pay tipped workers a lower minimum wage with the assumption that tips will make up the difference. Similar earning discrepancies anchored by tips have been documented in many restaurants around the United States (see Haley-Lock and Ewert 2011; Jayaraman 2011; Gomberg-Muñoz 2011). This is also consistent with my own findings, derived from both employee interviews and my own personal record of tips earned. “Full-time” for front-of-the-house workers is usually five shifts a week, though this rarely amounts to forty hours. A recent study of the restaurant industry found that, including tipped earnings, waiters and bartenders working in full-service restaurants average nearly double the earnings of cooks and dishwashers (HaleyLock and Ewert 2011; see also Jayaraman 2014). The social division of restaurant labor is often sharper in higher-end service establishments as opposed to fast-food chains (see Ehrenreich 2001; Jayaraman 2011; Newman 1999; Sherman 2007; Zukin 1995). For example, Richard Ocejo (2017) notes the well-established “ethnic division of labor” within craft cocktail bars in New York City. Adler and Adler 2004; Williams and Connell 2010; Sherman 2007. Fine 1996; Whyte 1948. Barley 1989; Brown 2015. Acker 2006: 443. Ray 2019. Tilly 1998. Gatta, Boushey, and Appelbaum 2009; Moss and Tilly 2001; Neckerman and Kirschenman 1991. Laura Rivera’s research (2012, 2015) demonstrates the subtle preferences employers maintain for applicants who represent a “cultural fit” within the company. See also Moss and Tilly (2001) on hiring managers’ preference for “soft skills,” such as exhibiting a friendly demeanor with customers (see Wilson 2016). Hochschild 1983; Nickson et al. 2001; Williams and Connell 2010. Gatta, Boushey, and Applebaum 2009; Williams and Connell 2010. Waldinger and Lichter 2003. Waldinger and Lichter 2003. Burawoy 1979; Fleming and Sturdy 2011. Relatively little has been theorized about intralabor dynamics by recent sociological studies of work, which instead describe the role of powerful actors such as managers and customers (Vallas 2003; but see Ribas 2016; and Subramanian and Suquet 2017). Hughes 2009 (1971): 345. The Los Angeles region remains the most important center for Mexican migration in the United States, both numerically and culturally. Los Angeles contains multiple waves of immigrants from different regions of Mexico, each possessing its own distinct migration history and settlement pattern. See Alarcón, Escala, and Odgers 2016.

Notes

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187

31 Institute for Applied Economics 2016. 32 Restaurant Opportunities Center of Los Angeles 2011. 33 According to a 2008 survey by the Restaurant Opportunities Center of Los Angeles, 31.8 percent of all restaurant workers in the city are between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four, compared to 16.6 percent of the overall working-age population. 34 Restaurant Opportunities Center of Los Angeles 2011; Restaurant Opportunities Center United 2014. 35 For a discussion of male waiters as a sign of prestige, see Hall 1993b. French cuisine has for the past century been considered the most prestigious in the culinary world (Fine 1996; Ray 2016). 36 In my view, both tropes of restaurant work loom large in American culture, embodied by well-known publications by Anthony Bourdain (2000) and Barbara Ehrenreich (2001). 37 Although I am not fluent in Spanish, I speak and understand the language to a passable degree, particularly in the casual conversational context of restaurants. 38 Pseudonyms. 39 I do not claim that these three restaurants exhaust the full range of upscale dining in a sprawling city such as Los Angeles.

Chapter 1. Producing Difference

1 Labor scholars have long sought to understand how management attempts to control the means of production and gain the upper hand in relation to workers (Burawoy 1979; Thompson and Smith 2010). More recently, scholars such as Sherman (2007) and Sallaz (2009) have extended this framework to examine service work environments. 2 Several scholars have noted distinctions between different types of service jobs. Sherman (2007), for instance, uses the terms “interactive” and “non-interactive” to describe front- and back-of-the-house forms of labor, which differ in their respective relationship to customers. See Subramanian and Suquet 2017. 3 For more on emotional labor, see Hochschild 1983. 4 On gender segregation in the labor market, see Charles and Grusky 2004; Ridgeway 2011. For a discussion of gendered work and migration, see HondagneuSotelo 2001. 5 Cantazarite 2000; Grugulis and Bozkurt 2011; Oppenheimer and Kalmijn 1995; Osterman 1980; Waldinger and Lichter 2003. 6 Bonilla-Silva 2010; Ridgway 2011; Rivera 2012, 2015; Tilly 1998. 7 Moss and Tilly 2001; Rivera 2012. 8 Dimaggio and Powell (1983) refer to this process as “institutional isomorphism,” in which competing companies adopt similar organizational standards and practices, usually modeling industry leaders. 9 I borrow the term “brown-collar” from Cantazarite (2000). Gomberg-Muñoz 2011.

188

10 11 12 13 14

15 16

17 18 19

20 21

22

23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32

| Notes

Gomberg-Munoz 2011: 83. Neckerman and Kirschenman 1991. “Good Restaurant” is a pseudonym to protect the restaurant’s privacy. Gatta, Boushey, and Appelbaum 2009; Warhurst and Nickson 2007; Williams and Connell 2010. Sharon Zukin (1995) discusses how immigrants possessing more “urbane,” middle-class mannerisms are more often given desirable jobs in restaurants by management (Zukin 1995: 154–73). Melamed 2006. Yuen (2017) makes a similar point about racial inequality in Hollywood. She argues that people of color occupy highly stereotyped and tokenized roles on screen. See also Kanter (1977, chapter 8). Yuen 2017. I tried repeatedly to reach these two former employees to hear their perspective in the aftermath of their departure from The Neighborhood. I was not successful. Though I did not conduct a systematic analysis, this practice appears to be more common among smaller mom-and-pop restaurants that are both less likely to be familiar with labor laws and more likely to fly under the radar of labor enforcement agencies. A study by UCLA’s Labor Center (2015) notes that part-time and on-call work is particularly challenging for young, working-class individuals. Studies consistently show that employers infer the race, gender, class, sexuality, and age of applicants based on stereotyped factors listed on resumes. Dias forthcoming; Jayaraman 2011; Rivera and Tilcsik 2016. Sociologists Paul Dimaggio and Walter Powell (1983) call this process “normative isomorphism,” whereby common practices in the industry (e.g., hiring standards) are upheld. The hiring strategy of customer recruitment mirrors that found in other service and retail establishments (see Williams and Connell 2010). Bailey and Waldinger 1991. Lynn Pettinger (2004) has similarly written about “branded culture and branded workers” in the fashion retail industry. I elaborate on “proximal service” in Wilson 2016. Bolton and Boyd 2003; Hochschild 1983; Leidner 1993. This sharply contrasts with the explicitly themed service offered at some national chains such as Hooters (sexually suggestive), Dick’s Last Resort (surly), or Bubba Gump’s (movie-themed). Bourdieu 1984. Warhurst and Nickson 2009. Crang (1994) discusses the nature of restaurant servers being on stage, available for visual consumption by diners. McClain and Mears 2012.

Notes

| 189

33 The use of formal credentials as prerequisites to control access to top positions in high-end kitchens has a socially exclusionary function. As Ray (2016: 115) writes, “In the public domain the untrained cook and the school-trained American chef are precise foils of each other . . . [T]his community of insiders, that some immigrant cooks with haute aspirations struggle to be admitted into . . . is in itself a work in progress of extending expertise most typically for white American and Asian-American men.” 34 Higher-end restaurants have been known to employ more male waiters, who are traditionally associated with fine dining and a more prestigious image for the establishment (see Cobble 1991; Hall 1993b). 35 Sherman 2007: 6. 36 See Karla Erickson (2009) on the production and consumption of familiarity in service interactions. 37 I have altered this acronym (SD) to protect the privacy of the restaurant. 38 OpenTable’s website describes it as “a real-time online reservation network for fine dining restaurants.” On the basis of internal data, the company reports that diners are more likely to return to a restaurant that knows their favorite drink, special requests, and seating preferences. Accessed on February 15, 2018 (http:// openforbusiness.opentable.com). 39 This is less true of the “dinner crew,” who work when the restaurant strives to be a swanky affair. Dinner servers are more uniformly white, college-educated, and conventionally attractive. 40 During my time at Terroir, I did not witness a single worker cross from a position in the kitchen to a role in the dining room, including as server assistants.

Chapter 2. Worlds Apart

1 The concept of an “arc of labor” comes from Strauss (1985). See also Star and Strauss 1999. 2 Shaw 2005: xix. 3 Sociologists have neglected to analyze everyday experiences of social inequality that take place within workplaces. Steven Vallas (2003: 80) writes that “relatively little attention has been paid to the ways in which racial and ethnic relations unfold within the sphere of production itself.” 4 Hochschild 1983; Warhurst and Nickson 2007. 5 Recall that Terroir does not formally staff bussers and food runners. Instead, the restaurant employs a two-tier system of servers and server assistants, both of whom receive the same training and collectively share the tasks of running food and bussing tables. Unlike the racialized jobs of bussers and food runners, server assistants at Terroir are more likely to be white men and women. 6 Fine 1996. 7 Fine 1996: 98–99. 8 Paules 1991.

190

| Notes

9 A high ratio of front-of-the-house employees to customers on a given shift deals a direct blow to the earnings of each individual worker. As one server phrased it, working an overstaffed shift is like having “too many hands in the cookie jar.” 10 This kind of clandestine manipulation of labor hours by kitchen workers recalls sociologist Donald Roy’s famous studies on quota restriction in an industrial factory (1952, 1954). However, in my study, I found little evidence of a coordinated effort among cooks to slow their food-service productivity. 11 Korczynski’s (2003) notion of “communities of coping” describes ways in which coworkers in customer-service positions help each other manage the emotional and psychological toil of dealing with customers. This example extends the concept to include dealing with fraught relations between front- and back-of-the house workers. 12 Social psychologists refer to this as the “fundamental attribution error,” in which observed behavior is attributed to someone’s character instead of the external factors that may have resulted in that behavior or action. 13 Tip policies often vary slightly per restaurant, shaped by industry standards, state laws, and employee discretion. (See http://www.restaurantbusinessonline.com.) 14 Tim’s sarcastic comment about tip disparities between himself and me may have also been influenced by the fact that we had become friendly outside of the restaurant. I did not witness him confronting another member of the waitstaff in the same way. 15 Granovetter 1995 [1974], 1985. 16 Migration scholars note that the presence of dense social networks serves to “colonize” a line of work or workplace whereby job entry, like workplace norms, is regulated by group members (Massey, Durand, and Malone 2002; Waldinger and Lichter 2003). 17 For a review, see Quattrone and Jones 1980 and Taifel 1982. 18 Taifel 1982.

Chapter 3. Flexibility, Play, and Privilege in the Front of the House

1 See Huddleston 2011; Shigihara 2015. 2 Ehrenreich 2001; Jayaraman 2014; Restaurant Opportunity Center United 2014. Arne Kalleberg (2009, 2011) notes that a disproportionate number of “precarious” jobs in the United States—employment featuring low wages, uncertain schedules, few benefits, and no job security—are located in the service industry. 3 These employment characteristics are not unique to restaurants but are shown by an increasing proportion of the working population in the United States (Halpin 2015). 4 Young Americans, particularly middle-class ones, often take some time to try out different kinds of jobs before committing to a line of work and attempting to advance up established job ladders (Kalleberg and Mouw 2018; Oppenheimer and Kalmijn 1995). Past research shows that Americans make fewer job changes by

Notes

5 6 7

8

9 10 11 12

13 14

15

16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23

|

191

their late twenties as they stabilize their career path and begin to move up on the job instead of switch out (Oppenheimer and Kalmijn 1995; Osterman 1980; Topel and Ward 1992). Kalleberg 2011; Ross 2009. Cote and Bynner 2008; Ray 2017. The more time an individual spends in a given line of work, the more unlikely they are to shift to another occupation. To be sure, socioeconomic resources make this process easier. While working-class individuals struggle to navigate a growing number of precarious and “bad” jobs, those with access to money, social networks, and college degrees have greater ability to transition into more desirable lines of work (see Carroll and Powell 2002). See Besen-Cassino 2014. Barley and Kunda (2004) report that many Silicon Valley technology contractors voluntarily leave stable, well-paying jobs at reputable firms in order to pursue careers as “hired guns.” These individuals eschew traditional ideals of stable employment in favor of build-your-own, “free agent” work lifestyles (Pink 2001; see also Mears 2015). Besen-Cassino 2014; Mears 2008; Ocejo 2017; Williams and Connell 2010. See Menger 1999; Umney and Kretsos 2015. Besen 2006, 2014. As anthropologist Marcel Mauss would note, shift trading is akin to gift giving: a social gesture made with the expectation that a similar one will be returned in the future. Elsewhere, I refer to these lifestyles as “portfolio lives” (Wilson 2019a). O’Mahony and Bechky (2006) refer to this as “stretchwork,” where workers seek to accumulate or hone skills that may help them secure employment in external labor markets. Few workers actively expressed concern over their lack of job benefits associated with full-time employment in one job. This lack of concern could be due to their relatively privileged class backgrounds, though it could be equally related to their youth (Huddleston 2011). For a similar finding, see Huddleston 2011. The health insurance that Helen refers to here is private health insurance that she purchases on her own. To my knowledge, Match does not offer an employee health insurance package, at least not to front-of-the-house workers. Greg has previously worked as both a chef and a general manager. He was the only person I met in six years with such diverse restaurant experience. Ocejo (2017) has written about the appeals of craft for today’s “artisan” bartenders and butchers in New York City. Ehrenreich 2001; Terkel 1974. Bourdieu 1984. Crang (1994) makes the point that the front-of-the-house staff in restaurants are on display for customers to consume. Hochschild 1983.

192

| Notes

24 See Fleming and Sturdy 2011; Marshall 1986. 25 Gutek et al. (2000) develop a typology for service exchanges that differentiates between encounters (impersonal and fleeting), “pseudo-relationships” (repeated yet otherwise distant), and relationships (longstanding and personal). 26 Other kinds of service workers also take pride in a similar process of customer service. Just as Michael does with food and drink, city tour guides do customized work to “re-enchant” the passing urban environment by using colorful stories and personal touches to drum up interest (Wynn 2010). 27 All the hosts at Terroir were exclusively young women. None expressed a commitment to staying in the restaurant industry long term. This made them more similar to the front-of-the-house workers at Match, though I suspect that this group of hosts had an even looser attachment to their jobs, as stopgap employment. 28 Bonilla-Silva 2010; Ray 2019. 29 Crang 1994. 30 See Besen-Cassino 2014; Shigihara 2015. 31 George 2008; Neff, Wissinger, and Zukin 2005; Ocejo 2017. 32 See Huddleston 2011.

Chapter 4. Brown- Collar Careers in the Back of the House

1 Restaurant Opportunities Center of Los Angeles 2011. 2 See Eckstein and Peri 2018; Pew Hispanic Research Center 2015; Restaurant Opportunities Centers United 2014. 3 The restaurant industry has one of the highest proportions of undocumented workers of any US industry, more than doubling that found in construction (33 percent to 15 percent, respectively). See Pew Hispanic Research Center 2015. 4 Focusing on routine kitchen labor and those who do it also differentiates my analysis from recent studies that have focused on (white male) chefs and their high-end culinary creative work (see Lane 2010; Opazo 2016; Ray 2016). 5 See Desmond 2008; Holmes 2013. 6 Fine 1996. 7 Bourdain 2000. 8 Gary Fine’s (1996) study focuses on restaurant cooks specifically, showing how these workers use a range of occupational rhetorics to justify their jobs. However, his study does not address the way racial and ethnic group norms shape these occupational rhetorics. 9 Cantazarite 2000; Waldinger and Lichter 2003. 10 Hagan 1998; Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994, 2001. 11 Gomberg-Muñoz 2011; Waldinger and Lichter 2003. 12 Neckerman and Kirschenman 1991; Waldinger and Lichter 2003. 13 Massey, Durand, and Malone 2002. 14 Eckstein and Peri 2018; Waldinger and Lichter 2003; Waldinger and Bozorgmehr 1996.

Notes

|

193

15 Research on ethnic niches, for example, tends to focus on niche formation and maintenance rather than social distinctions within the ethnic niche (Massey et al. 1987; Peri and Eckstein 2018; Waldinger and Lichter 2003). 16 See Bonilla-Silva 2010; Lee and Zhou 2015. 17 Kasinitz et al. 2008; Rumbaut and Portes 2001. 18 Sociologist Tessa Wright (2007) identifies several distinct perspectives of minority and migrant restaurant workers in England, such as those seeking career progression, those looking for a chance to earn better wages, and those using the work as a stepping stone to a new career. But she neglects to examine whether these perspectives correspond to workers seeking to position themselves in slightly different jobs within restaurants (e.g., kitchen work versus support work). 19 In the summer of 2016, this included a core team of two immigrant Mexican men, one second-generation Mexican man, and one part-time white woman. When the white woman left to return to college that fall, she was replaced by another immigrant Mexican man. 20 See Fine 1996. Similar bonds have been noted among male workers in close-knit, physical occupations such as firefighting and roofing (Desmond 2008; Chavez, Edelblute, and Korver-Glenn 2016). 21 This phrase literally translates as “don’t suck” (“mamar”), followed by a term of address used among friends (“güey”). It is mostly used among friends to express disbelief. 22 Gary Fine (1996: 61) has also noted the extensive “backstage” lingo that exists in kitchens, and the animated way it is used during meal service rushes. 23 Fine (1996) notes that chefs benefit from being able to frame their work as a form of artistic expression. This occupational rhetoric is less available to line cooks executing formal recipes, and even less so for prep cooks and dishwashers operating behind the scenes with raw or dirty materials. See also Opazo (2016) on chefdriven innovation. 24 Ray (2016) argues that in the culinary world, “ethnic” cuisine and its characteristic dishes are often treated as subordinate to the haute cuisines of France, Italy, and, more recently, Japan. The distinction between formal menu dishes and family meal dishes in the restaurants in this study mirrors this distinction. 25 Kanter (1977) notes similar relations between bosses and secretaries in whitecollar workplaces. 26 This insight draws inspiration from Seth Holmes’s (2013) ethnography of migrant farm workers who engage in seasonal agricultural labor in the United States. Holmes shows that these individuals, who are mostly undocumented indigeneous men from Oaxaca, have no choice but to engage in this work to survive, and as a result, try to make their labor conditions as tolerable as possible. 27 Christine Williams’s (1991) classic study of male nurses and female military personnel details the gendered nature of certain occupations, in which certain stereotypically masculine traits are attributed to some jobs and feminine traits to others.

194

| Notes

28 To my knowledge, restaurants do not require cooks to purchase and bring in their own equipment, which would resemble an independent contractor arrangement and probably put that restaurant in violation of employment laws. 29 “Timing,” as Geraldo would later explain to me, involves being able to keep mental tabs on how long certain items are going to take to ready. The goal is to have everything finish at once: the cold salad made to order, the french fries from the fryer, the burger, medium-rare, from the grill. 30 Hagan, Lowe, and Quingla (2011) document a similar strategy of job hopping (brincar) to gain new skills among Mexican immigrants in the US construction industry. 31 Other scholars have noted similar phenomena among working-class immigrants (see Hagan, Hernández-León, and Demonsant 2015; Waldinger and Lichter 2003). 32 Born to immigrant parents, Andrew is unusual among his kitchen colleagues in that he graduated with a four-year degree from a University of California school. This probably contributes to his more cerebral approach to cooking philosophy. 33 Occupational prestige scores from General Social Survey 2012 (see Smith and Son 2014). “Waitress/waiter in a restaurant” is 3.7, “cook in a restaurant” is 3.9, and “TV repairman” is 4.0. 34 Anderson 2015. 35 A number of Latino workers expressed an interest in eventually returning to their home countries, though this was rarely an immediate priority. Their anticipated return migration ranged from “two or three years from now” to “when I’m ready to retire.” 36 Given these circumstances, the relatively positive ways in which Latino workers describe their restaurant jobs probably represent a degree of post-hoc framing (e.g., “I am making the best of a bad situation”).

Chapter 5. Mobility Pathways and Closed Doors

1 Burt 2005. 2 Goldberg et al. 2016. 3 Structurally speaking, Granovetter (1985) refers to this as a problem of embeddedness. See also Fernandez and Fernandez-Mateo 2006. 4 Williams and Connell 2010. For variation in what “looks good and sounds right” for different service environments, see Lloyd 2010: chapter 7 and Pettinger 2004. 5 Alarcón et al. 2014; Hernández-León and Lakhani 2013; Morando 2013; Rumbaut 2014; Waldinger, Lim, and Cort 2007. 6 Alarcón et al. 2014; Hernández-León and Lakhani 2013; Morando 2013; Portes and Rumbaut 2006; Rumbaut 2014. 7 Villa and Villa 2005. 8 Hernández-León and Lakhani 2013; Morando 2013. 9 Moss and Tilly (2001) refer to these intangible qualities as “soft skills.” For a recent review of the socially constructed nature of “skill,” see Warhurst, Tilly, and Gatta 2017.

Notes

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195

10 In the migration literature, the “1.5-generation” connotes individuals born in one country and raised in a different country. 11 Granovetter 1985. 12 This is based on Antonio’s recollection of his work history before I met him. However, other employees also affirmed Antonio’s qualities as a worker, and the rough timeline of these events. 13 The US-born children of immigrants do not approach their jobs with a “dual” frame of reference in which bottom-rung employment opportunities “here” in the United States are viewed as preferable to available jobs found back “there” in the mother country (Waldinger and Lichter 2003). 14 Research by Andersson, Holzer, and Lane (2005) shows that among unskilled workers at the bottom of the labor market, horizontal mobility—moving between employers in the same industry—is associated with accessing better job opportunities. 15 I discuss this in chapter 3. See Besen-Cassino 2014; Dublanica 2008; for an exception, Ocejo 2017. 16 For more on the concept of a cultural toolkit, see Swidler 1986. 17 Agius Vallejo 2012; Morando 2013. 18 Ironically, the way foreign-born Latino men approach their restaurant jobs shares some similarities with the way white men and women approach theirs (as parttime and supplemental). However, their central motivation for holding these jobs remains starkly different: foreign-born Latino workers are far more likely to seek multiple jobs out of economic necessity rather than lifestyle preference. 19 Many back-of-the-house workers have probably suffered labor infractions and wage theft too. Reports of labor infractions, such as wage theft, no breaks offered, and withholding of workman’s compensation, are common in the restaurant industry (Jayaraman 2014). However, I did not investigate whether employees had experienced such violations in the past, so I cannot speak on this matter specifically. 20 The shortage of quality kitchen labor in large cities has recently been a hot news topic surrounding the restaurant industry, with feature articles in nearly every major news source in the last three years. 21 Hagan, Hernández-León, and Demonsant 2015. See also Hagan, Lowe, and Quingla 2011. 22 The strategies these workers use to hedge their job bets and vie for better opportunities in the restaurant industry are similar to those used by immigrant workers with low levels of education in a variety of US labor settings. See Hagan, Hernández-León, and Demonsant 2015; Lowe, Hagan, and Iskander 2010; Ramirez and Hondagneu-Sotelo 2009. 23 Recent industry trends suggest that this standard may be loosening. A number of young chefs in LA have grown to prominence by valorizing “street food” and homestyle culinary traditions instead of the classic European techniques taught in culinary school.

196

| Notes

24 Management ensures that servers are tested on the ingredient list for each dish; food runners and bussers need only identify the dish by sight. 25 I also encountered a minority of non-Latino individuals working as part-time dishwashers. At Terroir, for example, one previously homeless white man worked part-time at the dish pit, as well as two black men. 26 Several studies have documented the structural disadvantages that foreignborn women uniquely face in the US labor market, see Hagan 1998; Hagan, Hernández-León, and Demonsant 2015; Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001. For a discussion of gendered power dynamics within immigrant networks, see Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994 and Hagan 1998. 27 See Alarcón, Escala, and Odgers 2016. 28 On informal training systems among immigrant workers, see Bailey and Waldinger 1991. 29 In addition to working as dishwashers, two of these women told me they also work as house cleaners, a common occupational niche for Mexican and Central American women (Alarcón, Escala, and Odgers 2016; Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001). 30 Lopez-Sanders 2013.

Conclusion 1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16

17

Warhurst, Tilly, and Gatta 2017. Williams and Connell 2010. Pettinger 2004; Sherman 2007. Scholars and social justice advocates link standards of “professionalism” with white favoritism. See Gray 2019. Hall 1993a. Lamont and Molnár 2002; Ribas 2016. Lamont and Molnár 2002. See Besen-Cassino 2014. Zuñiga and Hernández-León 2005; Marrow 2011. US-born Latinos are already a larger percentage of the US Latino population than the foreign-born, see Flores 2017. Waldinger and Lichter 2003. Recent monographs by Lung-Amam (2017) and Jimenez (2017) document changing social institutions and cultural frameworks in Bay Area communities where large proportions of nonwhite immigrants now reside. Tilly 1998. Gray 2014; Jayaraman 2014. Cobble 1991. Due to the substantial tips they often make, the minimum wage does not affect front-of-the-house workers in higher-end restaurants to the same extent as those working in lower-end establishments. Interview with Kathy Hoang, director of Restaurant Opportunity Center of Los Angeles, March 8, 2016.

Notes

| 197

18 See Lynn 2006. This point has also been made in the recent debates over the need to change tip policies to allow for distribution to back-of-the-house workers. See Sciacca 2018. 19 Alexander 2016. 20 I have written about tipping and inequality elsewhere (see Wilson 2019b). 21 In the summer of 2020, as this book goes to print, Danny Meyer announced that all his restaurants would resume the practice of tipping. No-tip restaurants, despite their good intentions, have encountered serious pushback from both consumers and staff alike. See Victor 2016. 22 Maddaus 2015. 23 Harris 2015.

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Index

Acker, Joan, 9 advertisements, jobs, 26–28, 32 aesthetic labor, 11, 33, 83, 93 African Americans: in front of the house, 30–31; racial stereotypes and hiring, 10; social hierarchy and, 12 ages, of Los Angeles restaurant workers, 187n33 alcohol, 16, 18, 72, 107 all day, 179 Anderson, Elijah, 129 arc of labor, 53, 189n1 Asian Americans, 17, 18, 168, 169, 189n33 Atlantic, 185n4 autonomy, 40, 85, 98 back closet, 21–22, 135, 154–57, 166 back door, jobs accessed through, 135–37 back of the house: defined, 179; front of the house and, 9, 37–38, 58–59, 64–66, 69– 81; hiring “brown-collar,” 25–28; labor infractions and, 195n19; Latino men in, 6, 165; people of color in, 8; racial stereotypes and hiring for, 10; shifts for, 38, 59; as space of masculinity, 165; training, 38t, 38–39. See also brown-collar jobs back-of-the-house work: categories of, 7; kitchen life masculinizing, 107, 119–23 backstage: lingo, 193n22; spaces, 48–49 bakers, 27, 45, 59, 61 barbacks, viii, 127, 131, 150, 179 Barley, Stephen, 191n8 bartenders: with flexibility to blend pursuits, 92–93; playing at work, 97–100;

professionalized service and, 45; role of, 54; schedules, 89; shifts for, 60; tips, viii–ix, 61–62, 152, 171; training, viii–x Bechky, Beth, 191n14 Besen-Cassino, Yasemin, 85 bilingualism, 27–28, 38, 134–35, 141–42, 156 boundaries: service with racialized and classed, 164–66, 189n39; social, 34–38, 54–62, 76–81; symbolic, 21, 39, 54, 70, 72 Bourdain, Anthony, 107, 187n36 brown-collar jobs, 45, 142, 187n9; back of the house and hiring for, 25–28; differentiating, 123–31; glass ceiling for, 156; kitchen life, 108–31; navigating, 105–8; race and, 5, 10, 26, 50–51, 108, 156, 165; in restaurants, 108–9; subworlds of work and, 131, 133 bussers, 73, 104, 118; kitchen life and, 127– 28, 147; professionalized service and, 45, 46; requirements, 196n24; role of, 56–57, 153 Cantazarite, Lisa, 5, 187n9 careers, work, 21, 104 chain of command, kitchen life and, 34–35, 36, 113 chefs, 112, 179; with chain of command, 34–35; as mentors, 45–46; occupational rhetoric and, 193n23; personalized service and, 48–49, 162; with professionalized service, 42–46; with street food, 195n22; workplace tensions and, 63–64, 71. See also sous-chef

213

214

| Index

children, of immigrants, 73, 195n13 class: part-time jobs and, 49; power, racism and, 46–47, 49; race, gender and, 21, 76–81, 107; race and, 68, 84–85; service with race and, 164–66, 189n39; social inequality and, 10, 28–34 clopen, 86, 179 communication: bilingualism, 27–28, 38, 134–35, 141–42, 156; brokered and social networks, 140–42; coworkers with, 58–59, 64–65, 67–72, 77–80, 97; with customers, 143–44; hierarchy, 34–35; between worlds of work, 142 communities of coping, 190n11 comp (free of charge), 42, 49, 179 complaints, customers, 129 comradery, with “the guys” and kitchen life, 110–15 Connell, Catherine, 10 consumers, 10, 85, 168, 197n21 consumption, 28, 114, 163, 188n31, 189n36 cooks, 78–79, 194n32; equipment for, 123– 24, 194n28; kitchen life for, 105–6, 110– 15, 123–26, 137–38, 147; line, 48, 59–60, 64, 68, 127; occupational rhetoric and, 192n8; prep, 7, 17, 18, 36, 38, 45, 50, 59, 71, 75, 79, 122, 156, 193n23; shifts for, 59; tips for, 171; wages for, 62, 106, 185n6, 185n12; workplace tensions and, 70–71 coolness, with social networks, 142–44 cover, 179 coworkers: with communication, 58–59, 64–65, 67–72, 77–80, 97; kitchen life and comradery with “the guys,” 110–15; microrelations, 6, 12, 76, 81, 161; restaurant jobs done differently by, 54–62; workplace tensions among, 62–72 Craigslist, 26–27, 32 Crang, Philip, 188n31, 191n22 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 100 cultural capital, 40, 96, 153 culture: branded, 188n25; embedded cultural brokers, 157; multiculturalism, 29

customers: communication with, 143– 44; communities of coping and, 190n11; complaints, 129; core diners, 33–34, 47–49; with food orders, modifications, 62–65; front-of-thehouse employees and, 190n9, 191n22; hiring, 33–34, 49; SDs, 47–49, 163; second generation and, 57; social segregation, 8 customer service: bilingualism and, 135; blending pursuits and, 92; entrylevel position, 151; front of the house and, 7, 98–99, 100, 102, 144; people of color and, 144, 167; preparation for, 55; service brands and, 39, 42, 43, 46; social segregation and, 8; tips and, 97; whiteness and, 11, 14, 33, 56, 58, 83, 90 Demonsant, Jean-Luc, 148 Dick’s Last Resort, 188n28 difference: brown-collar jobs and, 123–31; with jobs and race, 25–34; managing, 34–52, 161–64; with restaurant jobs, doing, 54–62; service brands and, 23–25 Dimaggio, Paul, 187n8, 188n22 dining room: front of the house with labor instability in, 84–86; white space reinforced in, 28–34 disciplinary action, social inequality and, 58 dishwashers, 104, 119, 193n23; with mobility, 138; part-time, 196n25; shifts for, 59–60; training for, 136 disputes, workplace, 65–68. See also tensions disruptions, in service, 69–72 diversity: hiring and racial, 29–30, 161; profiting from ties, 144–46 dress codes, 17, 18, 19, 41, 43 drugs, 14, 101, 107 dual frame of reference, 10, 195n13

Index

economic inequality, 7–8, 61, 65–67. See also tips; wages Ehrenreich, Barbara, 187n36 eighty-six, 159, 179 electronic point of sale. See POS embedded cultural brokers, 157 embeddedness, 137, 194n3 emotional labor, 24, 50 equipment, for cooks, 123–24, 194n28 Erickson, Karla, 189n36 ethnic niches, 109, 193n15 ethnography, 14, 15, 193n26 expo (expeditor station), 144–45, 179 Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, 8 family meals, 114–15, 179, 193n24 Fine, Gary Alan, 61, 107, 192n8, 193n22, 193n23 fire, 180 firings, 49–50, 99 first generation, 5, 111. See also immigrants flexibility: to blend pursuits, 91–96; front of the house and shift, 82–83, 86–90, 162; hiring with race and, 11; to play at work, 96–104 floor managers, 16, 41, 48, 70, 77, 172, 179–80 food and drinking places, worker population in, 4, 185n2 food orders, modifications, 62–65 food runners, 78, 136; kitchen life and, 118–19, 127–28; professionalized service and, 45, 46; requirements, 196n24; role of, 56, 57, 132; tips, 144; training, vii–viii food tastings, 36, 37–38 food tickets, viii, 2, 69, 70–71, 79, 120, 180 formal credentials, 168, 189n33 free of charge (comp), 42, 44, 49, 179 French cuisine, 187n35 front of the house, 180; back of the house and, 9, 37–38, 58–59, 64–66,

| 215

69–81; customers, 190n9, 191n22; customer service and, 7, 98–99, 100, 102, 144; eliminating, 171; with labor instability in dining room, 84–86; at Match Restaurant, 192n27; meetings, 36; minimum wage and, 83, 196n16; onstage, being, 54–56; people of color in, 30–31; playing at work and, 11, 96–104; with pursuits, blending of, 91–96; racial stereotypes and hiring for, 10; role of, 56; shifts for, 14, 59, 82–84, 86–90, 162, 186n13; stereotypes, 45; training, 37–38, 38, 40–41; whites in, 6, 8, 14, 28–29; white space in dining room and, 28–34 front-of-the-house work, categories of, 7 fundamental attribution errors, 190n12 garde manger, 45, 124, 137, 138, 180 gender: race, class and, 21, 76–81, 107; roles and hiring, 25, 93, 189n34; support jobs and, 151 General Social Survey, 194n33 Gjelina, 13 glass ceiling, for brown-collar jobs, 156 Gomberg-Munoz, Ruth, 26 Granovetter, Mark, 137, 194n3 güey, ix, 58, 111, 193n21 Gutek, Barbara, 192n25 Hagan, Jacqueline, 148, 194n30 hands, 1, 58, 89, 175, 180, 190n9 health insurance, 85, 191n17 Hernández-León, Ruben, 148, 176 hierarchy: chain of command and, 34– 35; communication, 34–35; French cuisine, 187n35; of kitchen labor, 34–35, 45–46, 64; of restaurant jobs, 102; scheduling, 87; social, 11–12, 160, 171– 72; workplace, vii–x; worlds of work and, 51 hired guns, 191n8

216

| Index

hiring: back door, 135–37; “brown-collar” back of the house, 25–28; casting calls and, 30; customers, 33–34, 49; gender roles and, 25, 93, 189n34; race and, 11, 23–24, 26, 28–30; with race and flexibility, 11; racial diversity and, 29–30, 50, 161; racial stereotypes and, 10; resumes and, 26, 32–33, 188n21; social codes and, 20, 25, 28, 42; social networks and, 31; strategy of customer recruitment, 188n23; training and, 32, 36–39, 38; understaffing and, 62, 90; with white space in dining room, 28– 34; workplace hierarchy and, vii–x Hoang, Kathy, 169 Hochschild, Arlie, 96 Hollywood: casting calls and, 30; racism in, 30, 188n16 Holmes, Seth, 193n26 Holzer, Harry, 195n14 home countries, 10, 111, 117, 194n35 Hooters, 188n28 horseplay, 111, 112, 122 hospitality, 17, 96, 129, 154; art of, 54, 98; skills, 94, 99; tips and, 170; for wealthy guests, 163 Hughes, Everett, 12 immigrants: ceiling and mobility, 146– 54; children of, 73, 195n13; with dual frame of reference, 10, 195n13; first generation, 5, 111; labor for foreignborn women, 196n26; Los Angeles with Mexican, 186n30; 1.5-generation, 195n10; population, 12; populations, foreign-born, 12, 106–7; restaurant owners, 185n9; undocumented, 108, 154–55, 192n3. See also Mexican immigrants; second generation in-betweenness, 21, 156; with advantages diminished, 168; mobility and leveraging, 135–46; promotions and, 141, 142, 157; situated opportunities and, 166–67

inequality: economic, 7–8, 61, 65–67; higher-end restaurants and, 7; minimum wage and, 167; racial, 9, 188n16; with tips, 4, 7–8, 61, 171, 190n14; wages, 7–8, 61. See also social inequality infractions, labor, 195n19 ingredient list, 196n24 injuries, kitchen life, 120 institutional isomorphism, 187n8 intralabor dynamics, 186n28 invisible jobs, 54, 164 Jimenez, Tomas, 196n12 jobs: advertisements and, 26–28, 32; back closet, 21–22, 135, 154–57, 166; back door and accessing, 135–37; benefits, 191n15; changes, 190n4, 191n7; difference with race and, 25–34; done differently in restaurants, 54–62; hopping, 194n30, 196n29; invisible, 54, 164; Latino men with multiple, 195n18; lowest-paying, 185n6, 186n13; part-time, 11, 73–74, 85, 92, 93, 162, 188n20, 195n18, 196n24; precarious, 84–85, 190n2, 191n7; second, 74, 106, 133, 147; for second generation, 5, 15, 17, 20, 21, 26, 46, 50, 107, 111, 165; social inequality and, 72–76; stopgap, 25, 85, 192n27; termination, 49–50, 99. See also brown-collar jobs; support jobs Kalleberg, Arne, 190n2 Kanter, Rosabeth M., 193n25 kitchen life: with back-of-the-house work, masculinizing, 107, 119–23; brown-collar jobs, 108–31; bussers and, 127–28, 147; chain of command and, 34–35, 36, 113; comradery with “the guys,” 110–15; for cooks, 105–6, 110–15, 123–26, 137–38, 147; family meals and, 114–15, 179; food runners and, 127–28; formal credentials and,

Index

189n33; grind of, 101–2, 120–21, 127, 128, 137–40; horseplay and, 111, 112, 122; injuries, 120; labor hours and, 59, 60–62, 190n10; with loyalty to mentors, 115–19; nicknames and, 112; racial diversity and, 45–46; with staffing shortage, 61; women and, 112, 121–23, 142, 154, 155; workplace tensions and, 65–72 “kitchen music,” 1, 112–13 kitchens: labor, 34–35, 45–46, 64–65, 192n4, 195n20; professional, 101, 105–6, 123, 135, 154 Korczynski, Marek, 190n11 Kunda, Gideon, 191n8 labor, 53, 185n6; aesthetic, 11, 33, 83, 93; arc of, 53, 189n1; emotional, 24, 50; Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, 8; hours and kitchen life, 59, 60–62, 190n10; infractions, 195n19; instability, 84–86; intralabor dynamics, 186n28; kitchen, 34–35, 45–46, 64–65, 192n4, 195n20; manual, 25, 107–8, 115; New York City bars and ethnic division of, 186n14; restaurant, 6–9; social codes and, 109, 162, 164; strategies, 137–40, 195n22; undocumented, 108, 154–55, 192n3; United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, 185n2; for women, foreignborn, 196n26 Labor Center, UCLA, 188n20 labor laws, 8, 25, 188n19, 194n28 labor unions, 169 Lane, Julia, 195n14 Latino men: in back of the house, 6, 165; brown-collar jobs and, 5, 50–51; with hiring and race, 11; with multiple jobs, 195n18; racism and, 150–51; social hierarchy and, 12. See also brown-collar jobs leisure, 10, 41, 91, 94 lifers, 95–96, 100, 103–4, 165

|

217

line cooks, 48, 127; shifts for, 59–60; tips and, 68; workplace tensions and, 64 Lopez-Sanders, Laura, 157 Los Angeles, 167; chefs with street food in, 195n22; with Mexican immigrants, 186n30; population of restaurant workers in, 13; Restaurant Opportunities Center of Los Angeles, 187n33; restaurants, higher-end, 12–13; ROCLA, 176, 187n33 Lowe, Nichola, 194n30 loyalty: as barrier to promotion, 118; for mentors and kitchen life, 115–19 Lung-Amam, Willow S., 196n12 luxury: personalized, 46–52, 144, 163, 168; resorts with hiring, race and flexibility, 11 machismo, 121, 154, 165 maître d’, 180 males, waiters in higher-end restaurants, 189n34. See also men management: difference and, 34–52, 161– 64; of service brands, 23–25, 39–52; social inequality and, 9–12, 20, 25; styles, 36, 150; workers and, 187n1. See also difference; hiring managers. See floor managers manual labor, 25, 107–8, 115 masculinity: kitchen life with back-ofthe-house work and, 107, 119–23; machismo, 121, 154, 165; spaces of, 165; stereotypical, 193n27 Match Restaurant, 25, 51; front of the house at, 28, 33–34, 192n27; health insurance and, 191n17; lunch rush at, 1–4; profile, 15–17; proximal service at, 39–42, 94, 134, 162; social codes and, 34; workers at, 16–17 Mauss, Marcel, 191n12 meetings: pre-shift, 41, 43–44, 94, 159; workers with segregated, 35–36 Melamed, Jodi, 29

218

| Index

men: with gender roles and hiring, 25, 93, 189n34; masculinity and, 107, 119–23, 154, 165, 193n27; tips and white, 171. See also Latino men mentors: chefs as, 45–46; kitchen life with loyalty to, 115–19; in workplace, 11, 165 menus, 114, 115, 118, 159, 171; items, 13, 17, 19, 23, 39, 53, 69; knowledge, 44, 45, 152, 153; limited, 18, 70; memorizing, 37; modifications to, 62–65; samples from, 36; seasonal, 113; specials off, 47; timing and, 181 Mexican immigrants, 186n30; racist stereotypes about, 26 Meyer, Danny, 171, 197n21 microrelations, coworkers, 6, 12, 76, 81, 161 minimum wage, 24, 36, 73, 149; front of the house and, 83, 196n16; increase, 169, 171; inequality and, 167; tips and, 4, 169, 171, 185n12, 196n16; training at, 32; women and, 155 mis en place, 59–60, 70, 180 mobility: with advancement strategy, 137–40; back closet jobs and, 154–57, 166; barriers to, 6, 42; bilingualism and, 134–35; with coolness, display of, 142–44; immigrant ceiling and, 146– 54; with in-betweenness, leveraging, 135–46; perspectives on, 193n18; social context and, 132–34; at Terroir Restaurant, 189n40; tips and, 67–68 modifications, food orders, 62–65 Moss, Philip, 186n22, 194n9 music, 1, 18, 97, 112–13 National Restaurant Association (NRA), 169 The Neighborhood, 25, 188n18; front of the house at, 28, 30–32; with hiring and race, 26, 28–29; personalized luxury at, 46–52, 144, 163; profile, 19– 20; social codes and, 34 neoliberal multiculturalism, 29

New York City, 167; bars and ethnic division of labor, 186n14; with immigrants as restaurant owners, 185n9; upscaling of downtown neighborhoods in, 185n1 nicknames, 112 normative isomorphism, 188n22 no-tip policies, 171, 185n12, 197n21 NRA. See National Restaurant Association occupational prestige, 102, 138, 187n35, 189n34, 194n33 occupational rhetoric, 192n8, 193n28 Ocejo, Richard, 185n1, 186n14, 191n19 O’Mahony, Siobhan, 191n13 1.5-generation, 195n10 One Fair Wage, 169 on the fly, 77, 159, 180 OpenTable, 47, 189n38 overtime, 36, 62, 87, 88, 172 part-time: dishwashers, 196n25; hours, 32; jobs, 11, 73–74, 85, 92, 93, 162, 188n20, 195n18, 196n24; servers, 31 people of color: in back of the house, 8; customer service and, 144, 167; in front of the house, 30–31; racial stereotypes and hiring, 10. See also African Americans; Asian Americans; Latino men perfect service, 43 perks, 21, 48, 85, 96, 130, 137, 147. See also flexibility; tips personalized luxury, 168; at The Neighborhood, 46–52, 144, 163; service, 48–49, 144, 163 Pettinger, Lynn, 188n25 playing: horseplay, 111, 112, 122; at work and front of the house, 11, 96–104 point of sale. See POS populations: foreign-born, 12, 106–7; immigrants, 12; of restaurant workers in Los Angeles, 13; of workers in food and drinking places, 4, 185n2

Index

portfolio lives, 191n13 POS (point of sale), 9, 49, 63, 64, 74, 77, 82, 180 Powell, Walter, 187n8, 188n22 power: class, racism and, 46–47, 49; of social codes, 157; whiteness and, 68 precarious jobs, 84–85, 190n2, 191n7 prep cooks, 17, 18, 71, 75, 156; brown-collar jobs, 50; hiring, 38; with kitchen life, 122; occupational rhetoric and, 193n23; role of, 7, 36, 45, 59; social boundaries and, 79 pre-shift meetings, 41, 43–44, 94, 159 privilege. See flexibility; front of the house; whiteness: on display professionalized service: lifers and, 100; at Terroir Restaurant, 42–46, 99, 162–63 professional kitchens, 101, 105–6, 123, 135, 154 promotions, ix, 144, 154, 156; barriers to, 118; bilingualism and, 134–35; inbetweenness and, 141, 142, 157; racial inequality and, 50, 83, 139–40, 151; skill-based, 43, 45–46, 125, 126, 147–48; structural holes with, 134; training and, 51 proximal service: at Match Restaurant, 39–42, 94, 134, 162; service brands and, 168 Quingla, Christian, 194n30 race: brown-collar jobs and, 5, 10, 26, 50–51, 108, 156, 165; class, gender and, 21, 76–81, 107; class and, 68, 84–85; difference with jobs and, 25–34; hiring and, 11, 23–24, 26, 28–30; promotions and, ix; service brands and, 39–52; service with class and, 164–66, 189n39; social inequality and, vii–x, 4–6, 10, 189n3 racial diversity: hiring and, 29–30, 50, 161; kitchen life and, 45–46

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racial inequality, 9; promotions and, 50, 83, 139–40, 151; in workplace, 6 racialization, 25–26, 109 racial stereotypes, 161; hiring and, 10 racism, 11, 26; class, power and, 46–47, 49; in Hollywood, 30, 188n16; Latino men and, 150–51; white space and, 28–52 raises, wages and, 116–17 Ray, Krishnendu, 185n9, 189n33, 193n24 reading tables, 143 recipes: authenticity of, 113–14; for family meals, 114–15 refire ticket, 35, 180 restaurant jobs: done differently, 54–62; front of house and back of house, 72– 76; hierarchy of, 102 restaurant labor, inside, 6–9 Restaurant Opportunities Center Los Angeles (ROCLA), 176, 187n33 Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROCU), 169, 170 restaurants: brown-collar jobs in, 108–9; industry boom, 185n4; NRA, 169. See also Match Restaurant; The Neighborhood; Terroir Restaurant restaurants, higher-end: inequality and, 7; in Los Angeles, 12–13; male waiters in, 189n34 resumes, 26, 32–33, 188n21 Ribas, Vanesa, 12 Rivera, Laura, 186n22 ROCLA. See Restaurant Opportunities Center Los Angeles ROCU. See Restaurant Opportunities Centers United Roy, Donald, 190n10 Sallaz, Jeffrey, 187n1 scheduling, 82, 87–90. See also flexibility; part-time; shifts SDs (special diners), 47–49, 163

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second generation, 62, 168, 193n19; in back closet, 154–56; with coworkers and communication, 58; customers and, 57; jobs for, 5, 15, 17, 20, 21, 26, 46, 50, 107, 111, 165; kitchen life and, 109, 111, 120, 130; mobility and, 132–37, 142–43; social boundaries and, 78–79; workplace tensions and, 64–65, 67–68, 71–72 second jobs, 74, 106, 133, 147 section (for servers), 180–81 servers, 80; with flexibility to blend pursuits, 91–96; ingredient list and, 196n24; with mobility, 140; part-time, 31; playing at work, 96–97, 100–103; professionalized service and, 45; role of, 49–50, 54–55; schedules, 89; shifts for, 60; Terroir Restaurant and twotier system of, 189n5; tips, 61–62, 83, 139; training, 47, 51, 146; workplace tensions and, 63–64, 69–71 service: disruptions, 69–72; across divide, 159–61; future trends, 167–73; with inbetweenness and situated opportunities, 166–67; perfect, 43; personalized luxury, 48–49, 144, 163; professionalized, 42–46, 99, 100, 162–63; proximal, 39–42, 94, 134, 162, 168; racialized and classed boundaries with, 164–66, 189n39; table, 7, 181; workplace, vii–x, 1–4. See also customer service service brands: difference and, 23–25; management of difference and upscale, 161–64; managing, 23–25, 39–52; training and, 40–41. See also personalized luxury; professionalized service; proximal service sexism, 121–23 Shaw, Steven A., 53 Sherman, Rachel, 46, 187n1, 187n2 shifts: for back of the house, 38, 59; for bartenders, 60; for cooks, 59; for dishwashers, 59–60; flexible, 82–83, 86–90; for front of the house, 14, 59, 82–84,

86–90, 162, 186n13; for line cooks, 59– 60; meetings pre-, 94, 159; for servers, 60; trading, 191n12 shift switching, 87–89 sidework, 15, 101, 181 situated opportunities, in-betweenness and, 166–67 skills: promotions based on, 43, 45–46, 125, 126, 147–48; work, 96, 153 social boundaries: restaurant jobs done differently and, 54–62; space and, 77; in workplace, 34–38, 76–81; world of work and, 76, 77, 160, 162 social class. See class social codes: hiring and, 20, 25, 28, 42; labor and, 109, 162, 164; power of, 157; rigid, 34, 46; white supremacy and, 28, 160 social context, mobility and, 132–34 social drama, of workplace, 12 social exclusion, 42, 89 social hierarchy, workers reinforcing, 11– 12, 160, 171–72 social inequality: class and, 10, 28–34; with different jobs for different people, 25–34; disciplinary action and, 58; jobs and, 72–76; management and, 9–12, 20, 25; mechanics of, 9–12; race and, vii–x, 4–6, 10, 189n3; workplace and, 50–54 social networks, 26, 75, 78, 89, 103, 109, 162, 190n16, 191n7; with advancement strategy, 137–40; with communication brokered, 140–42; with coolness displayed, 142–44; diverse ties, profiting from, 144–46; hiring and, 31; jobs accessed through back door, 135–37 social organization of work, 8, 11, 156–57 social segregation, 8, 9, 13, 23, 53, 161 social stereotypes, 81 soft skills, 10, 144, 186n22, 194n9 sous-chef, 118, 181; management styles, 36, 150; as mentor, 46; role of, 45, 46

Index

spaces: of masculinity, 165; SDs and backstage, 48–49; social bounded, 77; white, 28–52. See also back of the house; front of the house “space the room,” 99 special diners. See SDs stage, 181; backstage, 48–49, 193n22; front of the house and being onstage, 54–56 station, 181 statistics, population of workers in food and drinking places, 4, 185n2 stereotypes: front of the house, 45; masculinity, 193n27; negative, 80; race-typed labor, 109; racial, 10, 161; racist, 26; resumes and, 188n21; social, 81 stopgap jobs, 25, 85, 192n27 Strauss, Anselm, 189n1 street food, chefs with, 195n22 stretchwork, 191n14 structural holes, with promotions, 134 support jobs, 5, 50, 108–10, 127, 139, 160; advertisements for, 26–28; gender and, 151; mobility and, 42, 135, 137, 142, 155; tips and, 67, 130, 142 support staff, 181; professionalized service and, 45; role of, 56–58; tasks, 7; tips for, 8 symbolic boundaries, 21, 39, 54, 70, 72 table service, 7, 181 technology, 9. See also POS tensions: over authenticity of recipes, 113–14; over food order modifications, 62–65; tip disputes, 65–68; workplace, 62–72 Terroir Restaurant, 25, 79; with dishwashers, part-time, 196n25; front of the house at, 28; mobility at, 189n40; professionalized service at, 42–46, 99, 162–63; profile, 17–18; servers, two-tier system of, 189n5; social codes and, 34 Thrillist, 185n4

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tickets: food, viii, 2, 69, 70–71, 79, 120, 180; refire, 35, 180 Tilly, Charles, 169, 186n22, 194n9 timing, 181, 194n29 tip-out, viii, 67, 71, 181 tips: bartenders, viii–ix, 61–62, 152, 171; for cooks, 171; customer service and, 97; disputes, 65–68; food runners, 144; hospitality and, 170; inequality with, 4, 7–8, 61, 171, 190n14; minimum wage and, 4, 169, 171, 185n12, 196n16; policies, 170–71, 185n12, 190n13, 197n18, 197n21; from SDs, 47; servers, 61–62, 83, 139; support jobs and, 67, 130, 142; for support staff, 8; underreporting of, 8 training: bartenders, viii–x; for dishwashers, 136; food runners, vii–viii; with hiring practices, 32, 36–38, 38; at minimum wage, 32; promotion and, 51; SDs and, 47; servers, 47, 51, 146; service brands and, 40–41; unequal regimens, 35–39 understaffing, 62, 90 undocumented labor/laborers, 108, 154– 55, 192n3 uniforms. See dress codes United States Bureau of Labor Statistics: on lowest-paying jobs, 53, 185n6; workers in food and drinking places, 185n2 upscale service brands, 161–64 Vallas, Steven, 189n3 wages: for cooks, 62, 106, 185n6, 185n12; inequality, 7–8, 61; for lowest-paying jobs, 185n6, 186n13; One Fair Wage, 169; overtime, 36, 62, 87, 88, 172; raises and, 116–17; for restaurant workers, 6. See also minimum wage; tips waiters, higher-end restaurants with male, 189n34

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Waldinger, Roger, 175 walk-in, 79, 110, 181 whiteness: customer service and, 11, 14, 33, 56, 58, 83, 90; on display, 41, 68 whites: in front of the house, 6, 8, 14, 28–29; with hiring and flexibility, 11; men and tips, 171; racial stereotypes and hiring, 10; with scheduling, 87–89 white space: with difference, managing, 34–52; navigating, 129–30; reinforcement of, 28–34 white supremacy, 28–29, 33, 160 Whyte, William, 9 Williams, Christine, 10, 193n27 women: with gender roles and hiring, 25, 93; kitchen life and, 112, 121–23, 142, 154, 155; labor for foreign-born, 196n26; minimum wage and, 155 work: back-of-the-house, 7, 107, 119–23; consuming, 85; front-of-the-house, 7; front of the house and playing at, 11, 96–104; kitchen life with masculinizing back-of-the-house, 107, 119–23; sidework, 15, 101, 181; skills, 96, 153; social organization of, 8, 11, 156–57; stretchwork, 191n14. See also labor; worlds of work work careers, 21, 104 workers, restaurant: ages of, 187n33; food and drinking places and popula-

tion of, 4, 185n2; management and, 187n1; at Match, 16–17; with meetings, segregated, 35–36; population in Los Angeles, 13; shortage of, 61; social hierarchy reinforced by, 11–12, 160, 171–72; undocumented, 108, 154–55, 192n3; wages for, 6 work-leisure balance, 96, 127, 133 workplace: disputes, 65–68; hierarchy with hiring, vii–x; jobs and social inequality, 72–76; mentors in, 11, 165; racial inequality in, 6; service, vii–x, 1–4; service disruptions, 69–72; social boundaries in, 34–38, 76–81; social drama of, 12; social inequality and, 50– 54; tensions, 62–72 worlds of work: brown-collar sub-, 131, 133; communication between, 142; divided, 5, 12, 35, 129; hierarchy and, 51; micro-interactions and, 6, 81; with racialized and classed boundaries, 164–65; social boundaries and, 76, 77, 160, 162; social organization and, 8, 11; symbolic boundaries and, 21, 39, 54, 70, 72 Wright, Tessa, 193n18 Yelp, 53, 185n10 Yuen, Nancy W., 30, 188n16 Zukin, Sharon, 188n14

About the Author

Eli Revelle Yano Wilson is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of New Mexico. He received his PhD in sociology from UCLA. Dr. Wilson’s research examines how social inequality is both reproduced and contested in urban labor markets. His newest project explores labor dynamics in the US craft beer industry.

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