Gender and Disability Within the Food Industry (Kendra Curtis)

Analysis:

Located near the end of downtown Holland, 8th Street Grille stands tall after new owners renovated and remodeled it’s once rustic atmosphere. Aiming for a younger crowd, and possibly a specific gender, than what they originally had, while still leaving their infamous soup bar, renovations at 8th Street Grille included taking down all the antiques that used to line the restaurant walls, and replacing them with ‘Macatawa Brewing Company’ signs and fewer, more modern elaborations. There is also an addition-in-the-making of a microbrewery in the basement. The new owners are hoping to expand the restaurants already broad bar with beer they brew right under the restaurant.

As soon as you walk in, you’re greeted by the friendly faces of hosts and waitresses. The smell of burgers and fries lingers everywhere, but in a very inviting way. Towards the back of the restaurant, you can hear a lovely melody of dishes clanking and the chefs singing, sometimes yelling, some of their favorite songs. In the middle of a dinner rush on a weekend night, you almost have to yell what you’re saying to hear and talk over the full restaurant. While the restaurant has a very welcoming, happy atmosphere to it, it can get pretty crowded with it’s close together, and small, tables. It’s hard to move around, especially carrying five plates and a few appetizers. This can be especially difficult for those who are disabled and who are eating or working at the restaurant.

All together, 8th Street Grille has twenty-eight tables, not including bar seats. Eleven of these are booths while the other seventeen are tables set up systematically around the restaurant. While new renovations have opened up the restaurant and have made it look bigger, 8th Street Grille, in reality, is pretty small. To get between the tables that lead from the kitchen to the bar, you have to pretty much weave yourself throughout them. Even the main walkway that leads you down the middle of the restaurant can get crowded within minutes of people arriving. It also doesn’t really help that the soup bar is located in the middle of that walkway and people are always constantly getting 8th Street’s soup. While waitresses and hosts and the management have figured out how to weave their way throughout the restaurant, the close knit set up of the tables can make it very difficult for people with disabilities to make their own way through the dining floor.

People who have walking disabilities and find it necessary to use canes or walkers have a very difficult time moving through the restaurant, even down the main walkway. A wheelchair can barely fit down the main walkway, let alone throughout the close together tables. There’s really just not enough space where people are supposed to walk. When a person with a disability does go through with a wheelchair, walker or cane, there can be difficulty maneuvering through the tables without getting something stuck or causing a traffic jam in the walkways. This then makes it difficult for both waitresses and other customers to walk throughout 8th Street Grille. The only accommodations made for people with disabilities are the handicap bathrooms and the ramps at both the front and back entrances.

This then starts to bring up the idea of what would happen if someone with a disability started to work at the restaurant? Would it even be possible? Most of the storage needed for restocking the restaurant and the kitchen is located in the basement. There isn’t any elevator or ramp that leads from the main floor to the basement. As Elizabeth Barnes states in The Minority Body, “our culture assumes that disability is a bad thing, and does not do a particularly good job of accommodating or accepting people with disabilities” (56). With no accommodations for disabilities within the working area of the restaurant, it would be very difficult for a waitress or waiter with a movement or walking disability to do their job effectively and efficiently at 8th Street Grille.

Within the inner workings of the 8th Street Grille establishment, there are also power struggles between the sexes when it comes to management and who’s in charge of what. With the new owners that came in, automatically there was worry among the managers about who would be staying and who would be either leaving, stepping down or who would be let go. The original general manager, before the switch to new owners, was especially worried about her job title. Eventually, she was basically bullied out of her job when new management came. There were men working at 8th Street Grille who thought they deserved the general manager job more than she did. In my opinion, their views that they could do a better job than her comes from a very intrinsic view that Simone Beauvoir explains in her book, The Second Sex; “at the present time, when women are beginning to take part in the affairs of the world, it is still a world that belongs to men – they have no doubt of it at all and women have scarcely any” (225, xxvii). Even though the previous manager was perfectly qualified and capable of doing her job, in the end, male coworkers of hers decided to talk to the new owners and convince them to take a different direction, while also making her work life terrible. They were able to go over her head, as men, to convince the new owners to let her go because, in their opinions, they’d be able to do the job better. Before leaving, the previous general manager called the restaurant with the new management a “boys club.”

Most of the higher up management consists of mainly men. Most female managers were either transferred to a different restaurant, fired or had to step down to lower managerial positions. This power struggle and who’s winning currently at the restaurant is even reflected through the new spotlight on the bar. There are many different, new beers on tap with derogatory and very sexist names. For instance, currently there are beers on tap (draft) called the ‘Dirty Blonde,’ ‘Deez Nuts,’ and ‘Horny Monk.’ Most of the handles for the beer on draft have a very sexually explicit picture or a picture of women with cleavage and most of the time the picture gets cut off at the neck. If you look at the serving staff that works at 8th Street Grille, the majority are women, specifically younger, college-aged girls. With the new bar layout, the new beers being sold at the bar and the design and environment of the renovated restaurant, it’s becoming more and more obvious that the customer base 8th Street Grille is trying to attract, is men.  

In conclusion, while 8th Street Grille is a great place to eat and enjoy an evening at, there are definite changes that need to be made to accommodate every customer that they have. There should be more room among the main dining floor to help those with disabilities move more freely and easily around the restaurant. There also needs to be some thought into what needs to be done in case a person with a disability applies for a job at the restaurant. There is also an inner-workings power struggle between the sexes and an obvious customer base that the new management of 8th Street Grille is trying to attract. With all of the new changes to both the environment and products being sold, more men have been attracted to the restaurant. Through the first week or two of new management, there was an increase of men at the bar on a nightly basis. The once rustic restaurant that aimed for an older customer base, is now forming into a very modern, patriarchal establishment.

Discussion Questions:

1. What other accommodations can be made for those with disabilities who want to or already work in the food industry?
2. What makes the layout or environment of an establishment related to a certain gender? What can be done to make the space and environment more gender neutral?

Works Cited

Beauvoir, Simone de. “Introduction.” The Second Sex, Vintage Books, 1989.

Barnes, E. B. (2016). The minority body: a theory of disability. Chapter 2; pgs 54-77. Oxford: Oxford University Press.