Individual restaurants are rarely large employers. Yet many employ two groups of workers who have little in common and little interaction in the workplace, despite a shared goal of getting food to diners. In an ethnographic study of two upscale Los Angeles restaurants, sociologist Eli Wilson draws out the separation between front of house and back of house workers and argues that workers who are not only bilingual but bicultural can provide an important bridge.
Wilson worked as a server at the restaurants, which put him in the “class-privileged white labor niche in the front of the house,” where workers interact directly with customers and receive tips. The front of house roles with less extensive interaction with customers, like table runner and busser, are more likely to be filled by Latino workers. And, at least in large, diverse cities like Los Angeles, workers in the back of the house—cooks, dishwashers, cleaners—are overwhelmingly Latino, many of them immigrants. These back of the house workers get a low hourly wage with no tips and have few chances for advancement.
Work is coordinated across the restaurant.
“[A] server must relay specific customer orders to the kitchen (and drink orders to the bar), where the correct dishes (and drinks) are assembled,” writes Wilson. The prepared meal “is handed off to a food runner who must successfully relay it to the correct table. At the conclusion of the meal, a busser clears the table, and the host is notified that the table may be reseated.”
Yet servers, hosts, and bartenders have little contact with the back of house workers.
At the larger restaurant at which Wilson worked, many front of house and back of house workers didn’t even know each other’s names. Staff meetings broken into “servers and bartenders only” or “mandatory for all kitchen personnel” highlighted and contributed to the distance between the groups. In that restaurant, servers were even prohibited from talking to kitchen staff other than the executive chef, as Wilson found out in humiliating fashion when he was yelled at for telling a line cook about a change to an order. Divisions continued outside the workplace: Servers often went out for a drink together after work. Back of house workers were not invited.
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Wilson did find important exceptions to the divisions, though, people he describes as “bridges.”
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Being bilingual is an asset in restaurant work. At one of the restaurants in the study, a bilingual Mexican immigrant played an important role in coordinating work between the two realms. But, Wilson argues, that worker “remain[ed] socially embedded within the immigrant Latino niche.” By contrast, second generation immigrants may be both bilingual and bicultural, able to share slang and chat about shared cultural references with coworkers in both front and back of house.
During his time in the field, Wilson saw two such workers get significant promotions, reflecting management’s recognition of their value. While these workers remain in heavily Latino, low-paid service jobs, then, they are advancing, and “it remains to be seen how far these intangible and contextualized ‘skills’ can take workers as they continue building work careers.”
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