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

by Eli Revelle Yano Wilson

Overview

Honorable Mention, Mirra Komarovsky Book Award, given by the Eastern Sociological Society

2021 Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Magazine

How workers navigate race, gender, and class in the food service industry

Two unequal worlds of work exist within the upscale restaurant scene of Los Angeles. White, college-educated servers operate in the front of the house—also known as the public areas of the restaurant—while Latino immigrants toil in the back of the house and out of customer view.
In Front of the House, Back of the House, Eli Revelle Yano Wilson shows us what keeps these workers apart, exploring race, class, and gender inequalities in the food service industry.

Drawing on research at three different high-end restaurants in Los Angeles, Wilson highlights why these inequalities persist in the twenty-first century, pointing to discriminatory hiring and supervisory practices that ultimately grant educated whites access to the most desirable positions. Additionally, he shows us how workers navigate these inequalities under the same roof, making sense of their jobs, their identities, and each other in a world that reinforces their separateness.

Front of the House, Back of the House takes us behind the scenes of the food service industry, providing a window into the unequal lives of white and Latino restaurant workers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781479800629
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	12/29/2020
Series:	Latina/o Sociology , #10
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Eli Revelle Yano Wilson is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of Front of the House, Back of the House: Race and Inequality in the Lives of Restaurant Workers, and co-author of Beer and Society: How We Make Beer and Beer Makes Us.

Editorial Reviews

"Wilson joins a legacy of ethnographers who take jobs in the fields that they study, building a bridge between theory and practice…His book fits into a growing body of scholarship and activism that not only theorizes but also works to transform the injustices built into the restaurant and hospitality industries."

Gastronomica - Natasha Bunzl

"Using his keen lens of participant observation and his powerful writing style, Wilson takes readers into the world of high-end dining in Los Angeles. He shares the often-unnoticed, taken-for-granted ways that managers, customers, and even workers themselves sort workers into different and unequal jobs rooted in systems of inequality and socially coded expectations that advantage some and disadvantage others. This book is a must read for students and scholars who are interested in the racialized coding of labor in US workplaces, and will be a seminal text for both the sociology of work and ethnographic studies."

Choice

"Front of the House, Back of the House: Race and Inequality in the Lives of Restaurant Workers stands as a brilliant empirically grounded account of how food service work and social inequality intertwine in ways that go largely unnoticed by consumers in these establishments. Written in clear and descriptive prose, Wilson provides a vivid image of the processes that pattern social inequality in the lives of restaurant workers."

Sociological Inquiry - Paul Jakhu

"Eli Wilson invites us inside some of the fanciest restaurants in Los Angeles. The food may be exquisite, but the mundane racism he documents will churn your stomach. As a waiter he is privy to a system of racial apartheid between the front of the house and the back of the house. This book vividly shows how white managers and workers benefit from the everyday oppression of immigrant laborers."

Christine Williams Christine Williams

"This beautifully written book uses the world of restaurants to provide readers with a primer on the making and re-making of everyday social inequality. Filled with lively ethnographic detail and yet always keenly analytical, Eli Wilson has delivered a volume to be savored by scholars and students alike."

Roger David Waldinger

"Sociologist Eli Revelle Yano Wilson skillfully traverses the swinging kitchen doors of high-end restaurants in Los Angeles and takes the reader into the two worlds of fine dining, the front-of-the-house, and back-of-the-house. Wilson’s riveting book…highlights how swinging kitchen doors provide a physical barrier that separate staff based on job tasks, but it is a series of formal and informal practices that ultimately cements inequities between them."

Social Forces - Glenda M. Flores

"Eli Wilson’s careful research reveals the parallel universes of work that keep upscale restaurants humming. At the front of the house, young, white bartenders and servers who telegraph “cool” and “class” leisurely interface with the customers and collect the higher pay, while in the kitchen an army of lower-paid Latino immigrant men frantically cook, clean, bus tables and literally run as “food runners.” But one of the many surprises is this: the back of the house runs not only on super-exploitation, but also a complex work culture defined by an ethos of loyalty, mentorship, skilled craftsmanship, and masculine competition. And a smaller sample of US-born Latinx workers use their in-between status to leverage new positions. Offering nuanced insights into how race and class operate in the workplaces of 21st century global cities, this book is a must read not only for students and scholars, but also for fine dining enthusiasts, celebrity chefs and their Instagram followers—if they are willing to look beyond their plates."

Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo

"You’ll never see that Hamachi crudo with yuzu kosho the same way after reading Eli Wilson’s Front of the House, Back of the House. The stories and commentary of this well-told tale of restaurant work give that plate a chain of literal “back-stories”: of structural and racial discrimination and of the real humanity of food workers. The meeting point in a fine-dining restaurant is the kitchen-to-dining-room “pass-through” where the dishes created by mostly “brown-collar” workers, with different pay scales, languages, family lives and opportunities meet the front-of-the-house workers whose wages, lives and experiences, in the very same establishment, are so very different. This should be required reading for anyone interested in the social, economic and racial coding of labor in America – and for anyone who comes to the table to consume the foods of that labor."

Merry White

"Eli Wilson invites us inside some of the fanciest restaurants in Los Angeles. The food may be exquisite, but the mundane racism he documents will churn your stomach. As a waiter he is privy to a system of racial apartheid between the front of the house and the back of the house. This book vividly shows how white managers and workers benefit from the everyday oppression of immigrant laborers."

Christine Williams