Chisolm, Edward. 2022. A Waiter in Paris: Adventures in the Dark Heart of the City. New York: Pegasus Books.Guidara, Will. 2022. Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect. New York: Optimism Press.Storer, Christopher. 2023. The Bear, Season 2. FX Productions. Hulu.In a thoughtful post-pandemic essay on the restaurant industry, Ligaya Mishan (2023) draws from philosopher Jacques Derrida’s writings on hospitality to frame her discussion of the contemporary restaurant industry, noting, as does Derrida, the similarity in the roots of the Latin words hospes (hospitality) and hostis (hostility). This correspondence leads Derrida, in noting “the troubling analogy in their common origin between hostis as host and hostis as enemy, between hospitality and hostility” (Derrida 2000: 15), to coin the playful term “hostipitality.” I take this as a jumping-off point in considering three recent popular texts on restaurants, Unreasonable Hospitality, by Will Guidara, A Waiter in Paris by Edward Chisholm, and the popular Hulu series The Bear. While only the first is explicitly focused on hospitality, I argue that all three are revealing for what they say about the price of hospitality. As part of our post-pandemic moment, there is perhaps an opening for thinking about the role of restaurants in society, drawing as they do on discourses of hospitality (host and guest, “hospitality industry”) while remaining the locus of so many of the exploitations of our current world. And how might these texts suggest routes to genuine hospitality, or simply to preserve hospitality as an illusion?In her essay “When Did Hospitality Get So Hostile?,” Mishan (2023) notes in relation to host–guest relationships that the restaurant guest is not, in fact, a guest in the traditional sense, but a paying customer, “tainting” this longstanding human relationship: “Hospitality, as it has been understood for thousands of years, is a gift, unconditional, outside politics, giving food, shelter and aid—whatever you have, however little it is—to a stranger who may not speak your language or know your ways, and asking nothing in return. The transaction upends the relationship.” Thus, for Mishan, the act of paying for a meal and service in the restaurant challenges that a restaurant visitor is a “guest” in the true sense of the word. Anthropologists have long noted, since the work of Marcel Mauss, the contradictory nature of the “gift” vs. the “commodity,” especially in capitalist societies (Mauss 2000 [1950]; Carrier 1990). How restaurants negotiate this question of commodifying the gift of hospitality, and what it means for the quality of social relationships that emerge in the restaurant, is explored in the two books and one series under consideration, as they explore, or implicitly display, the issue of unequal power relations, both within the restaurant and between restaurant workers and customers. The massive popularity of The Bear suggests the popular imagination of the restaurant as a space of chaotic but ultimately positive sociability, for both staff and customers; the other texts suggest a more ambivalent relationship between host and guest, a “hostipitality” that even when smoothed over with positive feelings seems to lead to many contradictory outcomes.Because the books and the show all came out in 2022, at a time in which, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, people were actively reconsidering the role of restaurants in our public lives, reading and watching them together raised these issues for me, even if that might not have been the intention of the authors/creators. In some ways, Unreasonable Hospitality and A Waiter in Paris are far different books. The former, a firsthand account of British author Edward Chisholm’s experience—having moved to Paris with no French language skills—learning to negotiate the social, linguistic, and economic challenges of working in a Parisian restaurant on the banks of the Seine. The latter, by contrast, is written by Will Guidara, the manager of Eleven Madison Park, a New York high-end restaurant that was awarded the number one restaurant in the world honor in 2017.1 While Guidara’s book is part autobiography, it is much more a business how-to book, as Guidara dispenses wisdom on how his mantra of “unreasonable hospitality” in fact led to Eleven Madison Park’s award.2 Not only are these different styles of books, one an account of life during the year that Chisholm worked at a variety of Parisian restaurants and the other verging on business management “self-help,” at many points they seem to be describing completely different kinds of institutions, united only by the common element that they both sell food to customers.3 In this essay I consider how the depiction of these two restaurants raises issues about the relationship of hospitality to hierarchy, commodification, profit-making, and sociability in the dining space.Guidara describes a restaurant as an intimate space always striving for improvement in the rankings—and the ultimate prize of number one—through the creation of unique customer experiences. Guidara’s restaurant, despite—or perhaps because of—the huge price tag on each meal, is constantly trying to minimize the perception of commodification or “transaction.” He removes computers from the restaurant for putting in orders, or even for taking reservations, to give a greater sense of intimacy, and even decides that the standard restaurant practice of assigning numbers to tables for easy reference as too impersonal. As he writes, “Everything about that is transactional—the screen, the fact that you’re being transported around the restaurant like cargo, the table number…Contrast that with what happens when you go to a friend’s house for dinner. They throw open the door, they look you directly in the eyes, and they welcome you by name” (188). Chisholm, by contrast, describes a restaurant world that reminded me of the work of Erving Goffman (1959) and Goffman-inspired work like that of Gerald Mars and Michael Nicod (1984) in which the waiter works under an unwritten code of “fiddles” to cheat the customers and/or the restaurant itself, with a very strict demarcation between frontstage and backstage. Erving Goffman was famed for his “microsociology” of mundane situations, and for using the metaphor of performance and “stage” (as in front- and backstage) to analyze behavior in public contexts. One such context that he analyzed was restaurants, with the idea that the dining room was “front-” and the kitchen “backstage.”4 As Chisholm captures it: “If a waiter is doing his job correctly, he will be manipulating your perception of reality. He is, to all intents and purposes, an illusionist and his job is to deceive you. He wants you to believe that all is calm and luxurious, because on the other side of the wall, beyond that door, is hell” (202). In Chisholm’s experience, the customers are largely anonymous (the restaurant itself is described as huge—all the more challenging, as he works for most of his tenure as a runner, delivering plates across the vast restaurant expanse). The work of waiters in Bistrot de la Seine is a constant battle against managers, kitchen staff, other waiters, and occasionally demanding customers, to complete the simple act of delivering a hot meal. Chisholm describes the restaurant owner as having “got rich selling the illusion of fine food, simply by serving below-average food in stylish surroundings” (197). The metaphor of illusion dominates the scene in A Waiter in Paris.The idea of illusion, as noted in the quotations above, hides the reality, which Chisholm describes in scenes of chaos and disgust, such as the mold growing in the bowels of the restaurant and the frequent practice of waiters stealing food from other plates that have yet to be picked up from the kitchen so they can fill out their own customers’ plates. By contrast, Guidara describes Eleven Madison Park as a thing of art and beauty, with the illusions hiding not dirt and disgust but commerce itself. But is this even possible in a restaurant attempting to be awarded number one in the world?It is true that in contrast to the illusion of luxury described by Chisholm, we have the explicit goal of hospitality, and Guidara defines the difference that he sees between the two as that between “excess” and “thoughtfulness” (184). Here, however, is where I feel the contradictions start to come out in Guidara’s grand vision, which seems to want to balance the social relations view of restaurants as places that mimic home (Erickson 2007) and the aspects of commerce that are in fact central to a restaurant competing for the prize of number one in the world. I was struck, in fact, by the way these contradictions were beautifully and succinctly captured in the tremendously popular contemporaneous show about restaurant work, The Bear. In season 2 of the show, the focus is on how a small, neighborhood, family-run restaurant might transform itself into a high-end spot in the mold of Eleven Madison Park. In its most highly rated episode (9.7 on IMDB), “Forks,” “cousin” Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) is, in fact, reading Unreasonable Hospitality in his free time as he trains for high-end service. At the climax of the episode, Richie runs out to get a Pequod’s deep-dish pizza (famous in Chicago for their burnt crust). The chef then arranges the pizza artistically (cut into bite-sized rounds, garnished with basil gel on the side, and topped with micro-basil, for a family who had been overheard that they were leaving the city without having tried Chicago-style pizza. This incident is clearly inspired by Guidara’s book, where he describes very similar incidents at Eleven Madison Park. Guidara suggests that such acts of hospitality can be carried off either with advanced planning of a “Dream-Weaver” who researches the customers prior to their arrival, or on the spur of the moment, if the attentive server overhears casual comments by the customers. Once again, Guidara stresses that “it isn’t the lavishness of the gift that counts, but its pricelessness” (209). However, Guidara simultaneously insists that you should be extremely focused on the cost of most of the items in your restaurants, what he calls the 95/5 rule, or “manage 95 percent of your business down to the penny, spend the last 5 percent ‘foolishly’” (46). He further suggests that by allowing restaurant workers to be involved in the “creative process of giving gifts,” you can “make the business more profitable” (New Books Network 2022). Profit and a kind of casual surveillance, all good as long as it is put in the service of the ultimate dining experience and making the customer feel “special”—what Guidara calls the “business of human connection” (183), again flaunting the potential contradictions in such an endeavor.Money is not the only measurable and quantifiable substance at play. For, as the saying goes, “time is money” as well, particularly in the restaurant business with its focus on turning tables. When we think about hospitality, however, we often don’t dwell on the question of time, although it does show up in concerns about hourly wages, such as the “Fight for Fifteen.” But the anthropological insight that hospitality and gift-giving are very much about time and tempo, the relationship between gift and countergift that plays out over different time frames (see Bourdieu 1999), is critical here. It is the question of time in the relationship among staff and between staff and customers that is largely absent from Guidara’s account, but once again beautifully captured in the same episode of The Bear. Two scenes can serve as counterposed in the episode. In the one that many people reference in their comments on the episode, Richie and the owner of the restaurant share a quiet, reflective moment as they peel mushrooms for the evening prep. The owner (played by Olivia Colman) is shown to be thoughtful and caring, someone who has struggled with life choices, just as Richie has. This is also significant because Richie represents the family/neighborhood restaurant mode that was shown in season 1 of The Bear, the question being whether those skills and values can survive in this new context. This moment of kindness and lack of hierarchy stands in stark contrast to an earlier scene in which the chef de cuisine and the manager berate the staff for the loss of forty-seven seconds caused by what is referred to as “the smudge,” discovered on one of the dinner plates, which no one will admit to. Richie’s mentor, Garrett, is humiliated in this scene, as the chef de cuisine ends his tirade by shouting “fuck you, Garrett!,” to which Garrett responds, “yes, chef, fuck me.” This point is emphasized in the sign hanging over the kitchen with the message “Every Second Counts.” Indeed, in an award-winning restaurant, every second does count, while in a neighborhood joint patronized by regulars, nobody counts seconds when the many contingencies of food service interrupt the regularity of delivering food in the precise moment. Like Guidara’s 95/5 rule for restaurant spending, the counting of seconds—with its callback to Taylorist scientific management techniques that discounted that humanity of human labor and that in some ways Unreasonable Hospitality can be seen as updating—allows for the spending of time elsewhere: on the extravagant fulfillment of customers’ presumed dreams. Anthropologists who have studied gifts and commodities well know that what differentiates them is the extent that the former cannot be rushed, while the latter must ultimately bow to the rhythms of capital.The scene with the smudge on the plate is not just about lost time—it is a reminder of the strict hierarchy that often exists in restaurants. While Guidara does not deny such hierarchies and talks in several places about dealing with difficult staff members or those who don’t share his vision, he tends to emphasize notions of teamwork, and management admitting to their own mistakes, reflected in mantras like “Invite Your Team Along” and “Leaders Listen” (62–63). He tells a story about his father leading a platoon in Vietnam with one soldier who seemed incompetent in many of the skills of soldiering, but who it turns out had an amazing sense of direction and moving through a landscape based on his experience of navigating the rural landscape of his childhood. Guidara suggests similarly that management needs to find the hidden talents of each staff member, providing an example of an employee who seemed like a deficient runner but turned out, under Guidara’s probing, to be an excellent expeditor (66).5 All these aspects described by Guidara are in striking contrast to the experience that Chisholm has in Bistrot de la Seine, where much of his story is concerned with the hierarchy, conflicts, and exploitation of staff by management, and management’s desire to make all staff not invaluable, but easily replaceable.The beauty of A Waiter in Paris comes from Chisholm’s account of his developing relationships with the other waitstaff (and to a lesser extent the kitchen staff, hostesses, and sommelier), and how the waitstaff struggle to keep their jobs, earn a barely sufficient living, and nurture their dreams: from the coke-dealing headwaiter to the the and other waiters as if they will the waiter comes to be by the they are or with from the to the the and the (the latter for the Chisholm is the But we also get to know them as as in the of the waiter in the who with the of and the of not having other He the idea of trying to up in the restaurant, if make more or that more to spend more time with his but from doing the thing that he tables. In one Chisholm whether he find a in restaurant, and the I have a a to I to know what it will be the new restaurant me a they know don’t about I like it for the about can go And you so many different Like you. first like this what Chisholm to as the nature of and the ways that is often by and who even at the cost of service. Chisholm on the of been around on a that he get and he when you but in restaurant work you were too to A of each different but largely the make up the of Chisholm’s describes restaurant, the where he and many of the other waiters go during in this restaurant there are constantly on and yet Chisholm is to be as a noting, is no being when you go into an It you keep also a kind of of your in at how you Indeed, a is an art in itself. The the the way the new across the a to someone who how to do is much and there is of the of constant in this family-run the contrast between the kind of neighborhood, family-run and the two restaurants that are the of this does not free of hierarchy and as anthropological of the relations within such clearly However, they do in many the of a where social relations as as the In Chisholm captures the and sociability on that is one of the of public and when to social relations to and that Guidara seems to suggest can be for the price of customer and the performance of a traditional gift-giving genuine different kinds of are at in capitalist and I reminded of on food and in where many people to me that there was a difference between a and a the former in a of relations and the latter from such Indeed, in one can between seen as for and or de la Seine into the latter with its illusions of luxury hiding being as as possible by staff in Chisholm’s is also about his own to up from a that is itself when it will be to on the of to This latter in up much of the second of the It is a to feel in as it means the difference between and the to in to from with and to occasionally the sense of the good life when an means a of and in more it is an that Guidara’s is to and to the for restaurant for Eleven Madison Park. But I the of or the between and just all the performance of as in the of the pandemic, chef, and author notes on the of nothing to the that the of the restaurant might simply lead to more of the same there will be even people from the other of the pandemic, in which by most the has the question of what have been by the restaurant Indeed, the of providing food for both and restaurants raises more about two books make it that to the of hospitality, restaurants must their Guidara his share in Eleven Madison Park to his in and Chisholm his of restaurant work in their were largely and completely COVID-19 and restaurant Thus, these issues are not raised by either but clearly the of restaurants and restaurant work is on the of in different ways, as Guidara Eleven Madison Park, have been raised about especially in its current selling high-end at a labor and issues not too different from what Chisholm describes for fine dining with as have also most of staff 2022). while no it be far to be at Eleven Madison Park at in the Unreasonable Hospitality is a to illusions that under is not to and beauty does not A Waiter in on the other these illusions at a time when so many of our of have to