Front of the House, Back of the House

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 *
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, author of Coffee Life in Japan
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, Florence Everline Professor of Sociology, USC
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, author of Inside Toyland: Working, Shopping, and Social Inequality
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, The Cross-Border Connection: Immigrants, Emigrants, and Their Homelands
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. -- Paul Jakhu, University of the Fraser Valley * Sociological Inquiry *
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. -- Glenda M. Flores, University of California * Social Forces *
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. -- Natasha Bunzl, New York University * Gastronomica *