The Restaurant Host Is Suddenly at the Front of the Covid Wars
The New York Times
Forget the powerful maître d’ of old. Today’s hosts are mostly young, inexperienced women who have to enforce health rules and deal with the sometimes violent response.
Caroline Young was thrilled to be hired two years ago as a host at Café Poêtes in Houston. She was pursuing an undergraduate degree in hospitality, so she thought the experience in fine dining would be invaluable. She wanted to be the first person to greet arriving diners.
Initially, she said, most guests seemed glad to see her. Since the pandemic, not so much.
“I have been screamed at. I have had fingers in my face. I have been called names. I have had something thrown at me,” she said. One customer hurled a water glass at her feet and stormed out after she repeatedly asked him to put on a mask. “I have never been yelled at like that before in my life, until I was asking people to simply put a piece of cloth over their face that I was wearing eight to 10 hours a day.”
