Why Fascists Make Bad Restaurateurs [View all]

https://www.dmagazine.com/food-drink/2026/02/how-ice-enforcement-affects-restaurant-industry/

The idea that restaurants and bars should welcome all their guests equally is a new one. The restaurant industry might like to call it an ageless instinct, but our modern vision of good service for everyone is only about 60 years old. Millions of American customers alive today can remember a time when they were unwelcome at a table because of their skin color. The food business had its own reasons to discriminate. For many decades, the term “Siberia” described the part of the dining room where less-welcome guests—rube tourists, country folk, loudmouths, strangers unknown to the all-powerful maître d’—were discarded and forgotten. Meanwhile, loyal regulars, power brokers, and celebrities would sit at the most desirable tables and receive the most attentive treatment, flattered not just that they were being served well, but that they were being served better than other people. This remained a prime attraction of fine dining as late as 1993, when a host told the New York Times’ restaurant critic, “The King of Spain is waiting in the bar, but your table is ready.”

The all-are-welcome model became standard for a few decades, but it is not unopposed. A few restaurants, such as Rao’s in New York, function as de facto private clubs. Dress codes can exclude through specificity. The 219-word dress code of one Dallas steakhouse includes a paragraph defining “stylish denim” and specifying the type of shoes that denim wearers must match to their jeans. And then there are prices. Chris Rock jokes, “The Four Seasons hotel does not say, ‘No Blacks allowed.’ But a $4,000-a-night hotel suite sure does.”

Now our fragile service ideal is imperiled again, not by a rival business model but by a political movement that wishes to make some people less comfortable living in our society generally. In the coming years, we will learn whether the new hospitality industry can survive a campaign to make public life less hospitable.

That movement explicitly targets restaurants for reprisal. A paramilitary force of masked henchmen, assigned to carry out ethnic cleansing in major cities, sees dining rooms as one of the best places to do the job. They sit down for a meal, then arrest the owners. They enter immigrant-owned dining rooms with guns drawn or circle around them in unmarked vans to pounce on customers. They lie in wait near restaurants’ back doors at closing time, to transport dishwashers to concentration camps.

*snip*