And another such chain of girls-showing-tits drinking and dining establishments, courtesy of Orac commenting on the last one. This one is called, winsomely, Tilted Kilt. I thought it must be the flipped version, with male servers in kilts and nothing else. How silly can you be? Of course it’s not.
While the Tilted Kilt concept has its roots deep in the rousing tradition of Scottish, Irish and English Pubs, it actually first came to life in America’s own sin city, Las Vegas. The brainchild of successful restaurateur Mark DiMartino, Tilted Kilt was conceived to be a contemporary, Celtic-themed sports Pub staffed with beautiful servers in sexy plaid kilts and matching plaid bras.
Well actual – “Celtic” – kilts are worn by men rather than women, but whatever. The point is the matching plaid bras anyway. (Or tartan, if you want to get it right, which they don’t.)
There are three years’ worth of Kilt Girl calendars, so you can check out their levels of hottitude.
Also, they have food, and beer.
Welcome to Tilted Kilt Pub & Eatery, where good times are always on tap. That’s because we’re more than just a restaurant, and so much more than a sports bar. Our fun, festive atmosphere makes us the go-to place to watch sports, enjoy a cold beer and hang out with friends. We offer a delicious, mouth-watering menu, more than 30 draft and bottled beers to choose from and an extensive spirit selection. All this, plus year-round, nonstop pro and college sports action on all of our HD screens.
Of course, there’s also our World Famous Tilted Kilt Girls.™ Beautiful and ever so friendly, everyone is eager to put a smile on your face and an ice cold beer in your hand. So, when you’re in the mood for fine Pub food and cold beers, get into your nearest Tilted Kilt Pub & Eatery. All across America, everyone agrees that “A Cold Beer Never Looked So Good.”®
It’s interesting how both the kilt place and the bikini place insist on the friendliness of the beautiful wait staff. Clearly the customers are being assured they will have no trouble fantasizing that their server would happily serve them in any way they asked, maybe out back next to the dumpster once the clients have eaten their TK Irish Nachos.
I heard about this after watching an episode of Undercover Boss (which I have so many feelings about… but I digress), and the conditions were terrible. They kept emphasizing how it was a family place, and people came for the boobs but stayed for the food, etc. The waitstaff was treated terribly by the customers, with the one guy who was sort of on security lamenting that at least at a strip club they protected the dancers.
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The owner refused to imagine that maybe he was deliberately attracting a certain type of clientele (the kind that wants to leer at scantily dressed young women who are serving them food), and that might be the problem. There was also the young woman who told some bawdy jokes who he (I think) ended up firing because that was not ‘classy’ behavior.
I first-and-only ate at a Titled Kilted while on vacation. I, as a married, hetro man felt uncomfortable at the sex displayed. The kilts were extremely short (like mini-kilts) where one slip and there would be full on lower-body display. My dude-bro friends loved it and went back multiple times. I, too, noted the lack of kilts on men and the friends were like, “I do not want to look at that”. Of course, they neglected to take my wife’s viewing preference into consideration.
The food was ‘okay’, and they did have a okay-to-decent Tap of beers but the non-single guys spent times at other places to eat. Not sure why? Personally, I felt the sexualized nature of the female servers was one step above a stripper club (nothing wrong with that, but not what I was expecting). I just felt that the whole ‘raison d’etre’ of the establishment was the sexualized nature and nothing else. I was to the point of where I was like,
“Seriously, is there food and drink that crappy that one needs to sexualize the (female) waitstaff in order to get some type of clientele into here in order to eat their food?”
In their favour, they did have awesome sports on TV (not just the usual), lots of TVs and were accommodating as possible to get our TV to our preferred channel, and the servers were friendly – probably to the point of, “Please let’s keep talking so that your eyes do not dropping down in order to visually grope me?”
Insert “Smell the Glove” reference here.
They’ve begun to appear in Canada as well, and the following ad has appeared on Canadian TV. www(dot)youtube.com/watch?v=j44JSFGAeyA
Frankly the 20 something guys in the ad behave like 14 year olds.
A Saskatoon bar renamed itself the Twisted Kilt this summer, but I don’t get the impression they went the full T&A route with their servers from what I can see online.
In better news, this place (basically an up-market version of the same idea) near me lasted less than a year: http://ottawacitizen.com/life/food/local-food-reviews/skirt-steak-putting-sizzle-before-steak-resto-review
(No, we never went in).
‘the rousing tradition of Scottish, Irish and English Pubs’
That does not sound at all like any Scottish, Irish or English pub I’ve ever been in, and I think we could number that into the hundreds by now.
Tim @ 4,
“Frankly the 20 something guys in the ad behave like 14 year olds.”
I have often wondered if there is evidence that the 14’ers are any more sexist than the 20er’s. There may be some confirmation bias running here. Since in the over all age spectrum, younger males appear to be more sensitive, it’s just possible that the 14’s as a group have a more progressive attitudes.
At any rate a stereotype is a stereotype and is prejudicial to those of us who happen to be 14.
OK, I admit I looked at the “calendar girls”. Young and pretty, and if that’s their preferred method of earning a living, then good for them. Hopefully, they earn enough in tips to make up for the deficits in their working conditions.
Serious question though — doesn’t it hurt to have your breasts forced up and in by those bras? I would think that after a couple of hours in one of those, you’d be begging for mercy.
I’m straight-up straight, and I would be embarrassed to go to one of those places. Hooters, et al. They’re all designed to distract you from the fact that you’re being charged $5 for a $3 beer.
I don’t get places like these. There are actual strip clubs if you want to see women partially or totally naked – what’s the appeal of this and Hooters?
‘Serious question though — doesn’t it hurt to have your breasts forced up and in by those bras? I would think that after a couple of hours in one of those, you’d be begging for mercy.’
In my personal experience? Not really, if you have a bra that fits right. The pushup part isn’t uncomfortable, though the underwires can be annoying after a while–they should lie flat against your chest, but no off the shelf bra is ever going to fit an actual body that precisely. After a long day at the office I often swap a ‘professional’ underwire bra for a more casual one with just elastic for support, and these days I never wear the former on weekends or days off.
Many years ago I and some other accountants were treated to a surprise restaurant meal by one of my colleagues. The ‘surprise’ was that the waitresses were completely naked—-the food was crap, I was uncomfortable and the experience was sexualised but completely non-erotic.
There’s one here that I’ve gone to with of bunch of guys (obviously) for Sunday football watching and while it has the benefit of a lot of big TVs it also has lousy food, a terrible beer selection, and quite frankly seems to be designed by people who think “Hooters” is a feminist plot. I can certainly see how it would attract people who would treat the wait-staff terribly. It’s one of the few sports-bar type places with enough TVs to keep everybody happy, so I hope something more inclusive opens up soon.
Ah, yes, I went to one in Killeen, TX for a coworker’s birthday party. My wife and I were mildly amused at the ridiculous costumes. The “Irish Dip” was decent, but the McAllister’s down the road had a much better French Dip and better food in general. I recall some of the men in my unit being rather obsessed with the place, which is probably a red flag all things considered.
Somehow, this thread is making me glad that I find watching sports unbearably boring — I need no excuse to avoid gatherings in any sort of “sports bar”, with or without half-naked waitresses.
Eamon – my thoughts exactly, except i do enjoy watching sumo wrestling. (I only rarely have the oppurtunity, which is probably a reason it doesn’t bore me yet.)
There’s one in my town and while I’ve never been to, my parents have. My mother lamented the lack of short kilts on the men. Frankly, from everything I’ve heard it does seem like Hooters is more family friendly than this place.
Mandatory Amy Schumer link
The thought I keep having about these places that the sleaze factor inherent in deliberately selling barely-clothed young female servers as a marketing angle seems to me maybe a more blatant extension of something I suspect I see through a lot of the restaurant industry…
Insofar as: I’ve been to quite a few places over the years where it does seem to me the servers are predominantly young, female, and conventionally attractive, and the uniform or dress code does seem calculated to emphasize this. I know also that were the numbers have been done (see Jezebel, on one such thing) there’s a lot to be desired about the gender politics and economics of the industry…
I’m always kinda pondering, though, sitting at the table being served by some pretty young women, how calculated it is on the part of the hiring manager, or how much this is just a knock-on result of the overall sexism of our culture and larger economic factors around the age of the workforce. As in: yes, you’ll get young people in the industry, because it’s accessible to them, where others might not be. If you’re a pretty young woman, do you get better tips (or is it just the expectation you will?), is it maybe your perception this is a relatively good job to have? Or the odds just are, if there are a lot of young people working, yes, some of them will be pretty young women? Or is this, again, pretty consciously calculated, part of the image the business figures it wants to project?
Oddly, it seems in some situations, at least, attractive women get fewer callbacks, so I kinda suspect if there is some such effect in the restaurant industry, it’s not something you can generalize much beyond that.
And I do always feel a bit of a mixed feeling, even walking into a place like that. Always kinda wonder: what’s the real deal, here? Which of this is what you’re really selling? Was in one of those just yesterday (had never been before–kinda had to duck out of the cold a few hours when I discovered I was having some trouble breathing in the cold, on the tail end of a rather annoying illness; yes, I’ve had a lovely holiday, thanks. And I’d told someone I’d had to duck out on they could find me there, so I couldn’t just move on. And it turns out to be this kinda warehouse-ish thing with the big screen TVs, and the hostess and looks like nine-tenths of the waitstaff are 20-something pretty white women in tight jeans, and I’m wondering, yeah, wonder just how much of the marketing for this place this is… Clientele were mixed ages, not so much the hooting young guys, so I guess it wasn’t more of the blatant places, insofar as clearly families and seniors had no issue being in there, at least)…
And extending that: yeah, I don’t think I could go to one of those more blatant places at all. It’s kinda what it says about me, thanks. We all appreciate pretty, yes, but there’s something skeevy about that, endorsing a business that so blatantly capitalizes on the same. Maybe there’s some tangled hypocrisy in that, saying fine, yes, if there are particularly pretty people to be found herein, I’ll have to admit I do appreciate this, to some degree, but I just don’t think I’m gonna do business with you if you are, indeed, saying you deliberately select your workforce that way, thanks…
Meh. Scratch the hypocrisy anxiety, actually. Because, yeah, that latter thing, I think that’s one of the key problems. We want to encourage diverse hiring, methinks, and that just doesn’t.
Irish Nachos? Isn’t that the punchline of an offensive joke?
And as for ‘kilts.’ Aren’t we really doing the Hentai Catholic School-Girl fetish here?
We have a Tilted Kilt in our rather middle-class, conservative outpost of wanna-be Orange County, CA. It has lasted for longer than the Hooters* did, which puzzles me a bit because our city is very heavily young, upper middle class families. Hooters closed after a bit more than a year. So, plaid bras and tiny plaid skirts beat out tight tanks and shiny orange hot pants, I guess. The thing that puzzles me is this is the kind of community where you probably don’t want to be seen at such a place because it will be remarked upon at church.
My husband and I went to the Tilted Kilt two years ago, right after it first opened up. It was on xmas night and we wanted to go out to eat and nothing else was open besides Denny’s, which was packed. The male servers wore traditional length utilikilts. The food was meh and we’ve never been back.
*We also did go to Hooters once before it closed, at my request, because I was curious. I had the same reaction as to Tilted Kilt, but the waitresses seemed pretty entertained by the fact that there was a middle-aged couple in the place.
I’ve been to quite a few places over the years where it does seem to me the servers are predominantly young, female, and conventionally attractive, and the uniform or dress code does seem calculated to emphasize this.
As I understand it, there’s a general policy to have older, more experienced people serving breakfast and lunch, because the customers have limited time and need fast and competent service; while younger and sexier people are preferred to serve dinner, because the customers tend to want eye-candy more than fast and efficient service.
The waitstaff was treated terribly by the customers, with the one guy who was sort of on security lamenting that at least at a strip club they protected the dancers.
That’s a major red flag. A strip-club can have diligent security because the clients are there to see T&A, and won’t be deterred by the sight of big guys actively tossing out disruptive customers. But a “family-friendly” restaurant can’t afford to have their clients see that, so their “security” don’t have the leeway they need to really protect the staff.
My better half wanted to go to one of these near us, she was under the unfortunate illusion it would be men in kilts – she does like me in a kilt, so much so she has finally persuaded me to buy one of my own. As far as I know the food is not authentic either, If you can’t get square slice and black pudding, or scotch pie and beans I am not interested.
I do recall a colleague of mine who went to a place called “school dinners” in London, I understand the female servers wore a similar uniform, the tables were laid similar to the long tables at Hogwarts and were overseen by a “headmaster” in a robe similar to Professor Snapes, but with a mortar board. Anyone attending who had a birthday would not get sung a silly song, they were taken to the front and given “six of the best” (six strokes across the posterior with a cane). The food was as I understand it, traditional English school fare, including spotted dick for dessert.
RJW @ 11:
People often forget that combination even exists.