So this is something I didn’t know about – a chain of “sports bars” called Bikinis Sports Bar & Grill. “Bikinis” isn’t the name of the owner but what the servers – all women, of course – wear.
How “America’s Only Breastaurant®” got started…
It all started back in the winter of 2001. Weary of the technology world, and discouraged by the “dot-com” implosion that was happening all around him, Doug Guller packed his bags and headed to Australia for a much needed vacation.
While sitting at a bar on the Australian coast, watching some rugby on a small TV nearby, an attractive server approached and asked, “Wanna beer, mate?”
At that moment, all Doug could do was smile. Life suddenly made sense to him. He thought to himself, “This is a nearly perfect combination: relaxing, drinking, sports, girls, service. … plus great food.
The idea behind the Bikinis Sports Bar & Grill® concept was soon born.
There are a few words left out. It should be “an attractive server in a bikini approached.”
It wasn’t long afterward that the first Bikinis Sports Bar & Grill® location opened in Austin, Texas. The popularity of the concept which offered an unbeatable mix of sex appeal, sports, and delicious food soon led to the opening of 10 more locations over the next 5 years… in Texas and beyond.
Bikinis Sports Bar & Grill®, “Americas Only Sports Breastaurant!®”
Well not exactly “sex appeal” tout court. The sex appeal is, obviously, for straight men. It’s a Breastaurant!®, after all; there are no men in bikinis shown or mentioned. It’s like Hooters only – well no it’s just like Hooters.
There are eight of them. They’re all in Texas. Or, if you look at the Careers page, there are ten, or eleven if there are two in Austin as the Location page says, and one of the ten (or eleven) is in Oklahoma City. There are some manager jobs and some server jobs. The managers wear shirts and the servers wear bikini tops.
Let’s look at the job requirements for servers (who are also bartenders).
Purpose
Bikinis Babes at Bikinis Sports Bar and Grill are more than your average food and cocktail servers. They are the physical embodiment of Bikinis Sports Bar and Grill: sexy, fun, friendly and entertaining. The environment you create is the reason our customers choose to spend time with us.
Basically sex workers, but paid less.
Job Duties
- Provide customers a fun, entertaining and visually appealing experience.
- Greet and attend to customers in friendly, upbeat and welcoming manner.
Then there’s some strange alien bafflegab about serving food and explaining menu items and shit, but nobody cares about that when there are tits to look at.
Then there’s how to deal with problem customers.
- Visit with customers, as time permits, to ensure they have a good time—take an interest in them and be able to converse about current sports events.
- On occasion, a customer may conduct himself/herself in an rude, offensive or inappropriate manner. Such conduct may, at times, be due to excessive drinking. Such behavior is not condoned. When this occurs, please notify your coach or another manager, who will handle the situation.
It’s like this. We put you out there, in your bikini top and your sexy fun friendly entertaining physical embodiment of Bikinis Sports Bar and Grillitude, and the result is that some customers grab your bum or your tits or maybe just plain try to yank your pants down. Such behavior is not condoned. (By whom? Oh, that would be telling, we can’t answer questions like that. It just isn’t, that’s all.) When it happens – as it will, because of the way we present you – tell someone else rather than emptying a pitcher of ice water on the guy’s head.
Requirements
- Must wear Bikinis Babes uniform, and present herself in a favorable, appealing manner to our customers. Must be well groomed, and maintain good personal hygiene.
And Bikinis Babes uniform is? I bet you can figure it out.
Then there’s a bunch of palaver about showing up on time and serving customers while remaining sexy – but of course all that is way second to wearing the Bikinis Babes uniform. First duty: show us your tits!
The last item is interesting though.
- Able to handle difficult customers, or any customer complaints, in a tactful, courteous and professional manner.
The difficult customers we set you up to have to deal with by making you serve people food and alcohol while wearing a bikini.
That’s far from the only such chain. For example:
http://www.tiltedkilt.com
I just learned of this a few weeks ago, when my wife and I drove by one of these restaurants in Michigan.
Eeeesh.
That there is a demand for these sort of establishments is worrying. I could not imagine a worse way of spending an evening. Well I can, but not one that does involve hospitals and the like.
The person who coined the term Breastaurant needs to swim in a pool of Legos.
Job Duties
Provide customers a fun, entertaining and visually appealing experience.
Greet and attend to customers in friendly, upbeat and welcoming manner.
Having lived in Japan It sounds like the job is a that of being a traditional Geisha, without the good stuff like extensive training in music, protocols, and culture, little exposed flesh, a tradition of respect, and good pay.
The American system seems much more pay-to-play, false, empty, and potentially exploitative.
On the other hand it might work in some ways for some women:
http://www.alternet.org/labor/what-i-learned-working-hooters-girl
So, I don’t have any problem with a beach-side restaurant being staffed by someone wearing a bikini top. See it all the time in Florida. No biggie…you’re at the beach.
But a strip mall in Dallas? Yeah — smacks of desperation. Trying to hide the fact that you get your food from the same Sysco truck as everyone else down the road, and your beer is exactly the same Americanized crap as everyone else, but $3 more expensive. Probably consider Sam Adams as “edgy”.
These things come and go…I suspect it’ll last a couple of years and then flame out. Hooters is the only one that seems to have lasted. Dunno why.
In one of Keith Laumer’s Retief books is a description of a club for aliens with scantily clad females “to titillate and frustrate the reproductive urge.”
Wow, it’s the Playboy club all over again, how 70s. 1870s.
I don’t think so — I think they’re objectified (sexualised) serving staff.
(And I would be surprised if they didn’t get some premium over those performing similar duties but without the additional requirement to pander to prurience)
“America’s Only Breastaurant®”
Gah!!
“Unless they serve only grilled chicken,” he pondered, hoping against a sinking feeling.
Marcus Ranum @10
I looked at the menu. $8.49 burgers (cheese 89 cents extra), fish and chips for $13.99 and fried chicken breasts for $12.99. Typical sports bar food, overpriced and likely not particularly good.
Kevin @ 6
No, I don’t either. You’re at the beach, and more or less everyone is dressed that way, and it’s optional either way. But when you’re not at the beach, and it’s only the servers who are dressed that way, and the servers are women only, and it’s not optional but the “uniform” – that’s a whole different ball game.
The men who start and patronize businesses like this are human garbage, but shouldn’t we direct a little of this righteous loathing at the women who work in them? Please, none of that “a girl has to find work where she can”. I know the pay is better than working at McDonald’s, but part of the compensation is provoking a houseful of men to drool and cat-call. They are far from blameless in all this.
ericcollier, I have no intention of directing “righteous loathing” at women leveraging a fleeting period of double-sigma-beauty-standards compliance for some above minimum wage paypackets, but I find it rather loathsome of you to suggest that I should.
I can’t help but note a troubling suggestion that these women and the owners should expect that men are going to sexually harrass and assault them based on what they wear. On the other hand, that it this is not condoned (by the restaurant owners who presumably wrote or had someone write the policies on this issue) suggests that they are expecting their customers to behave in a civil manner and don’t expect the servers to put up with any crap. Is this not commendable, apart from their highly questionable business model?
So, Ericcollier, men who likes to look at scantily clad women are human garbage, but men like you who have a hate-on for these women are righteous? Got it.
@12 Ophelia.
Yeah, agreed. It’s all about context.
Wasn’t there a drive-up coffee shop that featured topless workers a little while back? Geez, not only inappropriate, but probably dangerous.
I don’t watch the television show “Undercover Boss” very often, but I’ve seen it on occasion. Normally it’s a feel-good show where the CEO puts on a disguise and winds up having empathy for the people doing the labor.
We wound up on that channel Sunday night and Guller was the undercover boss. He walks in to one of his bars to learn to tend bar, and the first thing he sees is the bartender wearing a T-shirt rather than a bikini top. He asks why, and she says it’s because the film crew was going to be there. In the scenes where he’s talking to the camera he’s complaining that the bartender is out of uniform and doesn’t really want to be there (which he knows to be the case because she tells him so on a break… she previously had a better job but the company she worked for shut down). Now, she winds up “over-serving” an obviously drunk customer, and the manager has to take care of the situation, so the bartender really wasn’t blameless, but the very idea that he’s upset that she differed from the “uniform” because of the TV cameras and that it wasn’t her dream job shows what kind of person he is.
Next he goes to another site to work the kitchen, and he’s pretty impressed with the manager there. We didn’t bother to get to the end, so I don’t know what happened when he called all of the people he’d worked with into the corporate offices and “revealed” himself. Did he have a change of heart? I hope so, but there was no hint of that in the part of the show that we saw.
Update: I just googled it. He ends up FIRING the employee on national television.
^ Yeah. That’s how I learned of the existence of this chain – I saw the last part of that “Undercover Boss” – yes, the part where he FIRED a woman on national television because she had worn A SHIRT instead of a BIKINI TOP also on national television. I was shouting at the tv rather loudly at that point. I regret missing the first part (though not enough to watch it), but the firing section did give a brief flashback to the part where she explained why she was “out of uniform” – in fact I think the flashback is where I started shouting at the tv.
I was fucking horrified, and still am. The fired woman was also furious, and said so, and yanked her mic off and left.
The whole thing was just repulsive.
And…we already have comments blaming the women employed at this pit. How about those lazy Negroes who don’t have the Entrepreneurial Spirit to get out of the cotton-picking industry?
The ‘uniform’ may highlight the issue, but women working in retail and ‘service’ are routinely harassed and exploited for their sexual vulnerability. Nothing like slave-wages and a collapsed economy to make ‘dating’ fun for these assholes.
Please, none of that “a girl has to find work where she can”.
Dude, have you looked outside your crib lately? THERE’S A DEPRESSION ON. So yes, a girl does indeed have to find work where she can. So do guys. The job I currently hold (for now at least) isn’t exactly ideal. How’s yours?
Blaming the employees for the situation their employers put them in is utter crap. Quite frankly, I think it’s damn sleazy to blame even the women who choose this sort of work because they enjoy it — that still doesn’t make them responsible for either the customers’ behavior or the workplace atmosphere.