Sociologist Eli Revelle Yano Wilson begins Front of the House, Back of the House with a moment of reflexivity that sets the table for his entire project. As a white, recent college graduate working in a restaurant in Los Angeles, Wilson recounts how he was quickly and undeservedly promoted from food runner—a job mostly held by working-class Latino men—to bartender, where he would earn more, “schmooz[e] with affluent ‘guests,’” (p. viii) and use class-inflected language to describe the menu. This experience led Wilson to focus his graduate studies on the inequality that pervades the “social environment of restaurants” (p. x) and the logic that supports their system of entrenched racial and class division. His reflexivity informs the whole of this devastatingly honest and readable book about the dynamics of race and class in an industry that, as of 2020, makes up 5 percent of the American workforce (USDA Economic Research...

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