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Kim, David
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Spring 2025
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2025
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9727_Luke_Arch.pdf
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This ethnographic study examines the inner workings of a restaurant called "The Parlor," a reservation-only tea room in Brooklyn, New York. The Parlor serves as the ideal space for looking at the restaurant industry ethnographically; drawing on meaningful participant observation, interviews, and my own experience. This paper examines how aesthetics and emotional labor come together to form an experience based on strict intentionality. Rather than focusing on food, The Parlor opts for a system structured around the curation of service and ambiance, inviting customers into a space of performative care. When examining and comparing the front and back of house in a space such as The Parlor, you begin to see how invisible and visible labor work in tandem to uphold the illusion of effortless service. This paper explores how workers navigate the emotional demands of service within this highly aestheticized environment, arguing that labor at The Parlor is shaped not just by physical tasks but by the constant performance of curated emotional experience. To condense this idea into a single question: Why does this work feel both performative and meaningful?
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