Karen's Diner
stonespring
Shipmate
Aussie Shipmates, if any of you are willing, it would be great if you could have a meal *for research purposes* at any of Karen's Diners. Here is more info from Wikipedia. Go to YouTube or TikTok and search "Karen's Diner" and you will see countless videos posted by customers who paid to be insulted, belittled, and neglected by the staff.
I know the term "Karen" refers to a rude and demanding customer, not to waitstaff. But the point of these restaurants is to get customers (who should be in on the joke - though social media is also full of kids who take their unsuspecting parents there) to pretend to be Karen-like, get into fake arguments with the waitstaff, and record it to post to social media so more people will want to come to the restaurant to be insulted!
(Apologies to any shipmates named Karen or who love people named Karen - you know this isn't about you. I didn't come up with the term, and I'm not a particular fan of it.)
The sadomasochism of the concept hearkens to similar restaurants in Japan (look up "tsundere maid cafe" for what, more than viral videos of real-life Karens, might be the real inspiration for Karen's Diners). The very big difference with tsundere maid cafes is that the abuse at tsundere maid cafes is in one direction (from the waitstaff to the customers) and is heavily gender-coded (usually an all-female waitstaff criticizing and belittling an overwhelmingly male clientele that probably has a *thing* for this type of female character in manga and anime). Karen's Diners seem to encourage the banter to go both ways between customers and staff (while banning racist, misogynistic, etc., language and other ways of being an actual a**(*)hole), and the waitstaff do not seem to be restricted to any gender (although most in the videos I have seen (since I don't know their gender identity) appear to be female).
So, is this an ingenious subversion of capitalism and the service economy or the worst kind of capitalism? (The restaurants seem to quickly be becoming tourist attractions, with locations across Oz as well as in NZ, the UK and now in St. Louis in the US.) The pandemic raised everyone's awareness of the working conditions of those working in hospitality and other face-to-face service industries - and the concept of having waitstaff turn the tables on the "customer is always right" ethos while customers not only love it but record it to enhance their own (the customers') social media brands because they were cool enough to go to be insulted over their meals - this concept seems like something from the fever dreams of budding Foucault scholars working on their theses.
Oh, and despite the fact that the diners hire male waitstaff and their employees are more than willing to abuse male customers - does the whole exercise seem to have an undercurrent of misogyny? There are an awful lot of videos online of female waitstaff and female customers trying to out-Karen each other. The people giggling holding the phones to record it all are often their gay male friends. (Then there is the issue of the Karen label itself - I know it's about women who abuse their adjacency to patriarchal/imperialist/white supremacist authority to get the manager, police, etc., to get them what they want and punish any insufficiently servile employees, but you have to admit there's some misogyny in the stereotype, as earlier threads on the Ship have discussed).
I'm afraid it's only a matter of time (especially if they intend on expanding in the litigious US, where real-life Karens grow like weeds) before someone's feelings get hurt enough to end all the fun (and, judging from the way the elderly and young children are treated in the videos posted to social media, it really is a matter of time). But maybe that will prove the point. Soul-crushing capitalism wins in the end either way?
(P.S. My husband is currently visiting his family in Oz, but way out in Western Sydney. He has informed me that all of the Karen's Diners in Sydney are light-years away by Sydney standards and it is highly unlikely that he will be going there during his visit. That's why I'm asking if any Shipmates have the courage to attempt to patronize one of their establishments themselves.
I know the term "Karen" refers to a rude and demanding customer, not to waitstaff. But the point of these restaurants is to get customers (who should be in on the joke - though social media is also full of kids who take their unsuspecting parents there) to pretend to be Karen-like, get into fake arguments with the waitstaff, and record it to post to social media so more people will want to come to the restaurant to be insulted!
(Apologies to any shipmates named Karen or who love people named Karen - you know this isn't about you. I didn't come up with the term, and I'm not a particular fan of it.)
The sadomasochism of the concept hearkens to similar restaurants in Japan (look up "tsundere maid cafe" for what, more than viral videos of real-life Karens, might be the real inspiration for Karen's Diners). The very big difference with tsundere maid cafes is that the abuse at tsundere maid cafes is in one direction (from the waitstaff to the customers) and is heavily gender-coded (usually an all-female waitstaff criticizing and belittling an overwhelmingly male clientele that probably has a *thing* for this type of female character in manga and anime). Karen's Diners seem to encourage the banter to go both ways between customers and staff (while banning racist, misogynistic, etc., language and other ways of being an actual a**(*)hole), and the waitstaff do not seem to be restricted to any gender (although most in the videos I have seen (since I don't know their gender identity) appear to be female).
So, is this an ingenious subversion of capitalism and the service economy or the worst kind of capitalism? (The restaurants seem to quickly be becoming tourist attractions, with locations across Oz as well as in NZ, the UK and now in St. Louis in the US.) The pandemic raised everyone's awareness of the working conditions of those working in hospitality and other face-to-face service industries - and the concept of having waitstaff turn the tables on the "customer is always right" ethos while customers not only love it but record it to enhance their own (the customers') social media brands because they were cool enough to go to be insulted over their meals - this concept seems like something from the fever dreams of budding Foucault scholars working on their theses.
Oh, and despite the fact that the diners hire male waitstaff and their employees are more than willing to abuse male customers - does the whole exercise seem to have an undercurrent of misogyny? There are an awful lot of videos online of female waitstaff and female customers trying to out-Karen each other. The people giggling holding the phones to record it all are often their gay male friends. (Then there is the issue of the Karen label itself - I know it's about women who abuse their adjacency to patriarchal/imperialist/white supremacist authority to get the manager, police, etc., to get them what they want and punish any insufficiently servile employees, but you have to admit there's some misogyny in the stereotype, as earlier threads on the Ship have discussed).
I'm afraid it's only a matter of time (especially if they intend on expanding in the litigious US, where real-life Karens grow like weeds) before someone's feelings get hurt enough to end all the fun (and, judging from the way the elderly and young children are treated in the videos posted to social media, it really is a matter of time). But maybe that will prove the point. Soul-crushing capitalism wins in the end either way?
(P.S. My husband is currently visiting his family in Oz, but way out in Western Sydney. He has informed me that all of the Karen's Diners in Sydney are light-years away by Sydney standards and it is highly unlikely that he will be going there during his visit. That's why I'm asking if any Shipmates have the courage to attempt to patronize one of their establishments themselves.
Comments
Honestly, I'd just write this off as another form of fabricated-reality entertainment, sorta like WWE wrestling rants, but with the abuse directed against the audience. You were probably onto something with your "sadomasochism" reference, though it's arguably more realistic than the Japanese places, because the back-and-forth banter more closely captures the dynamic of real-life hostilities.
Strange. We ghave a couple of restaurants near us where the head honcho is (very) German and you can get the 'Karen experience' for no extra charge. She was just awful.
That was the Won Kei at Leicester Square which closed a few years ago. The difference is that where Karen’s Diner are doing it deliberately, the Won Kei were genuinely like that. A lot of their waiters spoke very little English and their job was simply to seat you, feed you and then get rid of you as quickly as possible. You would be sat where you were told, often with a complete stranger while your friends were sat in a completely different part of the restaurant, you had 30 seconds to place your order and if you hadn’t finished by that time the waiter simply walked away and you would get served what you had ordered up to that point. As soon as you finished, your plate would be cleared away and you would be told to leave.
The food was amazing though.
I love Fawlty Towers - possibly one of the funniest sitcoms of all time - but in my experience, people who are trying to be like Basil Fawlty are incredibly tedious and not funny.
I never found the staff at Won Kei particularly rude despite their reputation. I was veggie at when I lived in London 25-30 years ago and I would choose a dish on their menu and ask them to replace the meat with tofu with no hassle, unlike ordering veggie in some other places at the time.
They weren’t rude as such, just very abrupt.
That sounds like hell on earth. Complete strangers, busy environment, expected to make snap decisions.
Are the staff dressed like Disney characters?
That pretty much applies to any adult whose idea of humour is just to imitate the standard repertoire of a famous comedian.
Depends. Revisiting classic comedy sketches is a bit of a bonding ritual in geek communities.
I imagine being served by Ursula could be entertaining if one were in the right frame of mind.
Aha Kim de la Taste Tickell if memory serves me right.
He always struck me as a consummate actor rather than genuinely and innately obnoxious. He was rather classist IIRC welcoming the upper crust but denying the natives. No beer at times just wine - how well that went down in the 1970's
Abrupt service in Vietnamese restaurants catering to Vietnamese people is commonplace, and I'm fine with that. I remember once questioning a dish with burnt noodles. The waitress informed me that was how they did it. I checked with a friend, and its not. I crossed the place off my list, which was a pity because the food was generally good. But there were plenty of good Vietnamese places in that street.
No - although some restaurants do have character meets, and Cinderella’s stepmother can be bitchy!
I was thinking more of ‘50s Prime Time’ which is themed as a 1950s American home. Guests are ‘cousins’ and staff will tell them to take their elbows off the table, finish their greens, etc. Our waitress was splendidly sarcastic and very funny.
Wong Kei's is still there (on Wardour Street), but under new management and with a more relaxed/polite tone than existed up until about 15-20 years ago. Never had any problem there under the ancien regime - if you knew you were getting, you knew what to expect, and the food was really good and really reasonably priced. Yes, seating was often on a communal table (I once saw a couple, the man in which was really insistent he wanted a table for two.....no, not the place for that, and the waiter wouldn't budge, so they went elsewhere), but equally it was possible to go with a group and book a big circular table. It was a real institution, and, if you played by its rules, arguably better than other places nearby in Chinatown that were a bit more pricey. The staff were abrupt rather than rude. Essentially it was a crowded multi-storey canteen with very decent quality food. Not the place for a romantic tete-a-tete nor to conclude a business deal. But for a good meal with friends? Pretty great.
Not really my thing.
As you say, I think that much of his behaviour was an act. Self-styled squire Kim Tickell, aka Kim Joseph Hollick de la Taste Tickell, ran the Tickell Arms outside Cambridge until his death in 1990.
After parking carefully you approached the front door, on which was posted a long handwritten list of house rules – No Long-Haired Lefties, No Tee Shirts, No Trainers, No CND-ers and so on. The Squire himself usually presided over his empire in 18th century style attire including knee breeches and an eye glass. He was spectacularly rude, usually for no good reason, and was prone to outrageous behaviour. He once poured the ice bucket down a customer’s trousers because his shirt had come untucked and he was therefore “undressed”. A large pair of scissors was kept behind the bar so he could snip off any ties which offended him. Should a customer not have parked sufficiently neatly, he would call out their number plates through a megaphone, demanding they adjust the vehicle now. The walls were adorned with large weapons which he sometimes used for chasing people out of the building.
As were those who patronised the establishment in the hope of being the butt of such behaviour.
Is Dick's Last Resort the name? It's also a chain and it's been around since the 80's.
I think we are talking about three types of restaurants.
One is where the service is brusque because it's a no-frills, no-privacy, high-turnover place.
Another is a place with an idiosyncratic owner with very strong opinions and no fear of airing them (my husband is friends with two different restaurant owners who are like that - not like Kim Tickell, but his friendship has definitely been strained by how he's been treated while patronizing their establishments).
The third place is what my OP is about, where the whole concept of the restaurant and the job of all the waitstaff is a performance that is not unique to a certain locale but rather can be reproduced wherever a chain opens a new restaurant. Dick's Last Resort and Karen's Diner both belong in that category. What makes Karen's Diner new (unless someone can point out another example) is that a visit to Dick's Last Resort is basically taking the attitude of a blue-collar dive bar and commodifying it into something suburbanites driving into town looking for a safe thrill can consume (a callback to an earlier era where Yuppies and their fine-dining tastes were something both blue-collar types and suburbanites loved to hate), whereas Karen's Diner is much more explicitly skewering its own client demographic by saying "hey, all you suburban women (men too, but usually women in the mythology) who enforce class and racial hierarchies by terrorizing employees (and even customers you don't think belong there) at Starbucks and elsewhere, we're going to treat you like shit and not only are you going to love it, you're going to invite all your friends to celebrate your birthday here and put it on Instagram."
I'm sure most people who are in on the joke that patronize Karen's Diner do not treat waitstaff elsewhere poorly enough to be immortalized as a Karen by waitstaff or concerned fellow customers who pull out their phones and start streaming, but, let's face it, making a reservation at a Karen's Diner expecting to get the perfect humiliation you can record and show your friends (with the implication that you wouldn't feel you were getting your money's worth if you weren't treated that way) is almost just as Karenesque as expecting all employees to act as your servants - as Karens in the wild typically do. Ok, Karen's Diner customers probably don't make a stink about not being insulted enough (and I imagine anyone who does so out loud has it coming) - but the expectation of such treatment and the profit motive are enough to keep the hierarchies of server and served relatively intact. The irony and the social critique inherent in the Karen's Diner concept are more heightened than at Dick's Last Resort, in fitting with the controversy-driven attention economy of the present moment. But because it's all done in the context of for-profit entertainment, it's not that different from the Prime Time Diner at Disney World mentioned above. It both is, and is a parody of, woke capitalism (I hate the word woke because it has ceased to have any meaning other than as a straw man for the right, but I can't think of a better word to use at the moment and I'm tired).
Is your screen-name taken from the movie, or does the phrase pre-date that? I never saw that one, even though I'm a big fan of Philip Seymour Hoffman, because the subject matter did not particularly interest me.
I went there once with a friend. We were seated at a tiny table in the basement, in between massive drums of cooking oil and the toilet. We were given a tiny menu, while the Chinese party at the big table in the centre of the room each had a massive, A4 size menu that was almost book length. We were ignored for a while and had to ask a waiter to come and take our order, but eventually got our lunch, which was quite good.
Wong Kei closed for a while but then reopened under new management with friendlier staff. I'm told now it's pretty much like anywhere else.
There is a Karen's in Birmingham (UK), in Grand Central, no less (Peaky Karen's). No idea what it's like, though.