238873 Sun Oct 20 09:24:49 -0700 2002 21 19 Outer Boroughs 0 1266805 A Taste of France in Fort Greene Langston Hughes wrote of the “darker brother” unwelcome at the table as a metaphor for the lack of inclusion of people of African descent in American society. Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Duboise, Richard Wright and James Baldwin among many other African Americans enjoyed an acceptance in France they’d never experienced in the United States. I followed them and their legacy as a student of Pratt Institute in the late 1970s when I traveled to the south of France. As my first extended trip outside of the United States it provided lasting memories of excellent mountain vistas and a beautiful seacoasts and a love of French culture in its many expressions. In the years to come I continued to study French and to visit France periodically. During the course of a visit to Paris in the 1980s a friend, Yvonne and I experienced the other France, the one comedians and tourists describe a place where irrational rude and prejudicial behavior is expressed towards English speakers especially Americans. The visit started out pleasantly. For our first night’s dinner we chose a bistro near the apartment in the Marais, at the time, a newly gentrified neighborhood that surrounds the Bastille monument. The waiter who served us spoke of his recent trip to the US and his preference for New York over California. He asked us to come again. We returned on our last night, anticipating another pleasant evening. We entered, seated ourselves, and waited. Though the small restaurant was nearly full, the waiter was not busy and made a point of ignoring us. We were more than aware that an incident was unfolding when another pair of diners entered and the waiter rushed past our table to hand them menus. As young women from New York neither of us had experienced Jim Crow, only its more subtle northern variation. We had no trouble recognizing what was going and determined that it was best to leave, there was no recourse, no NAACP or the like and we were leaving the next day anyway. We contented ourselves with cheese and bread in the apartment where we were staying. Upon our return to the states I told the story to a friend, Annette, who is American though raised in France because her black mother and white father thought their children would be better treated in France than the US in the 1960s. She suggested that it was because they thought we were French. True we’d bought new clothes during our stay and were wearing them that night. My traveling companion is Haitian American and as a light skinned African American I am often mistaken for other ethnicities. Annette said we should have spoken English as to make them aware of our identity (an ironic twist on the fate of other Americans in France). In other words we could’ve received special treated not afforded black citizens of the land of Libertė, Fraternitė, Egalitė. For me this was not an option. The historic friendship and admiration of the French people for the likes of Josephine Baker, Langston Hughes, World War 1 soldiers and whomever else became a myth by then. A few years would pass before I returned to France. The confluence of issues concerning race and identity are often challenging but perhaps not as disturbing as the following incident. On the 12th of September 2001, the weather was sadly and ironically beautiful as the day before had been. The streets were full as stunned Brooklyn residents wandered around trying to be as considerate and kind to each other as possible to make up of the visceral pain we were experiencing. Several friends began to converge on Lafayette Ave. and decided to sit down and have a drink. We chose A Table, which in French means to being seated at the table to eat. It is a restaurant with rustic charm and good southern French food, reminiscent of my first trip to France. I’d eaten there recently with a friend from Malaysia. He and I liked the food and had planned to return. My friend Solange, ironically Yvonne’s cousin. was reluctant to sit there because she had had an unpleasant experience there some weeks with the restaurant’s owner when ordering a drink from the bar, which she considered to be racially motivated. Another Haitian friend Colette was the third in our small group. We chose a table outside and called to the waiter, a young Frenchman. When we asked for the drink menu he remained where he’d been standing three tables away and shouted the selections to us. The service he provided was uniformly rude, though we spoke to him in French. There was a marked difference between the way he spoke to us and a table of three blondes with whom he had previously flirted and joked. We had our drink and left vowing never to return. The kindness and consideration the rest of the city seemed to recognize was vital to our collective recovery was sadly lacking at A Table. October 2002, a year and a month later Michael, another friend was visited by his mother from Westchester. They planned to see a movie at BAM and have lunch in the neighborhood. You guessed it. At A Table, Michael was unaware of the stories that had begun to accumulate among our friends and unknowingly chose to dine at this restaurant. As Michael tells it, his nearly octogenarian mother was reprimanded by one of the owners for knocking on the restroom door to verify if it was occupied, when “clearly a closed door signals occupancy” she was told by the owner a red haired woman in her 50s. Regardless if this is an unwritten rule, older people are known to have less keen hearing and sight. Besides who could be less than pleasant to a petite gray haired lady nearing eighty!!! The ultimate irony for me in all of this is my nearly thirty years in and around Fort Greene: in the 70’s as my college neighborhood, considered to be too much of a ghetto for the comfort of my white classmates. Black and Latino students were frequently called upon to walk with a white classmate to the subway to insure their safety. The films of Spike Lee made the rest of the world aware of Fort Greene in the 1980s as the hip center of black film and visual arts culture. The sweat equity of black artists and entrepreneurs created the neighborhood that attracted real estate interests in the 90s, since then the struggle continues for equality amidst this rabid gentrification. Have we arrived in 2002 where people of color are not welcomed á table in Fort Greene? Sun Oct 20 09:24:49 -0700 2002 0 The Darker Brother 1 1266807 You have raised what is always in our country a very sensitive issue and perhaps a lot of people will hesitate to respond but I think this is an issue and I'd like to attempt a response, knowing that it is so difficut under the circumstances you described to make a clear cut determination.I have lived in the area for over 16 years and my friends and family are both black and white and others so that I think I have some abiltiy to judge when a slight is due to racism and when to simple rudeness or bad manners. I think at A Table it was probably due to the latter. I say this because I have been going there since it first opened and have frequented it with a white crowd, black only and mixed group and sometimes experienced bad or brusk service and and at times experienced warm and attentive service. The type of service appears to have no racial pattern at all.In addition at any given time during the day close to half the patrons might be visibly of African descent. I know that these things can be difficult to gage, however the staff there turns over frequently but there tends to be this kind of French seeming surliness (which I have often noted in France itself - mostly in Paris) which surfaces. I tend to chalk it up to cultural differences. The same way people often misinterpret the Korean tendency not to place change into one's hand but on the counter. Many Americans interpret this as rudeness or even a kind of racism, but in Korea it is polite. That said bad service is never appreciated, but in this case I don't think it was motivated by perceptions of race. I am not one to shy away from coming to that conclusion and have gotten up and left establishments when I feel it is present. Sun Oct 20 10:10:55 -0700 2002 1266805 0 Faren 1 1266809 Thank you for your thought provoking posting. To the best of my knowledge I have never been in Fort Greene so I cannot comment on the specific issues you raise regarding your treatment at A Table. I am a white nearly middle aged male who grew up in an ethnically and economically integrated neighborhood in Manhattan and now lives in a similar suburb. Nearly every day of my life I have witnessed an incident that might be percieved as racist, sexist, or ageist. And while I don't doubt for a minute that racism, sexism, ageism and a few other isms exist and are practiced with intent, I still believe that the great majority of those incidents are not intentional or even mindless acts, but the result of the necessary interactions of members of the tremendous variety of cultures our City is home to. I might be looking at the world through rose colored glasses, but while I recognize that racism exists I believe that much of what is called racism is really the evidence of the massive cultural diversity we are so lucky to encounter. It is understandable that we would wish these cultures to interact seamlessly, but it is not possible. It is important to note patterns of behaviour and question the motivations. We must each make the effort to learn about the customs of the people with whom we interact before we can determine whether something is racist or just a different way of being polite. Again, I do not know Ft. Greene or A Table, and I don't mean to minimize your feelings of having been abused there. But you raise much larger issues and it is those I am trying, however clumsily, to address. Sun Oct 20 11:05:46 -0700 2002 1266805 0 Deven Black 1 1266829 As a black woman who lives in Fort Greene and frequents many of the neighborhoods restaurants and bars, I have never been treated rudely at any establishment. I had dinner at A Table just a few weeks ago and was given excellent service and delicious food. Mon Oct 21 09:24:34 -0700 2002 1266805 0 DeeDee 1 1266831 Forgive me, but I'm confused by your conclusion of pervasive racism based on some rude waiters over the past year, and wonder why you chose to dramatize an incident using the 9/11 backdrop. Also, you conclude with: "The sweat equity of black artists and entrepreneurs created the neighborhood that attracted real estate interests in the 90s, since then the struggle continues for equality amidst this rabid gentrification." So you're saying the neighborhood has demonstrably improved with higher real estate prices and presumably lower crime rates, but in the end this was just racial exploitation, ie 'rabid gentrification'? This seems a big stretch. I don't mean to offend, and you seem like a reasonable person - with lots of great restaurant tips! Like you and most everyone, I abhor racism. Let's be careful not to ascribe racism to commonplace human behaviors such as rudeness and economic self-interestedness. It gives racism power that isn't deserved. Peace, UD Mon Oct 21 10:29:16 -0700 2002 1266805 0 Uncledave 2 1266884 Thanks for the post. Well said. Tue Oct 22 15:58:33 -0700 2002 1266831 0 Katerina 2 1266890 I think I understand what she meant in her comment about "rabid gentrification", though maybe I wouldn't have phrased it like that. I went to high school in Fort Greene and it was a predominantly black area, I guess it still is? I am Asian, if that matters, and never felt unsafe, and rather, loved the blocks of pretty brownstones. Clinton Hill was a bit different, my boyfriend was at Pratt at the same time and recounts stories of attempted muggings, shootings et al. Anyway, the black people who lived in Fort Greene made it what it was, in effect, a neighborhood that eventually attracted a diverse range of people who wanted a nice, reasonably priced place to live, not too far from Manhattan. Of course, there was quite a bit of demand and this led to increased rent and property values prices and a new personality. Sometimes a new personality can make a long-time resident feel unwelcome or like a stranger in their own neighborhood. I'm not suggesting this is racial exploitation, nor did I come away from the original post feeling that that was what Darker Brother was implying. You keep hearing about all these people moving up to Harlem because the space is cheap, but how long will it be before apartments becomes unaffordable for all the original residents who moved there when it was an undesirable ghetto? Let's be real, a majority of Blacks or Latinos occupying a certain neighborhood doesn't have the same effect as White people doing the same. I currently live in the Lower East side and have been since before it was an enclave of cool. I'm not saying I miss the crack hos loitering about, but for example, I was appalled to see many limos dropping off patrons in front of 71 Clinton Fresh Food in it's first year or so. The restaurant and the neighborhood became hot enough to warrant visits from wealthy Upper East Siders. The demographics are changing and though we all need roofs over our heads and essentially I am part of the problem, I am really most concerned with the low-income families that could be displaced from their homes. Tue Oct 22 19:27:53 -0700 2002 1266831 0 pastryhat 3 1266891 I have lived in this area for over 16 years (and by the way the ftGreene/Clinton Hill area are basically a single extended area)and I find it amazing that there is this overall impression, particularly from the former transient student population, that because the neighborhood is and has been a majority black area that these are all low income people. Just for the record, this area has always had a large middle income and professional black residents, including a lot of artists and musicians. Until recently so many people outside this neighborhood have assumed the area was dangerous simply because of the large black population. I guess many nonblack nyers just can't fathom that a predominately black area can be made up of people other than low income. There has also always been a sizable "other" population in this area and diversity and relative tolerance has made this the special area it was and I hope it will continue to be. Tue Oct 22 19:49:33 -0700 2002 1266890 0 Faren 4 1266926 I am totally unfamiliar with Ft Greene, but I know EXACTLY what you're saying. My hometown is Oakland, CA, and the same assumption seems to be made all the time about the (majority) black population - they're black, therefore they're all low-income and the areas are all depressed and dangerous. When I mention that I (white) grew up in mostly black middle-class neighborhoods that don't fit the profile, I'm told (by people who've never lived there) that they are obviously exceptional. So I have a feeling this same scenario is played out all across the country. Okay, enough off-topic, not-about-food ranting from me... Wed Oct 23 16:10:43 -0700 2002 1266891 0 Caitlin McGrath 5 1266935 Exactly! Check out the neighborhood - it would feel like home. Wed Oct 23 20:01:02 -0700 2002 1266926 0 Faren 1 1266859 Thank you for your very well-written post. I have been to A Table twice, once last week. I am a blond woman, and my husband is black. Once we received excellent service, and once the service was inattentive (the waiter spent too much time flirting with another table - same waiter?). I understand, completely, what you are saying, but I think that in the case of this restaurant, what you experienced may have more to do with service that is uneven for everyone than with service that singles out black people. Mon Oct 21 19:00:36 -0700 2002 1266805 0 EmilyW 1 1266872 As a side note, the red-haired woman has long been extremely moody in my experience--charming one visit, a nightmare the next. Busting the chops of an old lady for knocking on a bathroom door is obviously nuts. One of the pitfalls of gentrification may the proliferation of restaurants run by Parisians, whose manners seem culturally rude to many Americans. Tue Oct 22 10:35:31 -0700 2002 1266805 0 Tom Philpott 1 1266914 It's probably a bit late to weigh in on this topic, but I will nevertheless. I find it a little disturbing that so many are so quick to declare Darker Brother's experience at A Table a matter of bad behavior. I don't understand why it would be inconceivable to chowhound posters that a waiter or hostess might be motivated by racist views or feelings. There seems to be this pervasive idea that racism does exist, but never where we are, and never in such subtle context. I've experienced rudeness in restaurants, and what I perceived to be ill treatment motivated by racism. I really don't understand why so many feel so sure that Darker Brother is wrong about an experience that she and others have witnessed first hand. Don't be so quick dismiss. Wed Oct 23 12:13:23 -0700 2002 1266805 0 Gothamgirl 2 1266933 I drew my conclusion from personal expereince with the mercurial red haired lady in question and I think several others also based their opinions on personal experience at A Table. Wed Oct 23 18:28:35 -0700 2002 1266914 0 Faren 2 1266948 Point taken, but unless one is a mind-reader, simple rudeness seems to be the most likely cause in this incident. It's not a matter of proving Darker Brother was wrong. She very well may be right since there's a lot of jerks out there. The point is, we're a diverse group of millions randomly bumping into one another and sometimes we have a problem with others we encounter. I don't think it's productive to assume that racism is at play just because the other person looks different. (Is that reaction not itself reflexively race-based in principle?) What good does it do to assume racism exists where we're not reasonably sure it does? Peace, UD Thu Oct 24 11:12:18 -0700 2002 1266914 0 Uncledave 3 1266950 That reminds me of an incident when I was a poor checkout clerk at a Whole Foods. Two customers were on line, the first white, the second black. At the time (this was about 10 years ago), the company required that we have the name and an i.d. number for each customer paying with a check so that we could type the i.d. number into a system that identified people who had bounced checks. The white man had his name, address, and social security number pre-printed on the check. I took the check, typed in the number, and he left. The black man had nothing on his check but his name. Not even a home address. Since the check had no information, I asked to see an i.d. Indignant, the man launched into a long monologue about how stores discriminated against him because of his color. I sat there calmly and did not response. Finally, I reached into the drawer and showed him both checks. The other man already had the information pre-printed, I said calmly. The man said "fine" in a nasty tone and did not apologize. This is the kind of thing that happens when we rush to judgments. I would never discriminate against a customer, and, the fact is, I would be less likely to ask for i.d. from a black person for no reason precisely because it looks like racism. A Table might discriminate. They might not. Unless the OP has evidence that the restaurant doesn't treat white people in exactly the same way that his or her friends were treated, I think that it is unfair to rush to conclusions. No one at the restaurants uttered a racial epithet, and some of the posts below indicate that white people were treated the same way. If anything, the evidence seems to point to the fact that service at the restaurant is rude to everyone. Thu Oct 24 11:22:58 -0700 2002 1266948 0 Ann 4 1266953 The one time I was in A Table (the food was good bty) the place was simply packed, wall to wall, with a cross section of the local community black and white(at least the portion prosperous enough to support it.) Service staff was extremely rushed perhaps a bit brusque (our host was known there). I can certainly imagine service failings occurring, and even that some servers may have acted badly or in a even in an insensitive or racist manner, but I dont think the business could have survived, indeed thrived, in the Ft. Greene community if this behavior was institutionalized. The only thing to do is talk to the owner and make him aware of what happened. Thu Oct 24 12:08:43 -0700 2002 1266950 0 jen kalb 5 1266961 Here we go again !!! I really take issue about the stereotype floating around that because Ft Greene is now and has always been a predominately black area the residents are mostly low income. As a very, very long time resident of the neighborhood I can assure you that the majority of the "pre-this is a hot area invasion" residents were middle income, professionals and musicians and artists. Get it out of your heads that a predominately black area is per se a poor neighborhood! In actuality the real "prejudice" or sterotyping (note I'm not accusing anyone of racism that is a very different thing) that has emerged from this conversation is not that Darkerbrother experienced racism but that most people equate blackness with poverty and that is a shame. Thu Oct 24 16:56:29 -0700 2002 1266953 0 Faren 6 1266963 Faren, you mean here YOU go again - Im certainly not going there. Read my post again and be fair. The fact is that a lot of the people in the vicinity - of whatever race - middle class or not - couldnt afford a dining experience like La Table or wouldnt in a 1000 years consider laying down that kind of $ for the type of cosmopolitan dining experience they offer. Thats all I meant. I hope thats enough said; I think we are on the same side here. Thu Oct 24 17:47:38 -0700 2002 1266961 0 jen kalb 1 1266936 A similar experience turned me off from A Table. I live in the neighborhood, and have been there several times, with service ranging from inept to okay and food ranging from okay to very good. Then 6 of us went one night, on my recommendation--I'm white, the other 5 women were Caribbean or African American, ranging in age from 28 to 80, and all had lived in the neighborhood since childhood. Dunno, maybe the waitress just doesn't like long-time residents of the neighborhood, or maybe she doesn't like old people and those who associate with them, maybe she didn't like our clothes. She was downright sneering and sarcastic, particularly to the oldest two in our group (all of whom were, by the way, exceedingly polite). The women I was with were quite surprised at this rudeness at what we all expected to be a nice restaurant. None of them will ever go again. The oldest summed it up saying "It's good that white people are finally coming back to Fort Greene, but not if it means more places where you get treated like this." I am sure some other people have had opposite experiences, which is great. But it just gives me a really bad vibe about the place -- and the food isn't consistently good enough to justify the prices anyway Wed Oct 23 22:01:59 -0700 2002 1266805 0 Jenae R 2 1266985 Awful story. How are you going to be rude to old folks? I think I've had my last meal at A Table. Fri Oct 25 16:25:32 -0700 2002 1266936 0 Tom Philpott 1 1268147 I could not agree more about bad treatment at A Table. It is specifically racial. I know because I went there for lunch several times with a group of new moms (babies in tow) in the neighborhood. There was a huge disparity between the treatment of black and white members of our group. The white members of the group were greeted with joy and enthuiasm while the black members (including me) were treated as if we were a nuisance. This continued through 6 or 7 lunches until our group could no longer go there together and basically disbanded. Plus the food is wildly inconsistent - mediocre at best (tough, gristly leg of lamb and vile bouillabaisse). I was shocked to see them receive a "Best Brooklyn Bistro" award. I was also treated very rudely at their affiliated store L'epicerie. I will never set foot inside either one again! I have also encountered the owners socially and they are not nice. Wed Dec 04 17:27:30 -0800 2002 1266805 0 Concerned Resident