M. Night Restaurant

New Airbender Restuarant opens amidst hiring controversy
Critics of the new Midnight N. Shyamalan restaurant allege the restaurant discriminated against non-white job applicants.

by Marissa Lee
Opinion
Racebending.com

LOS ANGELES - On July 1, Airbender Restaurant will be reopening under new management, as critics decry the restaurant for racial discrimination in hiring.

In 2007, Apex Restaurants Corporation, the parent company of Airbender Restaurant, announced that celebrity restaurateur Midnight N. Shyamalan would be opening a newly designed Airbender Restaurant in 2010. Best known for the 6 Senses Restaurant, Shyamalan is a famous South Asian American chef whose signature dishes prominently feature twists of lemon.

Patrons of the original Airbender restaurant followed the redesign with rapt interest, but many immediately took notice in August 2008 when hiring announcements for sous chefs, station chefs, restaurant greeters, and waiters read "Wanted: Caucasian or any other ethnicity." A few months later, the top four positions at the restaurant were announced as filled by white applicants. Connoisseurs were baffled by the hiring selections, particularly since sous chef and line chefs Nicola Pelton and Jason McCartney boasted little to no formal culinary credentials.

The Media Action Network for Asian Americans and East West, a prominent Asian American culinary institute, both contacted the new management, explaining why their hiring practices were problematic and requesting a meeting. They were completely ignored until months later, when it was too late to change the hiring decisions.

The Original Airbender: A Visionary New Restaurant

Restaurant connoisseurs might remember the original Airbender Restaurant. It was located in Nickelodeon Plaza and opened from 2005 until 2008 and served pan-Asian and Pacific Rim fare. (You can relive the original Airbender Restaurant experience by checking out their former menu, on streaming NetFlix Eats.)

For over a century, financiers have tried to pass terriyaki burgers off as representative of Asian cuisine. While some trends like sushi and bubble tea have taken off, and Americans enjoy dining at establishments like P.F. Chang's, only 1.8% of restaurants in the United States reflect Asian cuisine, while 82% of American restaurants reflect white American cuisine, even though 44% of restaurant patrons are people of color.

In the face of popular wisdom--that audiences would not embrace restaurants with servers of color in prominent positions--the award-winning original Airbender Restaurant seemed proof that patrons are open to having their culinary entertainment served by waitstaff with Asian and Inuit faces. Asian and Asian American designers, chefs, and cultural consultants ensured that the decor, menu, and hospitality would reflect the cultures that inspired the restaurant. Critics like Edger Rebert noted that Americans--especially young Americans--are ready to support dining establishments with more colorful menus.

Fair Hiring Practices?

When directly confronted with the hiring language a year later, financier Franklin Marshall claimed that this language was written by a third-party entity and had nothing to do with Airbender, Shyamalan, or Apex--even though the hiring notice was released from the Apex Restaurants recruitment office and advertised on the Apex website.

In March 2009, Apex released hiring notices asking for applicants from "Near Eastern, Middle Eastern, Far Eastern, Asian, Mediterraneans and Latino ethnic groups" to fill kitchen staff, bus boys, dishwashers, and custodial positions for the new Airbender. Prospective job applicants were asked to dress in "traditional costume." Korean applicants were encouraged to apply for positions while wearing kimonos.

"There's been some talk that we're hiring authentic Asians as a response to the backlash," Dierdre Ricket, Apex's hiring manager, told the Washington Post, "which is totally wrong because our menu is multi-ethnic and Airbender restaurant will be multi-ethnic.’”

In February 2009 Shyamalan fired Jason McCartney and hired chef Devin Patel, who hails from the United Kingdom and is of Indian descent, to be Airbender's new boucher. As the restaurant's boucher, Patel will oversee the division of kitchen staff--nicknamed the "Fire Squad"-- in charge of butchering and preparing meat and poultry. Shyamalan then tapped Indian American culinary personality Aasif Mandava as the restaurant's new poissonnier. Mandava will oversee butchering for the restaurant's fish dishes.

Michael Lei, who runs a fan website calling for a boycott of the restaurant, said: "It becomes very clear that it’s part of the historical pattern of restauranteering. It’s because this is the standard procedure for restaurants--to hire white people for the most exclusive jobs and people of color for the drudge work. It really shouldn't be this way. It's 2010."

Apex says that more than half of the restaurant's full time positions have been filled by employees from cultures around the world. But critics said even today, restaurants often only hire ethnic minority applicants when filling secondary and behind-the-scenes roles. Positions for waiters who are people of color are hard to find, and employees who complain about the glass ceilinged industry are frequently blacklisted.

Shyamalan Responds

In a recent interview with IndieRestaurantsOnline, Shyamalan responded to accusations of racial discrimination.

"Well, you caught me. I'm the face of racism," Shyamalan said. "As an Asian-American, it bothers me when people take all of their passion and rightful indignation about the subject and then misplace it. You're coming at me--the one Asian restaurateur who has the right to hire anybody I want--and I'm hiring this entire restaurant in this color blind way where everyone is represented!"

Shyamalan pointed out that he hired several people of color to be kitchenhands and that he plans to hire more Asian American kitchenhands when the second Airbender Restaurant opens in 2012.

To Shyamalan, the controversy lies not with the glass ceiling in hiring, but in a misunderstanding of Airbender's culinary palette.

"The great thing about Oriental cuisine is that it's intended to be ambiguous. The features of the dishes are an intentional mix of all features," Shyamalan said, using one of the original restaurant's famous dishes as an example. "The Katara Chicken looks just like the Tandoori Chicken my daughter likes, so is it Indian? That's just in our house. When our friends eat it, they taste their own cuisines in it. That's what's so beautiful about Oriental cuisine."

Fans of the original Airbender Restaurant argue that the dishes were not ambiguous but were derived from specific, rarely celebrated cultures.

"The original Airbender restaurant was unlike other restaurants," Lei said. "When it opened, it was the only gourmet restaurant in America where families could appreciate cuisines from cultures like the Chinese and the Inuit in a way that wasn't stereotyped, mocked, or exoticized."

The New Airbender Experience

Entering the newly reimagined Airbender Restaurant, patrons will be immediately greeted by the new maître d, Jacques Rathbone. In addition to donning a stylized Inuit Anorak, Rathbone explained at a press junket how he transformed himself to prepare for the maître d position.

"It's one of those things where I pull my hair up, shave the sides, and I definitely needed a tan," Rathbone said."It's one of those things where, hopefully, the patrons will suspend disbelief a little bit."

As for decor, Shyamalan retained the original Airbender Restaurant's thematic trappings of Air, Water, Earth, and Fire, but removed the ancient East Asian calligraphy design elements of the original restaurant and replaced the decor with an fictionalized language. Shyamalan also noted that he "fought like crazy" to correct how the original dishes were pronounced, so waiters will describe the dishes using accurate Asian phonemes.

Shyamalan's Airbender Restaurant includes updated versions of the original's featured dishes. The popular vegetarian Aang Thenthuk Soup, inspired by traditional Tibetan cuisine, now has a "mixed quality" to it that includes seasonings used in Texas barbecue. The menu boasts an assortment of Asian, African, Inuit, and Pennsylvanian Dutch tapas and American-style entrees. The entrees will feature Shyamalan's signature lemon twist, with a three-dimensional (3-D) food arrangement and plate presentation by ILM Culinary.

Food Critic Rob Bricklin from ToplessServingDish.com addressed the controversy in a recent column.

"You guys need to settle down and stop losing sleep over this, because there is no way that restaurants would have ever, ever hired anyone other than white people as lead wait staff," Bricklin wrote. "Is this racist? In a sense, but restaurants always hire for their largest audience, and in America, that's generally white. If Italy was making an Airbender Restaurant, I bet it would serve Italian food and have white Italian waiters. That's just how it works."

Other supporters of the new Airbender restaurant point out that the detractors haven't even tried the restaurant yet. "Midnight is a great chef," iluvmnight, a fan of the chef's, wrote on a MidnightDiningFans.com message board. "These Racebenders haven't even tasted these dishes yet and they are already judgeing[sic] it. Midnight used a colorblind hiring process and got the best people for the job. As long as the food tastes good, who cares? I didn't see them complaining about Panda Express!"

Asian American advocates and many fans of the original Airbender restaurant remain skeptical of these new improvements and plan to boycott Airbender Restaurant when it opens on July 1.

"I am sure the waiters will be professional and the food might even taste great, but the original Airbender restaurant was truly something special," Lei said. "Compare that to the new restaurant, which blatantly discriminated in its hiring--from the job announcements to the final hiring decisions. Asian food is great, but Asian people should stay in the background? Midnight's Airbender Restaurant continues to reinforce the outdated notion that people of color are only good for scrubbing dishes and butchering fish."