In the fall of 1995, three decades after the March on Washington, the sports bar and restaurant chain Hooters staged a march of its own. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (E.E.O.C.) had accused Hooters of illegal hiring practices, as part of a four-year probe during which staff were “tripping over federal regulators and investigators in our restaurants,” as Mike McNeil, then the company’s vice-president, complained to the Los Angeles Times. The problem was men: Hooters declined to hire them as bartenders or servers, and the commission was demanding that the company create a fund of twenty-two million dollars to be disbursed among victims. Citing the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Marcia Greenberger, an attorney for the National Women’s Law Center, told the Times that the law permits exceptions only in obvious cases—“If you needed a wet nurse, you wouldn’t have to offer the job to men”—and pointed out that airlines had once argued that travellers preferred attractive young gals to staff plane cabins, and that they had lost.
McNeil gathered about a hundred Hooters Girls, as they’re formally known, to picket in D.C. They wore branded tracksuits over their uniforms, which consisted of neon-orange hot pants; nude pantyhose, to give the illusion of a suntan; and tight white T-shirts emblazoned with an owl whose big mammiform eyes serve as the double “O”s in the restaurant’s logo. Among the women was Vince Gigliotti, a burly and mustachioed manager at one of the chain’s Florida locations, who had also been featured in full-page newspaper ads and on billboards wearing a Hooters Girl uniform and a long blond wig; the caption read “Washington Get a Grip!” A year after the protest, the E.E.O.C. backed off, deeming it “wiser . . . to devote its scarce litigation resources to other cases.”
Hooters, which was founded in 1983, and expanded, at its peak, to more than four hundred locations worldwide, faced myriad such challenges over the years: lawsuits alleging sexual harassment and discrimination based on body weight and race; an employee protest, in 2021, over the introduction of even shorter, thong-like shorts. It was hardly a shock when Hooters of America, the corporation that controlled franchising rights, declared bankruptcy in 2025. The extinction of the middle-class chain restaurant, from Friendly’s to Red Lobster, appeared all but inevitable. In the age of ubiquitous internet porn, the idea of going to a chicken-wing restaurant to see some cleavage sounded almost quaint.
But Hooters, it turned out, was not going down without a fight. Last fall, Hooters Inc., a separate company that owned the first-ever location, in Clearwater, Florida, among others, acquired more than a hundred additional stores, as well as control of the brand. The plan, according to Neil Kiefer, Hooters Inc.’s C.E.O. since 1992, was for the chain to remarket itself as a family-friendly neighborhood restaurant: there would still be short shorts and snug tops, but no more bikini nights. In the New York Times, Kiefer insisted that this effort—to “re-Hooterize,” as he put it—was simply a return to form.“We’re getting back to what makes us a beach-themed restaurant as opposed to a girlie bar,” he said, a claim that struck me as both disingenuous and self-sabotaging. Wasn’t the girlie stuff the whole point?
Admission to the Hooters museum—the “Museeum,” as the sign hanging above its threshold calls it—at the original Clearwater location is free: hang a right past the hostess stand, attended by what’s known as a Hooters Girl at the Door, and you’re in. A gallery wall features framed photos of bodacious employees across the decades, as well as the original menu, which advertises the restaurant’s signature curly fries as “peeled and squared entirely by hand by an Idaho refugee whom we have chained to the wall in the back room.”Artifacts in glass display cases immortalize key moments in Hooters history: toy planes and race cars left over from the brand’s short-lived airline and its Nascar sponsorship; a dusty stainless-steel contraption known as a celery jig, invented by the first Hooters chef, Chuck Riley, to cleanly slice stalks in half before serving them with wings.
As it happens, Riley is still on the payroll, and works most days at the company headquarters, a squat two-story building a few hundred yards behind the restaurant. Not long ago, I found him—slim and boyish but for a shock of gray hair and wise, hangdog eyes—in a wood-panelled test kitchen that doubles as the company canteen, tossing batches of fried shrimp in a variety of sauces. When I marvelled at the fact that he’d spent four decades at Hooters, Riley smiled sheepishly and said, “Why not?” On speakerphone, he consulted with Gil DiGiannantonio, a Hooters founder who spearheaded the original menu—the pair learned to operate a deep fryer together—and who was weighing in from his home in Colorado.
DiGiannantonio was part of a group of six men, most of them young, married fathers working in industries such as general contracting and liquor sales, who opened Hooters on a lark. The joke, now cemented in company lore, is that they needed a place they couldn’t get kicked out of. “At the time, there were a lot of what you’d call ‘fern bars,’ ” Kiefer, who started as the restaurant’s lawyer, told me, referring to a category of upscale hangouts, decorated with potted plants and Tiffany lamps, that were meant to facilitate yuppie courtship. “We were sort of the opposite of that.”
Ed Droste, another of the original six, who worked in real estate, had a knack for marketing. The name and the mascot were inspired by a Steve Martin bit: “I believe it’s derogatory to refer to a woman’s breasts as ‘boobs,’ ‘jugs,’ ‘winnebagos,’ or ‘golden bozos,’ and you should only refer to them as ‘hooters.’ ” In Kiefer’s telling, he and Droste were at the beach with their wives when they handed a business card to a buxom blonde named Lynne Austin, who had just won a bikini contest, and asked her if she wanted to work at a restaurant. Like Venus from the sea foam, the Hooters Girl was born, an archetype that encompassed both sunny good looks and an unusually cozy kind of hospitality: at Hooters, your server might slide into the booth next to you while taking your order for a pitcher of Bud Light.
In Clearwater, I went to lunch with two former Hooters Girls: Becky Moore, the company’s director of learning, development, and training; and Andrea Hill, the executive vice-president in charge of all Texas locations. At a high-top table, Hill, a sleekly dressed Black woman in her forties, took charge of ordering a spread of her favorite dishes—honey Thai shrimp, sweet-and-spicy Daytona Beach wings, deep-fried pickles, and snow-crab legs—and made sure that everyone had plenty of paper towels to wipe their hands. Hill was a college student when she was first hired at Hooters, in Chicago, where she’d be flying later that afternoon: her best friend, her “literal Day One” from her time as a server, was expecting a grandchild, and she was going to the baby shower.
This sense of continuity turned out to be a prominent feature of the Hooters universe: Moore, a bubbly eastern-Florida native in her late thirties who started at the chain out of high school, told me about her “honorary nephew,” Chase—a teen-ager whose parents had brought him in regularly as a toddler. Our server, a recent college graduate named Brianna, had grown up in the restaurant, too. Her mother, Kimberlie Bennett, another former Hooters Girl, is now the company’s financial controller.
I asked Moore and Hill, tentatively, what they might say to someone who characterizes Hooters as exploitative of women. Neither of them flinched. “I believe, personally, that people just don’t know,” Hill said. “I don’t know many companies that—I was a Hooters Girl eleven years ago, and I’m the executive vice-president now. I don’t have conventional management experience, I don’t have an M.B.A., but they invested in me.” The uniform, she said, wasn’t so different from the one she’d worn as a cheerleader. “And anything that I felt about it, I would turn around, and everybody else had it on, too.”
“There was always a girl there that would have your back,” Moore added. When I recounted my own experience of working at a restaurant, and the sting of secondhand humiliation I’d felt when a co-worker was sent home because her bra straps were showing, both women nodded sympathetically. A high-school classmate of mine who happily worked at Hooters for five years told me that she’d felt more objectified, and been more frequently harassed, when she got a job at a higher-end bar. Maybe there was something valuable in the Hooters approach of saying the quiet part out loud.
In 2018, the writer and director Andrew Bujalski released a film called “Support the Girls,” about the staff of a fictional restaurant called Double Whammies. (Hooters has inspired so many imitators, including Twin Peaks and Ojos Locos, that it’s considered the originator of a genre: the breastaurant.) When I asked Bujalski recently what drew him to the setting, he described it as a riddle: he liked “the idea that no two customers, no two waitresses, quite have the same idea of what this place is supposed to be and supposed to mean.”
A few weeks ago, I took my family to the Hooters in Long Beach, California, after a visit to the aquarium, a short walk away. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised to count some thirteen children in the bustling dining room. As far as my own two kids were concerned, this was a restaurant designed for them: cute animal mascot; televisions on every wall; young women with the same friendly, patient countenance as their camp counsellors offering crayons, tater tots, and lemonade. The food exceeded no one’s expectations, but the beer was cold and the price was right. “I love Hooters!” my seven-year-old son declared. Who was I to argue with him? ♦