Your Friendly Neighborhood Hooters
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.
