Serena Williams speaks French and she loves the Olympics. She won four gold medals over the course of her Olympic career, and she’s also a big-time Olympic pin collector. All of that means that Serena has been in Paris throughout the Olympic games. She’s there with her husband and their two daughters, although only Olympia has been seen around. Well, on Monday, this happened:
Yikes @peninsulaparis I’ve been denied access to rooftop to eat in a empty restaurant of nicer places 🫠 but never with my kids. Always a first. #Olympic2024 pic.twitter.com/lEGJR5WoEn
— Serena Williams (@serenawilliams) August 5, 2024
Serena is saying – in sort of a convoluted way – that the Peninsula Paris wouldn’t give her a table despite the fact that the place was empty. She’s saying she’s been turned away from restaurants before but never with her kids. I’m always going to be Team Serena, but there are thousands of people in her mentions, screaming at her for being “entitled” and wanting to throw out other guests… who were not there. Well, the restaurant responded:
The luxury restaurant Serena Williams accused of turning her and her children away from has responded after she called them out on social media. On Monday, the tennis icon, 42, claimed that she wasn’t permitted to eat in the rooftop of Paris’ The Peninsula — despite claiming the place was “empty.”
Now, the restaurant has responded to the 23-time Grand Slam winner as the staffers doubled down on why they denied Williams and her children a table.
“In response to Ms Williams’ tweet, for whom we have the utmost admiration and respect, as we do for all our esteemed guests, we reiterate our deepest apologies that we were not able to offer her a table at our rooftop bar when she arrived with her family and without a reservation,” the hotel said in a statement to The Post. “We do always try to make space for walk-in guests but sometimes this is not possible.”
“On August 5th, our rooftop bar was indeed fully booked, and the only unoccupied tables at that time belonged to our gourmet restaurant, L’Oiseau Blanc, which was also fully reserved,” the Peninsula Paris said.
This reminds me of that 2013 incident with Oprah and the Zurich boutique. Oprah was shopping in Zurich, she wanted to see an expensive purse and instead of letting her see the bag, the shop’s clerk refused to show it to her and instead offered to show her less expensive bags. That blew up into an international incident over whether Oprah was being “oversensitive” or whether Oprah (correctly) read the vibe as racist and got out. I’m sure from Peninsula Paris’s perspective, they were following their own booking protocol and while the restaurant was empty, they simply did not see a good reason to get Serena and her family to a table. But I trust Serena’s instincts here – if she’s suggesting that there was another vibe, I believe her.
Photos courtesy of Cover Images.