If you’re asking me to pick sides between Serena Williams versus a French restaurant hostess, I’m choosing Serena every time. Celebrities from all around the world have descended into Paris for the Olympics. Serena has been there since before the games even started, and she was asked to be part of the torch relay, carrying it alongside Carl Lewis, Rafael Nadal and Nadia Comăneci. Serena attended a lot of the women’s gymnastics and she also turned up for the men’s gold medal match in tennis. Like many people in town for the games, I doubt she knows when various competitions will be over, and as such, she would probably find it difficult to nail down restaurant reservations. This is why Serena, her daughter Olympia and a friend (possibly her agent Jill Smoller, who has also been in town) hit up the Peninsula on Monday and asked for a table without a reservation. What happened next is being debated across the internet.
According to Serena, “I’ve been denied access to rooftop to eat in a empty restaurant of nicer places… but never with my kids. Always a first.” Meaning, she thought there were plenty of open tables and that she was being denied a table for unspecified reasons. The Peninsula replied to the tweet with: “Dear Mrs. Williams, Please accept our deepest apologies for the disappointment you encountered tonight. Unfortunately, our rooftop bar was indeed fully booked and the only unoccupied tables you saw belonged to our gourmet restaurant, L’Oiseau Blanc, which was fully reserved.” So yes, there were plenty of empty tables but every single thing was booked or reserved, now go home, you gauche American. But wait, there’s an added wrinkle! There always is.
A staffer at the Peninsula’s rooftop restaurant, Maxime Mannevy, told Variety that Williams showed up to the premises with another woman and a stroller and looked “unrecognizable.”
“When she came there were only two tables available and they had been reserved by clients of the hotel,” said Mannevy, who shares that she was not working when Williams visited the restaurant. “My colleague didn’t recognize her and feels terrible, but he told her what he would have told any other client, which is to wait downstairs in the bar for a table to become available. That was absolutely nothing personal.”
This is an important wrinkle to me. This is why I gave Serena the benefit of the doubt and not the restaurant employees. Again, Serena speaks French, she owns an apartment in Paris and she won three French Open titles. She looooves Paris. For Serena to call out a restaurant like this, it means that she absolutely feels insulted by the way they treated her. Serena looked “unrecognizable,” you say? Meaning, they thought she was just a Black tourist and they blocked her? I also doubt that Serena was told to “wait downstairs for a table” – it sounds like she was flatly refused service.
Last thing – personally, I find it gross to watch people gleefully try to put Serena “in her place” or mock her for wanting special treatment, if that is what she wanted. First off, Serena IS special and I’m fine with her being treated like she’s special. I also think people are conflating “wanting to be treated as respectfully as someone would treat a white customer” with “she wanted special treatment!”
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
Photos courtesy of Backgrid and Cover Images.