Risqué Business: Breastaurants in American Culture

Risqué Business serves up the breastaurant industry, where food service, sex appeal, identity, and gender politics mix.

Risqué Business explores the rise and ongoing cultural reckoning of ＂breastaurants＂ sports bar-style restaurants like Hooters and Twin Peaks, which have long relied on the sexualized presentation of female servers to attract a mostly straight, male clientele. Ty Matejowsky, professor of anthropology at the University of Central Florida, is uniquely positioned in America’s foundational, breastaurant-saturated landscape. From this vantage, he offers a well-balanced account that draws on pop culture, media analysis, and contemporary gender politics. He delivers a smart, layered analysis of how breastaurants commodify youth and femininity, uphold retrograde masculinity, and serve as symbolic battlegrounds in today’s highly charged political environments including America’s deeply polarized Red State/Blue State divide.

With case studies, cultural critique, and a critical lens on labor and sexuality, Matejowsky reveals how these restaurants are more than just risqué marketing gimmicks. They reflect deeper anxieties about gender, identity, and the uneasy fusion of sex and service in American consumer culture. Risqué Business is a high-spirited study of an industry that thrives at the intersection of appetite and identity.

Ty Matejowsky is professor of anthropology at the University of Central Florida. He is the author of Smothered and Covered: Waffle House and the Southern Imaginary and Fast Food Globalization in the Provincial Philippines.