From Eater:
A Revamped D.C. Hotel Opens With a Female Empowerment Theme — and a Male Chef
Hotel Zena says the pandemic hindered its plans, but given a professed commitment to gender equity, it missed an opportunity to place a woman in a public-facing leadership position
The headline already blows my mind.
This is a hotel that centers around female empowerment and they hire a man, and that’s terrible. How dare they hire a man into a high profile role.
I’m not kidding:
Figleaf, the New American bar and restaurant that doubles as the gallery for all that empowering art, lists David Sears as executive chef.
Given its professed commitment to gender equity, Hotel Zena missed an opportunity to place a woman in a public-facing leadership position.
Why would they pick a man to run their restaurant and bar?
For his part, Sears is an accomplished chef. His LinkedIn page includes experience as an executive chef with Marcus Samuelsson Group and a culinary trainer with global brand Sushi Samba. He won Food Channel’s Chef Wanted with Anne Burrell, and cooked at luxe properties like Terranea Resorts and Hotel in Rancho Palos Verde, California, and the Ritz-Carlton Palm Beach. He also helped Mandarin Oriental D.C.’s Cafe MoZU in the early 2000s.
Sure, he’s apparently eminently qualified, but he has a penis and not a female penis, so this is an utter disaster for female empowerment.
All of this leads me to this line of thought.
Who creates a hotel with a female empowerment theme? Who are its investors? What was the business case made for this?
In a quote attached to the release, the CEO of publicly traded Pebblebrook Hotel Trust says the hotel is a “safe gathering space that celebrates diversity, respects different points of view, and opens the floor to topics worthy of meaningful conversation. We know we’re pushing boundaries and might even make some people uncomfortable — and we’re okay with that.”
A hotel that actively makes all but the most ideologically conforming guests uncomfortable seems like a terrible business case.
Are there really enough radical feminist conventions in DC to fill up that hotel at a rate of $200 per night for the cheapest room?
Cocktails ($16) come in names like “Empowermint” and “Earhart,” which comes with Green Hat Gin, maraschino liqueur, crème de violette, lemon. LGBTQ-owned Republic Restoratives’ Civic Vodka also makes its way into several drinks.
How many girls’ nights are going to be had at a bar that serves $16 cocktails because the booze is distilled by a couple of radical Left-wing lesbians.
For instance, their Rye Whiskey is called “Rodham Rye” after the maiden name of Hillary Clinton. Now ask yourself, knowing that fact, would you pour that into your mouth?
Figleaf promises to serve small plates that embrace a “modern wellness movement” along with cocktails and mocktails. Sears’s menu includes condiments and spices from a variety of cuisines. A fried chicken sandwich gets a kick from Ethiopian spice berbere and the chef’s turmeric pickles. Kale Caesar gets punched up with a Peruvian aji amarillo anchovy vinaigrette.
Food that ’embrace[s] a “modern wellness movement,”’
You know what that means? It sucks. A Kale Ceaser Salad? Shit…
But here is the real kicker:
Andrea Sheehan, the founder of Seattle- and London-based Dawson Design Associates (DDA), commissioned a massive pointillist portrait of late Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg that’s made out of 20,000 hand-painted tampons (the release notes organic tampon company CORA donated them all).
Who in God’s name would want to sit under than and eat a $12 Kale salad while drinking a $16 cocktail?
Also, does anybody honestly believe that Ruth Bader Ginsburg herself would be honored by her likeness formed from tampons?
Also, what the fuck is up with feminists and tampons? Wearing them as earings, threatening to throw them at legislators, dressing up as them for feminist Halloween, their focus on feminine hygiene products in politics has to be some sort of obsessive mental disorder.
And lastly, and perhaps the most important part of this: the release notes organic tampon company CORA donated them all.
If a company were willing to donate 20,000 in tampons in DC, why not do something useful with them like donate them to a women’s shelter or homeless shelter or to the DC public school system for poor students?
Nope, they are going to donate 20,000 tampons for use in a shrine to the late RBG because that is what the radical Left is all about, doing something that looks meaningful and avante grade but functionally useless in helping anybody. Virtue signaling over results.
You don’t need me to tell you this but this hotel is a walking corpse.
It is a failed business model.
It is a place that caters only to the most woke and radical Leftist feminists while making everyone else uncomfortable, and charges rediculous prices (even for DC) for food and drinks that as unpalatable for being agressively political as they are unpalatable for being fusion health food.
I wonder what the share value of Pebblebrook Hotel Trust is going to do now that investors know they are willing to shovel money into the “go woke, go broke” business model.
Perhaps CORA didn’t donate tampons to a women’s shelter because that’s something a Christian would do.
Short selling opportunity!
And when it goes kaput, they will very quickly & predictably blame the “evil patriarchy” & “toxic masculinity.” Never you mind that it was the poor execution of an innane idea that caused the hotel to fail. SMH
Have you noticed that the default in commercials is changing ever farther over to women and especially so-called “women of color”?
Commercials and TV in general have only been depicting men as idiots or worthless, always being corrected by their wives or daughters. Pretty soon kids will think it’s a historical oddity if they hear a man actually accomplished anything.
Situational “comedies” have been trending this way for decades now … often in combination with the “kid knows everything” theme.
All commercials produce brain damage with how stupid and PC they’ve become since 2000, so I avoid them like dirty underwear with gonorrhea.
Just read this at a casino coffee bar. Indigenous People, Female Owned company. I laughed. She asked what was so funny. I told her I didn’t give a shit if she peed standing up or sitting down, was her coffee any good? I only got away with it because I look like native and I am female.
Sears’s menu includes condiments and spices from a variety of cuisines.
Sooo…. Cultural appropriation, then?
I thought that was a bad thing. But like everything else, it’s OK when done for a Leftist pet “cause” like “female empowerment”?
According to a quick lookup on Google Maps, this hotel is located about a three minute walk from the White House… This is some of the most commercial expensive real estate in the United States, outside of Manhattan.
This place is either being subsidized to the rafters from other properties owned by the conglomerate that runs it and is being used as a public relations/marketing tool (and justified as such to the bean counters) and/or its going to be a garden-variety Sheraton by this time next year.
(And that chef ought to be sure to buy several copies of this newspaper. His lawyer(s) will be able to get him a nice fat civil settlement if he ever gets sacked and replaced by a female chef.)
Yep. It will be a trendy spot for people like AOC and Nancy to be publicly seen for a month or so. But, that won’t be enough to pay the bills, and as you say, common or garden Sheraton before the year is out.
“Wellness”. Another puke enducing word like “empowering”. We are “empowering” women because the man is keeping us down. What utter bullshit.
A tampon portrait of RBG?
Once again, a leftist demonstrates they think shocking is the same things as clever.
They also think, for some reason, that tampons are “shocking.” They’re not. They’re rather boring, mundane, everyday objects. Half of the species menstruates, the other half (after the age of, say, four or so) is quite aware of this…
Fringe loonies on the left never seem to understand this and have a weird habit of treating menstrual products as if they were religious artifacts. Menses isn’t a magical elixir, ladies, it’s just some dead blood cells. Get over yourselves.
The menstruation fascination is a holdover from the old Terf days of radical feminism.
I’m surprised that this hasn’t been memory holed already.
Excellent point Ish.
However, your average leftists has a mental age of a toddler. If it is associated with a “private part” it is “shocking.” That’s the reason why pink pussy hats were all the rage in 2017. Not because a pink hat with cat ears on it was in any way controversial, but because the leftists believed the conservatives would be shocked to see something called a pink pussy hat. (ZOMG!)
Same thing with showing up at a protest dressed like a vulva, or walking out of a mob at a riot naked to show your bits to the cops. The children on the left think it is a win. Anyone with a mental age above five recognizes it as a demonstration of immaturity.
The quality of that portrait is fitting for the quality of RBG’s decisions. Rather apt in fact. And no that’s not a compliment.