In November 1982, theater critic John Simon wrote a review of a “genuinely peppy, and often genuinely droll” production of the play Hooters for New York magazine. The play concerns two younger men in a sexual entanglement with two older women, the plot moving from “predictable unpredictability to predictable predictability,” though apparently the actors are charming enough. At the end, Simon notes the play’s title is “a synonym, I learn, for knockers — you always learn something in the theater.”
This will be the last time anyone learns this information from a play. In April 1983, six men who came to be known as the “Hooters Six” (though it’s unclear if anyone but themselves bestowed them the title) founded Hooters, the bar and restaurant, in Clearwater, Florida, which found popularity due to the guarantee that it was staffed with conventionally attractive women in revealing outfits. “What else brings a gleam to men’s eyes everywhere besides beer and chicken wings and an occasional winning football season?” the restaurant’s current website recalls of the chain’s origin. “Hence, the name: Hooters. It is supposed they were into owls. Strange group.”
The restaurant, which met immediate success, relied on double entendre, insisting on a look-but-don’t-touch atmosphere that kept things at least nominally family-friendly. Though that was never really true. Almost from the restaurant’s conception, both workers and diners protested that the restaurant encouraged the blurring of boundaries. In 1993, a Minnesota server named Whitney Miller told the Associated Press that she had a regular who refused to pay for his food unless she took off her shirt. Miller, along with other employees, filed harassment lawsuits against Hooters and alleged the chain created a “corporate culture of misogyny.” In 1997, the chain paid out $3.75 million to settle a lawsuit filed by a trio of men in suburban Chicago who claimed they were denied jobs at Hooters because they were men. In 2001, a man was arrested for murdering a Hooters waitress; she allegedly met him while working. And the restaurant has faced lawsuits over hiring biases, racial discrimination, and harassment of a trans customer.