3. Working in a Gendered, Feminised and Hierarchical Workplace

In this chapter, I begin with the dining procedure in the restaurant. The reasons for why I put the dining procedure here are, first, to facilitate the explanation of different job positions in the public area of the restaurant. Second, to briefly explain at what stage each category of workers becomes involved in the dining procedure and how customers and workers interact. This information paves the way for a discussion of the conflict between female table servers and male pantry helpers in the subsequent section and also customer-worker relationships in the next chapter. Third, both the job responsibilities and the dining procedure may be somewhat different from other countries, making it necessary to contextualise the procedure for the reader who is not familiar with dining culture in China.