Gilroy
– An international sports bar chain that hires busty babes to
serve hot wings and beer could soon land in Gilroy.
Hooters, which proclaims itself
”
delightfully tacky, yet unrefined,
”
plans to open a string of restaurants in the Bay Area.
Gilroy – An international sports bar chain that hires busty babes to serve hot wings and beer could soon land in Gilroy.
Hooters, which proclaims itself “delightfully tacky, yet unrefined,” plans to open a string of restaurants in the Bay Area. Gilroy, San Jose and Brentwood top the list of potential cities, and the company plans to open restaurants as soon as it finds appropriate locations, according to Doug Kappy, vice president of the regional franchise.
“I like Gilroy because I love the fact that you’ve got the outlying towns looking for a good place to eat and the traffic generated by the shopping,” Kappy said. “Ideally, we’d rather be somewhere by the outlets.”
Hooters already has restaurants in San Francisco and in Dublin, and is preparing to open a store in Fremont. The store has 460 locations worldwide and is best know for its servers – young women clad in tight orange shorts and white tee shirts bearing an owl, whose eyes form the “Os” in Hooters.
Tacky? Sure. But popular too, even among families.
Kappy said families make up 30 percent of the Dublin restaurant’s weekend business. The company often encounters community resistance, he added, but complaints tend to vanish once the restaurant opens.
“We are a neighborhood restaurant and we’re family friendly,” he said. “The waitresses uniforms are not as skimpy as people think. There are girls walking down high-school hallways that have less on than our girls do.”
He said the company has not yet found a location in Gilroy. The last remaining restaurant space in the city’s’ Pacheco Pass shopping centers was filled in the last year, but plans are moving forward for new shopping centers. Two projects are planned for Pacheco Pass and a third is expected to rise to the north, by the Gilroy Premium Outlets.
Kappy said the restaurant would hire 130 people, with about 75 of those waitress positions.
“I see people walking around dressed much more provocatively than some of the young ladies at Hooters,” said Mayor Al Pinheiro, who dined with his wife in a Hooters in Florida. “But that’s beside the point. If Hooters thinks it can make it in Gilroy and that’s the place they want to be, then they can try that. I’m not boycotting it and I’m not screaming ‘Bring us a Hooters!'”
