The owner of an Upper East Side restaurant who read in The Post that a downtown eatery was fined $5,000 fine just for placing an ad for “waitresses” is issuing a call to arms against the gender-based penalties.
“This is an outrage, and more restaurants need to share their stories so this nonsense is stopped,” Giuseppe Bruno wrote to The Post.
“Someone needs to help these restaurants.”
His own included. Bruno’s Italian eatery, Sistina, was slammed with its own $5,000 fine after a staffer placed an ad on Craigslist for a “hostess.”
In 2011, the Windsor, a Greenwich Village sports bar, was fined after a sting by the city Commission on Human Rights caught it trying to hire “waitresses” through Craigslist.
Gender-specific ads violate city civil-rights law.
Unlike the Windsor’s owners, Bruno says he’s going to fight what he describes as a “scam.”
“They want us to settle for $5,000,” Bruno told The Post on Thursday. “I’m not going to settle. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
Sistina, on Second Avenue at East 81st Street, employs a staff of 21 that includes three women.
One of them, Lara Kineavy, 24, said she posted the “hostess” ad on July 28 without giving a second thought to gender.
“I just wrote it as I would write any other ad,” she recalled.
“I just typed, ‘Hostess/coat check needed. Reliable, personable, organized.’ Really no gender specified.”
Kineavy, who doubles as a hostess and Bruno’s assistant, said Sistina’s e-mail account then received two résumés — one from a man and one from a woman. Both turned out to be “testers” from the commission.
Kineavy says Sistina did not respond to either e-mail. But in its complaint against the restaurant, the commission claimed only one e-mail — the one containing the woman’s résumé — was opened.
E-mails aside, Bruno proposed a much simpler solution.
“We are human. It’s possible we made a mistake, but we got no warning,” he said.
State Sen. José Peralta (D-Queens) slammed the agency for targeting “unintentionally gendered language.”
“Of the 53 discrimination settlements reported by the commission in 2014, 18 — or more than a third of all settlements — are for this sort of case,” Peralta said.
A commission spokeswoman, Betsey Herzog, said education is part of its mission but warnings are not.
The commission gives “thousands of presentations a year” to educate the public about the laws, but isn’t required to issue warnings before issuing fines, she said.