Where do you put your bags at a restaurant?
In December, when I visited North Carolina over the holidays. I noticed a bag hook at a cafe in the suburbs:
It was a big surprise to me because it was the first time I’d noticed a bag hook in the U.S., or any bag solution for that matter.
It stood out sharply after living in Taiwan for over a year at that point, where bag solutions are common at cafes and restaurants across all price points.
The most common in Taiwan (and it seems, Japan, too) is a basket placed under or beside your chair or table. It can be self-serve, or placed by default. The basket can come in all materials and designs, from a IKEA felt storage box to a plastic crate.
Other times, there are hooks under tables, and at Ding Tai Feng, they also offer a cover for the back of your seat to protect your coat and bag, if it’s not in the basket.
In Mexico, sometimes restaurants will bring a short coat stand for bags and coats.
In the U.S., bag stools (exactly that, a little stool for your bag) can be seen at higher-end restaurants.
In the absence of institutionalized solutions, people come up with all sorts of ways to place their bags - on their laps, on the floor, on the table, bag of the chair, and so on:
A design problem
Where to put one’s bag appears to be an under looked design problem (or at the very least, a design area or consideration), with various and varying intents for solutions across individual restaurants and cultures. In the U.S., it seems particularly lacking.
Many other settings are designed with stuff and storage in mind. Travel is one: on trains, busses, and airplanes have designated racks or overhead compartments or under-seat vacancies to put one’s stuff. In Taiwan, self-serve lockers are also common in train, bus, and metro stations, and airports. Museums have lockers, bathrooms have hooks, elementary schools have cubbies, grocery stores have carts (for grocery products — though I have used grocery carts to carry my heavy bag even when I don’t intend to buy much).
But aren’t we also traveling about our days, between transportation and workplace and restaurant, between classes and errands and coffee shops, and lugging around our stuff? We’re traveling with our everyday luggage: school bags, messenger bags, shopping bags, gift bags, purses, diaper bags. The priorities for individuals may be: safety, cleanliness, ease of access, etiquette/appropriateness. For private and public spaces, the priority may be to provide a pleasant customer experience and welcoming environment.
Why is that for the travels & luggage of our everyday lives, there’s less attention paid?
Why restaurants & bars don’t have bag hooks
In It’s Ridiculous That More Restaurants Don’t Have Purse Hooks, Kat Thompson tries to understand why more places in the U.S. don’t have bag hooks.
“I used to joke that restaurants and bars without purse hooks hate women, but it's a problem for people with stuff everywhere! To me, it shows a real lack of thought and care from the establishment,” expressed Alina Nguyen, a Los Angeles-based copywriter with strong opinions regarding utilitarian objects. Though Nguyen doesn’t necessarily have an answer in mind to the purse hook problem, she does think that interior designers have a responsibility to think up an option that is “inconspicuous, out-of-the-way, and helpful for bag people everywhere.”
[…]
Greg Blier, design director and founder of Los Angeles-based design firm, STUDIO UNLTD, echoes this sentiment. “We would get crucified if we didn’t use purse hooks in our design. Either no female was related to the project on [the] client or design side or it was really an oversight,” he relayed. “It’s inexcusable any more to be honest.”
Apart from perhaps not consulting women, the reasons can be quite straightforward and pragmatic: some places, like fast casual, are not designed to be too comfortable. “Durability and aesthetics” of the restaurant design matters more.
Are bag solutions just for women with expensive purses?
Other forums and articles online also wondering the same (in the North American internet) seem to revolve around gender and class, in the form of talking about etiquette and female purses – expensive ones at that.
In a 2008 article from Canada’s Maclean’s, Anna Kingston writes:
Now that women have the Swiffer, it's time to address the next obstacle to female emancipation — the systemic discrimination that forces them to hang thousand-dollar-plus bags inelegantly from a chair back or, worse, has them languishing on the floor vulnerable to thievery, filth, scuffing, and nasty microbes.
Her rhetorical question also suggests this is an offensive problem especially if you have a luxury bag.
Would you put $8,000 on the floor?
A Canadian “business etiquette, international protocol, and image management“ consulting firm wrote a blog post called Handbag Etiquette When Dining Out. Here, the focus is on etiquette and class, and subtly suggests that it’s for women with beautiful and expensive purses:
If, however, your chair has a rounded back, you may have to suck it up and place your purse – no matter how beautiful or expensive it may be – on the floor next to your chair.
Given all this money-ed and gendered expressions, I found it comical to read this:
The rule-of-thumb is that it no matter what the occasion, it is a big no-no to put your handbag on the dining table. It is considered rude. When you think about it, our handbags have been placed on more public washroom and restaurant floors than we can count, so for hygiene reasons alone, common sense should dictate how inappropriate it would be to set your handbag on a dining table!
All this restaurant etiquette talk seems folly and pretentious when you don’t see putting your ~expensive~ purse on the public bathroom floor as the bigger problem.
This kind of limited framing around fancy bag etiquette also invites a limited, snarky pushback from Leah Garchik of the SF Chronicle regarding another bag solution: portal bag hooks:
I suppose if I carried one of those couple-a-thousand-buck purses, especially if it were yellow ostrich, I would worry about it getting a speck of dirt on it, might be tempted to hook it on the table. But I just think it looks too careful. Chic insouciance, that's the goal, even if muddled sloppiness is the effect.
This sounds faux-edgy — I’m not pretentious and I don’t carry a fancy designer purse. It dismisses the subject of bag storage solutions as frivolous and snobby. However, why should it be limited to fancy purses? It misses, perhaps, the larger question: what kind of experience, behaviors, and people are you designing for?
Not just for women…but everyone
NamNam, a Vietnamese restaurant in Singapore, has an entire blog post dedicated to why they intentionally designed bag hooks in their restaurants. While it references how women are disproportionally frustrated by the lack of bag solutions, it doesn’t over-gender the design choice:
We want to make sure that you are comfortable, and your belongings are safe during an outing to our restaurants[…] For we have learned that women certainly know how frustrating it is to not have a place to hold their purse or handbag in restaurants and bar top.
This same attention to detail pertains to shopping bags and backpacks too. Having to hold your purse, bag, or any other item on your lap is not the most comfortable way to enjoy your meal in NamNam, and it can ruin your dining experience.
The four reasons they’ve had bag hooks “since day 1 in NamNam:“
Comfort
Hidden
Stress-free experience during peak hours
Safety
And that benefits everyone! As Thompson concludes:
And though Nguyen jokes that restaurants that lack purse hooks hate women, it’s important to acknowledge that the purse hooks benefit everyone; coats and scarves and hats and purses are genderless -- and need to be stowed somewhere.
This is, by no means, a call for every eating establishment to install bag hooks or offer a dedicated place to put one’s bags. But it is a design area worth thinking about intentionally to make certain spaces and experiences more comfortable for women and everyone.
In Part 2, you will read about a quirky bag hook and a special chair and stool from Japan that offer bag storage solutions.
Hello from Boston! I've been here for under a week and have noticed two restaurants/cafes with bag hooks under the table.