Hydraulic Hospitality and the Waters of New York City Restaurants

Free tap water is given in abundance to patrons in restaurants in the United States, despite the availability of a plurality of commodified waters. Tap water hospitality sets US restaurant culture apart from that of other countries, where water is not automatically, freely, and reliably delivered to patrons. Drawing on repeated conversations with servers and fieldwork carried out in 2018 and 2022 in New York City restaurants and taking the networked and marketplace nature of restaurants as an ethnographic entry point, I foreground servers as simultaneously agents of hydraulic hospitality and actors of water commodification. In relation to tap water in restaurants, servers are laborers, flexible persons, place makers, experts, and agents of water commodification. As end points of the city’s infrastructure, servers’ actions enhance the value of tap water, temporarily suspend fears about water safety, and create alliances between patrons and the various waters available in restaurants. By bringing the ethnographic gaze to bear on the water-related actions of servers and on hydraulic hospitality, anthropologists can reconfigure hospitality as a material, networked, and distributed ethnographic object rather than just an exchange between persons and can get a grounded understanding of the nature, progression, and limits of bottled water commodification in the United States.