Serena Williams Says a Paris Restaurant Denied Her Family a Table: “Always a First”
Serena Williams wasn’t happy with a recent experience at a 5-star Paris hotel’s restaurant.
On Monday, the tennis champion slammed the Paris Peninsula for an encounter between staff and her family, including her children with husband Alexis Ohanian, six-year-old Alexis Olympia and 11-month-old Adira River.
“Yikes @PeninsulaParis I’ve been denied access to rooftop to eat in a empty restaurant of nicer places 🫠but never with my kids,” she wrote on X, captioning a photo of the hotel’s sign. “Always a first. 🙄 #Olympic2024.”
The restaurant responded in a series of posts shared on X.
“Dear Mrs. Williams, Please accept our deepest apologies for the disappointment you encountered tonight,” the post read. “Unfortunately, our rooftop bar was indeed fully booked and the only unoccupied tables you saw belonged to our gourmet restaurant, L’Oiseau Blanc, which was fully reserved.”
They added, “We have always been honored to welcome you and will always be to welcome you again.”
The Peninsula shared a similar sentiment in a statement provided to Today.
“In response to Mrs. Williams’ tweet, for whom we have the utmost admiration and respect, as we do for all our esteemed guests; we can only reiterate our deepest apologies for her perception of [Monday’s] situation,” they said. “[On] August 5th, our rooftop bar was indeed unfortunately fully booked, and the only unoccupied tables at that time belonged to our gourmet restaurant, L’Oiseau Blanc, which was also fully reserved tonight. She has always and will always be more than welcome with her family to The Peninsula.”
Maxime Mannevy, a staffer at the Peninsula’s rooftop restaurant who was not working at the time of the incident, told Variety that Williams was “unrecognizable” when she arrived.
“When she came there were only two tables available and they had been reserved by clients of the hotel,” Mannevy told the outlet. “My colleague didn’t recognize her and feels terrible, but he told her what he would have told any other client, which is to wait downstairs in the bar for a table to become available. That was absolutely nothing personal.”
Williams is currently in Paris with Ohanian and their kids to attend the 2024 Olympics. As an Olympic gold medalist herself, the retired tennis player joined other legendary athletes to be a torch bearer during the competition’s opening ceremony on July 26.
As an associate editor at HarpersBAZAAR.com, Chelsey keeps a finger on the pulse on all things celeb news. She also writes on social movements, connecting with activists leading the fight on workers’ rights, climate justice, and more. Offline, she’s probably spending too much time on TikTok, rewatching Emma (the 2020 version, of course), or buying yet another corset.
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