The Rochester Cocktail Revival — a weeklong spirits festival — began Monday with a session about connecting with deaf customers.
Organizers said the session, called “Breaking the Barriers,” is one meaningful way to help anchor hospitality practices in accessibility and inclusion, while helping hospitality workers understand some of the nuances of deaf culture. About 25 people attended.
“Simple signs help, and then just some of it is just understanding the etiquette,” said Chuck Cerankosky, director of Rochester Cocktail Revival.
“It's not verboten to use a phone to text messages back and forth, or to show screens, making sure to acknowledge that, like lighting might be adjusted in certain areas, so that signs can be better seen and things like that,” he added.
There are an estimated 40,000 people in the Rochester region who are deaf or hard-of-hearing, according to the National Institute for the Deaf at RIT. If hospitality workers in the area are going to communicate with guests, overall, Cerankosky said they need to acknowledge that Rochester has a large deaf population.
“Deaf hospitality is not a trend, it's a practice,” Cerankosky said. “If you're going to train your servers to properly open a wine bottle or offer wine service. In my view, we should be training our front-of-house folks to learn how to communicate with deaf guests.”
Joshua Mora, an American Sign Language consultant, said even though Rochester has one of the largest deaf populations per capita in the country, the hospitality industry has yet to reach their potential in terms of serving deaf people.
“Whenever we go into restaurants, our time typically takes a little bit longer because of that communication barrier,” Mora said. “That isn't only a negative impact for us, but that also impacts the workers and the cooks. Right? Everyone is taking longer to do their jobs. So, if we can try to truncate that and make time go faster, that is ideal.”
Applying that could look like incorporating more visual and tactile cues for ordering, such as buzzers that signal when food is ready, Mora said. It can also mean keeping an ASL “cheat sheet” card on hand at restaurants and bars to help bridge the gap.
Mora said there’s an economic advantage to serving an untapped market. Overall, his goal is to raise the standard of service for deaf customers.
“Something that's a little bit more nuanced is: there are some bars that like to have crafty drinks with very nice names and they have specific reasons behind that. Most of the times, they are sound-based or auditory-based, they have rhythm or they rhyme,” Mora said. “But I have no idea why that drink is funny or cute, because it's not translated into ASL.
“If there's a way to incorporate that into the design of whatever it is your hospitality industry is trying to accomplish, then everyone can enjoy the great ideas and creativity of that restaurant or bar,” he added.
The Rochester Cocktail Revival runs through Sunday with more than 75 events around the city.
This story is reported from WXXI’s Inclusion Desk.
