Why did an ‘empty’ Paris restaurant turn away Serena Williams

  

Most of us don’t have 23 Grand Slam titles to our names, but we finally do have something in common with Serena Williams. The tennis legend this week took to social media platform X to complain about being turned away from a restaurant that she described as “empty,” an experience that many of us mere-mortal diners have encountered.

“Yikes,” she wrote, tagging the Peninsula, a hotel in Paris, where Williams and her family had come for the Olympics. “I’ve been denied access to rooftop to eat in a empty restaurant of nicer places but never with my kids. Always a first.”

The establishment replied with a note of regret. “Please accept our deepest apologies for the disappointment you encountered tonight,” it wrote in response to her post. “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.”