A New York City Restaurant Was Allegedly Fined For Specifically Hiring An Indian Server

One of the jobs of the New York City Commission on Human Rights is to make sure restaurants and other businesses are not hiring based on discriminatory practices. The government organization generally deals with cases of restaurants looking to hire waitresses or excluding certain races or ethnicities. However, according to the New York Post, one New York City Indian restaurant was fined $5,000 for posting an ad on Craigslist looking to hire Indian servers.

The ad that Shalom Bombay allegedly placed online in October 2013 was looking for "experienced Indian waiter or waitress." This was seen as a red flag to the Human Rights Commission and the restaurant was slapped with the fine, since ads cannot discriminate "based on place of origin."The restaurant owners were originally fined $7,500, but a judge "took pity" on the restaurant owners — who, according to the New York Post, were probably just looking to hire someone familiar with the restaurant's cuisine — and the fine was dropped to $5,000.

The restaurant closed last year.

"The commission's new leadership, as of February 2015, is currently assessing its investigatory strategy to implement more comprehensive and strategic investigations to proactively root out systemic discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations and expand the commission's testing programs in these areas," a spokesperson for the Human Rights Commission said in a statement in the wake of the controversial case.