ensuring access for all to spaces where this diversity is manifested and celebrated – including spaces for dining, where cultures meet at the table.24 General Comment No. 21 of the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, in interpreting the right to participate in cultural life, makes it clear that this includes non-discriminatory access to places where culture is expressed and shared.25 In this context, critical hermeneutics proves indispensable. It would be a mistake to view the problem as a mere “whim” of consumers who wish to eat out, reducing it to a simple contractual dispute. The issue is ontologically deeper: those who are barred from entering a restaurant are symbolically excluded from the banquet of citizenship. Proper understanding requires reading equality and dignity as concrete categories, not as abstractions. As Lenio Streck26 reminds us, there is no room for decisionism or for the old temptation of weighing up issues without criteria: constitutional integrity demands consistency, and this points to the inadmissibility of any arbitrary exclusion from common life. It is precisely this requirement of integrity and consistency that leads us to the next step in this study. If constitutional and international foundations establish the normative horizon of freedom of access, the hermeneutic challenge itself remains to be addressed: how to apply these principles without falling into the traps of decisionism or the arbitrariness of empty deliberation? How can we ensure that the restaurant door is read not as a mere private matter, but as a constitutional boundary? This is the challenge that critical hermeneutics sets out to address. III. CRITICAL HERMENEUTICS OF ACCESS TO THE RESTAURANT Critical hermeneutics of access to the restaurant is not an abstract theoretical exercise, but an urgent practical necessity. Faced with a concrete case – the couple barred from entering, the group relegated to the “back table,” the family that suddenly discovers there are no more seats – the interpreter of the law faces a crossroads: either recognise the constitutional dimension of the problem, or 24 UNESCO. Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, 2001. Available at: https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ ark:/48223/pf0000127162_por . Accessed on: 5 Sept. 2025 25 UN. Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. General Comment No. 21, 2009. Available at: https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/671444 . Accessed on: 5 Sept. 2025. 26 STRECK, Lenio Luiz. O que é isto – decido conforme minha consciência?. 8. ed. Porto Alegre: Livraria do Advogado, 2019. p. 47-50. 592 RUI AURÉLIO DE LACERDA BADARÓ
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