Move over, Red Hen. The most controversial restaurant in America may be Fat Joe’s Bar and Grill, an unassuming establishment in the heart of Wisconsin.
Over the weekend, waitress Brittany Spencer was busy serving tables at the restaurant, known for serving cheesecake and playing Packers games on the television. Then a couple at a table Spencer was serving expressed “transphobic remarks” about a transgender woman sitting at the bar.
“They were asking me if I thought it was disgusting and wrong and why we would let someone like that into the establishment,” Spencer told WTMJ. “To which I answered, ‘No, I do not agree with that,’ and walked away.”
Spencer says she asked her manager to give someone else the table, and the manager “essentially told me to suck it up or go home.” So she did the latter.
“We don’t discriminate against anyone,” explained Tad Wallender, one of the owners of Fat Joe’s. “If you want to walk in our front door and you want to have our food or drinks, watch TV, watch live music we provide, we’re going to serve you as best we can and make you happy to your standards.”
Though it was completely inappropriate for the couple to question a transgender person’s right to eat at a restaurant, Spencer was hired to serve customers. They weren’t personally harassing her, or even the person they were rudely criticizing, so why should she refuse to serve them, even if she disagreed with their views? Everyone has an opinion, and people don’t change their minds after getting shunned.
That’s not how Spencer saw it, though. After walking out on her job, she posted about the incident on Facebook, writing, “I got sent home from work early because I refused to serve a table who were making transphobic remarks about guests at one of my other tables. Oh well, at least I stand by my morals and beliefs.”
The next day, she reported that she had been fired. “I WAS FIRED FROM MY JOB BECAUSE I REFUSED TO WAIT ON A TABLE WHO WERE MAKING TRANSPHOBIC REMARKS ABOUT GUESTS AT ANOTHER TABLE,” she wrote. “But I’ll always choose my morals over money.”
Spencer encouraged supporters to leave reviews on Fat Joe’s Facebook and Google reviews pages, later noting that the Facebook page had been temporarily removed. The restaurant has received mostly supportive, 5-star reviews on Google since then, though others left one-star comments with notes about the incident. Most of the commenters, it’s not a stretch to say, have probably never been to Fat Joe’s.
Onlookers reacted similarly to last year’s incident at the Red Hen, where the Virginia restaurant’s owner asked former White House press secretary Sarah Sanders to leave the establishment because of her work in the Trump administration. People quickly chose a side, though it appears that those who support kicking people out of restaurants won: The Red Hen owner ending up saying the viral story was “better than good” for business.
Last month, an incident similar to Spencer’s occurred in Nebraska, where a transgender barista was fired after telling a conservative customer to leave a coffee shop. “While we’re proudly liberal personally, and believe in human rights and diversity to the fullest degree,” the coffee shop announced in a statement, “let it be known that we would *never* condone treating a customer this way.”
On her end, Spencer has experienced a wave of both backlash and encouragement, and she says she plans to file a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. If she’s the one who refused to serve customers, though, she probably isn’t going to succeed with any EEOC complaint.
It’s easy to block people on social media. In real life, not so much. On Wednesday, Spencer reacted to her story making national news by writing, “Now I’m waiting for The Ellen Show to hit me up. Hi, Ellen, please notice me. I want to spread love and acceptance on your show.”
But Ellen Degeneres, if you remember from last week, came under fire for being cordial toward someone she disagreed with — former President George W. Bush — not for refusing to serve or befriend someone she disagreed with.
If you engage with society, it’s difficult to avoid people with different beliefs — even beliefs that they express in uncharitable ways, as the couple at Fat Joe’s apparently did, assuming that Spencer is accurately recounting the incident.
The impressive thing is not standing by your “morals and beliefs” by refusing to serve a customer, but in engaging people with different views — as she claims to have done originally by simply stating that she disagreed. That initial reaction took some courage and even some civility. It might have even made someone think again about their attitude toward others.
It’s easy and cheap to shout at people on Facebook. It’s harder to talk to them in real life. That usually requires patience, civility, and respect — three things that, while you sit behind a screen, are easy to forget.
