At the San Francisco restaurant called Hilda and Jesse, management asked three armed officers to leave last week, saying their presence and their guns were making their workers uncomfortable. The owners posted about the incident on Instagram and now have hundreds of one-star reviews on Yelp. They’ve since apologized for handling the situation poorly.
“Up until this incident, this was a very popular restaurant. They just opened at the beginning of November, they were on Eater’s list of hot restaurants to attend in the month of December. So they had been getting some really good press until a few days ago,” says Dion Lim, reporter and anchor for KGO-TV (ABC 7) in San Francisco.
The management team says they’re not anti-police, and the restaurant is built to be inclusive and open.
“Do I think that they’ll survive this? I do — based off of the food itself, from the reviews that came in prior. But it is going to take a lot of work. And in their apology, the owners said they wanted to build bridges, they wanted to make this a teachable moment. They admitted that they handled this badly, and they were open to having an open conversation. As to what they’re going to do with their policy going forward, that is going to be seen,” says Lim.