Onetime San Mateo chef and restaurant owner, J. Kenji López-Alt, expressed regret in a recent New Yorker article over a past tweet about not wanting to serve people wearing MAGA hats.
While López-Alt no longer co-owns San Mateo restaurant, Wursthall, for unassociated reasons, he remarked in the interview that, with 20/20 hindsight, he now feels that he didn’t “really have the authority to say something like that” because he had two fellow partners and it put his employees and others at risk.
“I completely discounted the feelings of every employee there, every staff member, every other customer there,” he told the New Yorker, noting that some people threatened actions against their restaurant employees and exhibited disturbing behavior outside their place of business.
López-Alt said that the real-world backlash to a two-hundred-and-fifty-character message he wrote was “probably inspired by something dumb Trump had said that day.” He added that his tweet “affected real-world people, people I cared about and people who made their livelihood through our business—people whose safety I put in jeopardy.”
MAGA hat photo via Pexels
