鬼百合
One day we will wake to his obituary :-)
N.J. restaurant hammered for ‘Proud Boys’ burger. It was an ‘ignorant’ mistake, owner says.
Aqua Blu Kitchen & Cocktails in Toms River has done a themed burger night every week for the past eight years. They've never had a backlash until now, the owner said.
www.nj.com
The phone at Aqua Blu Kitchen & Cocktails has been ringing off the hook for days.
Its email inbox has been flooded with hundreds of passionate messages.
Who would believe that New Jersey has a volcano?
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The restaurant has been a popular fixture of the Toms River scene for the past 13 years. But attention like this?
Never.
“It’s a nightmare,” owner Cathy Varriale said.
The reason: the Proud Boys Burger, a short-lived special that Varriale said she deeply regrets.
“We truly do apologize,” she told NJ Advance Media in an occasionally emotional phone interview. “It was a bad decision. It was stupidity. It was ignorance. But we do not support hatred or Nazism or any of that.”
The Proud Boys Burger was put on Aqua Blu’s menu on Thursday. A description of the burger — made of “white American cheese, onion ring layers of truth, resilience pickles, freedom fries, cancel culture coleslaw, and liberty sauce” — was posted by a customer to social media, where it quickly gained traction and fueled outrage.
The Proud Boys are a far-right extremist organization designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
In 2023, four of the group’s leaders were convicted of seditious conspiracy for their part in inciting the Jan. 6 Capitol riots. One, Enrique Tarrio, was sentenced to 22 years in prison, the harshest punishment handed down in relation to the attack.
Tarrio and his co-conspirators, along with more than 1,500 other rioters, have since been granted clemency by President Donald Trump this past week.
Aqua Blu posted an apology to Facebook, saying it would “reflect and learn from this experience,” and closed their comments. But that hasn’t stopped the backlash.
People have called the Aqua Blu team Nazi-lovers, threatened to hold a rally outside the building, and accused her of backpedaling, according to Varriale.
“I know this may sound ridiculous, but I didn’t know what a Proud Boy was,” she said. “I thought it was, you know, a proud boy.”
The burger was an idea hatched by one of her chefs, according to Varriale.
Every Thursday for the past eight years, Aqua Blu has done a themed burger night. Past specials have been named after sports teams or the restaurant’s regulars. Occasionally the burgers are political — there’s been both a Sleepy Joe and a Trump Burger — but they’ve always been meant as a lighthearted joke, Varriale said.
This week, the kitchen was asked to create two burgers based on a server’s family.
The first burger, a “flavorful tribute to a life well lived,” according to the menu, was meant to memorialize the woman’s father, who’d just died. The second was meant to honor her husband, who’d just returned from deployment.
The resulting burger was touted in a since-deleted post on the restaurant’s Facebook page as “layered with boldness and liberty.” Varriale said that server’s husband has no links to the Proud Boys.
She had been out of the restaurant for most of the day, attending a funeral that morning and a town hall meeting in the afternoon. She didn’t realize anything was wrong until her phone began buzzing, she said.
Confused by the fury she was seeing online, Varriale said she asked her chef whether the name of the burger symbolized something disrespectful. Her staff took down the posts and reprinted the menu, but it was already too late.
“Now that I know what it is, I completely understand,” she said, getting choked up. “But how do you fix it? I don’t know how to fix it.”
While she was speaking to NJ Advance Media on Saturday, Varriale had to pause to field several other phone calls. During one, she could be heard apologizing to the person on the other end of the line, a Marine Corps veteran who told her that the burger was “disgusting.”