Cafe 8 1/2 co-owner Robert Warner on Wednesday took down a sign on the Italian restaurant’s front door telling people who voted for President-elect Donald Trump he does not want them there, but offered no regrets or apologies for putting it up in the first place.
“I just ended it because I felt like ending it, and that’s my prerogative,” Warner said.
The sign at the Alakea Street eatery said, “If you voted for Trump, you can not eat here! No Nazis.”
Warner said there was no point in keeping the hand-scribbled note up. “It’s not necessary anymore,” he said. “It ran its course … no need for more aggravation for me or them and all that. No problem. No big deal to me.”
IT WAS not a financial decision because “that’s not the way I do things,” he said. Removal of the sign was prompted by other priorities, he said. “If there’s a little open space for us being human together, then that’s great.”
The sign had generated a swarm of mostly negative reviews and comments on the restaurant’s Yelp and Facebook pages after a foxnews.com story on it Tuesday morning. Some called the owners bigots or haters.
MANY OF the recent Yelp comments came from the mainland. Several commentators clearly hadn’t eaten there. One described eating bad pizza although Cafe
8 1/2 doesn’t serve pizza. Several described getting poor service from multiple servers, but the establishment is a two-person operation.
The restaurant’s Yelp page got so busy that Yelp web monitors issued an “Active Cleanup Alert” of the possible removal of “both positive and negative posts that appear to be motivated more by the news coverage itself than the reviewer’s personal consumer experience with the business.”
Warner, who does not vote, said the sign wasn’t meant to turn away people on the basis of whom they supported for president, but only as a personal expression of his view on the matter and as a warning that Trump supporters might find the environment of the restaurant unappealing.
The publicity also triggered a slew of negative telephone calls, most with mainland area codes, Warner said.
