This past weekend a group of storytelling friends flew from different parts of the country to join me at Scranton Pennsylvania to participate in an 80 Minutes Around The World Immigration Storytelling show (a show that features the stories of immigrants, descendants of immigrants, and allies from different parts of the world) to share our immigration-related stories in order to educate and inform the audience of the realities of the immigration experience.
After having an amazing show on Thursday night and two fabulous shows on Friday, we were filming interviews on Saturday morning, prior to our last show Saturday night. We had planned to have lunch after the interviews, and our friend had made a 1:30 PM lunch reservation at a local restaurant.
Since the interviews were taking longer than planned, a fellow storyteller and I were told to head to the restaurant and that the others would be joining us later.
I am a Latino man from Guatemala, my friend is a black man from Eritrea. Once we arrived at the bar/restaurant, the hostess immediately asked if we had a reservation. No greeting, no welcoming gesture at all.
We didn’t know if there was a reservation but we told her there would be others joining us.
She said we would have to wait a long time if we didn’t have a reservation (we could see that there were plenty of empty tables); then, she simply walked away.
A few minutes later she came back, and we told her that there might be a reservation under our friend’s name. Again, the hostess walked away.
When she came back, we asked her if she had found the reservation under our friend’s name. She responded that yes, there was a reservation but that the person that made the reservation needed to be present in order for us to be seated.
She walked away again and we were left standing by the door.
I told my friend to talk to the hostess because I was getting too upset. My friend tried to talk to her, but she just told us to wait or call the person who had made the reservation to confirm we were with her group.
My friend and I walk out to wait outside for the rest of our group.
A couple of minutes later, two more members of our group joined us outside after we explained the situation to them.
At this point, I didn’t want to eat at that place any more.
We texted our friend to let her know we didn’t feel welcome and were heading to another place.
We walked to Railway Restaurant and were welcomed and promptly served (the food was amazing).
Our friends joined us soon after. We had a delicious lunch and then walked back to the previous place to talk to the manager about what had taken place.
Once there, the manager claimed that it was their policy not to seat anyone at a table unless the person that made the reservation was present.
I asked him how come we had not been instructed to sit at the bar and wait there. In fact, I had to ask him more than once before he acknowledged that the host could have done that.
But then he added that we were never told that we couldn’t go inside.
I tried to explain him that I couldn’t go inside when I was not made to feel welcome in the first place.
When we pointed out how bad it looked, that they had made a Latino man and a black man feel unwelcome, the manager got upset and defensive.
He even claimed that they had a 50-person reservation at the same time that we had arrived, and that’s why they couldn’t take time to properly welcome us. When I pointed out that they didn’t have a 50-person party there, he claimed that they had canceled on them (eye roll).
This could have been a moment for them to learn what they were doing wrong and instead they got overly defensive.
They lost our business but made us more resolved in our intent to continue sharing our immigration stories since it is obvious that intolerance and bigotry are still rampant in our country.
Thank you for reading, and if you feel like supporting our show, take a minute to visit our web site 80 Minutes Around the World Immigration Storytelling Show