Vancouver restaurant faces backlash after #BlackOutTuesday hypocrisy

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) — As uprisings in support of Black Lives Matter and against police brutality continue throughout North America, many companies are expressing solidarity online.

Belgard Kitchen in Railtown put up a black square on Instagram for #BlackOutTuesday in support of ongoing protests.

But that didn’t sit well with former staff who claim the work environment was tense and toxic, and who report experiencing a number of racist incidents.

Summer Alexander says she made some great friends when she worked as a server at Belgard Kitchen, but claims management caused her and others anguish.

“It took us years to let go of the pain it caused us, just ripped my heart from my chest. Working at Belgard was so good –until it was not,” she tells NEWS 1130.

 

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*UPDATE* On Tuesday, we joined the #blackouttuesday movement. We were promptly called out by former employees & our community for being disingenuous. You were all right. In 2016 we were afforded an opportunity by a group of employees to address blind spots in our operation. We didn’t do the work at the time. It is clear that we have harmed people, & that not only have we never addressed it, we silenced the very people who were trying to give us feedback in the first place. We have been wilfully ignorant. We recognize how wrong this was & for that, we sincerely apologize. The best apology is changed behaviour. We are committed to listening, learning, growing & changing, starting at the top of our organization. Actions & Commitments: – We have contacted a D&I consultant. We hope our first session will be soon, but recognize they are busier than ever & owe us nothing. This person is Black, which we believe is important (living in an echo chamber is what has gotten us here). Should they not wish to work with us, we will continue our pursuit to find a consultant. – We have communicated with our staff through meetings yesterday and today. We’ve shared our commitments & apologized to our teams for the position we’ve put current & former staff in. We provided space to listen, answer questions, & offered one on one time. – These will be ongoing dialogues. This is a lifelong commitment. Our learnings will be implemented into our training programs & how we conduct ourselves moving forward. – We have identified Hogan’s Alley Society as a charity we’d like to support, making an impact as close to home as possible. We’ve made our first donation. – To those who we have caused direct harm, we will be reaching out. If you do not feel compelled to speak with us, we understand. This statement likely has mistakes. We are committed to being uncomfortable, owning our mistakes, & keep going. We know that for some people, this will not be enough. We understand that. We also know being silent is not good enough, & that we owe it to our community to work hard to right our wrongs, even if it’s messy along the way. Thank you

A post shared by Belgard Kitchen (@belgardkitchen) on Jun 3, 2020 at 10:37am PDT

Alexander, who is Black, commented on Belgard’s #BlackOut Instagram post last week.

“They deleted only my comments on the day where Black voices are to be amplified,” she says.

This started a firestorm as former staff and community members also called out the restaurant for past grievances.

The tipping point

Savneet Hothi worked at the restaurant for two years. She started as an evening manager in 2014, and then became a server.

“We were all kind of pushed out,” she says.

She claims a “Wild, wild west” themed staff party in 2016 was the tipping point when a former assistant manager, a non-Indigenous woman, showed up in an Indigenous headdress.

“It was a super intense night,” Hothi recalls.

A few staff members asked the woman to take off the headdress, but she allegedly refused.

NEWS 1130 has seen a photo from the party, showing the assistant manager wearing the headdress.

After confronting the manager, Steve Thorp, at the party about the incident, Hothi says he joked about putting on blackface.

“He again made more racial slurs, made comments about Indigenous people, [and] said he had no problem with dressing up as Bill Cosby for Halloween. [He said] we’re ‘All too sensitive, he doesn’t see things the way we see them,’” she says.

While Belgard Kitchen acknowledges the incident with the headdress, the restaurant is denying the claims that Thorp made blackface comments.

In a statement to NEWS 1130, Thorp says the comments on social media last Tuesday were the first he had heard of the allegations concerning blackface.

Belgard Kitchen’s owner Ruben Major also acknowledges the assistant manager who wore the headdress continues to regret what she did.

‘We didn’t want to lose our jobs, we were young people and job security was huge for us’

In the days that followed the party, a group of employees decided to send a collective letter to the owners and managers, asking them to invest in racial sensitivity training.

It was submitted through an anonymous email.

It was written primarily by Ryan Avola, a former server and bartender,  who worked at Belgard in 2015 for six months

“We didn’t want to lose our jobs, we were young people and job security was huge for us,” Hothi says. “We wanted acknowledgment, apology, and some work to be done.”

A team meeting was scheduled with owners and managers, and Hothi says there wasn’t an acknowledgment of any wrongdoing.

“We were visibly upset,” she says.

At the meeting, employees were asked to sign documents to keep quiet about the staff party. “We weren’t told it was an NDA (non-disclosure agreement), we were told, just sign here to declare that the meeting happened. There was no explanation,” says Hothi.

“We just left shattered,” Alexander says.

Avola says when he spoke up about the toxic work environment, he was terminated.

“They told me I wasn’t upholding corporate culture,” he says.

“We’re agreeing not to speak about this outside of this meeting. We’re agreeing to not bring this up, and to do so would be reprimanded.”

Restaurant apologizes, admits there’s work to do

In a statement to NEWS 1130, Belgard Kitchen owner Reuben Major apologizes.

“We are well aware now that [the] past wounds that came about as a result of how we chose to navigate the situation have not healed,” he writes.

“We have a lot of work to do to get to a better place of understanding and work going forward. For that, we are truly sorry.”

But despite this admission, Major is challenging some of the accounts from former staff.

In regards to staff being forced to sign non-disclosure agreements, he says not everyone agreed to sign it, and says despite that, one employee continued to work at Belgard Kitchen for some time.

Major also says the staff member who lost their job “continued to speak poorly of the business and management at work and outside of work to the point where we felt it was best to part ways.”

In a recent Instagram post, the restaurant says, they’ve contacted a Diversity and Inclusion consultant. “We hope our first session will be soon, but recognize they are busier than ever.”

For her part, Alexander says a meeting with former staff, owners, and management is being scheduled for this week.

“Until then, I don’t think it’s appropriate to accept any apologies…until we see their detailed anti-racism and decolonization plan/efforts,” she says.

“It makes us quite upset to see some of this willful ignorance and trying to reshape this in a way that is still dodging some of their accountability work,” Avola adds.