Restaurant owner delivered the best response after angry diner told staff 'I hope you get hit by a car'
Dealing with a range of customers requires a great deal of patience and skill on a server's part. But every once in a while, servers face extremely rude customers who end up disrespecting them without a reason. Brandi Felt Castellano, a woman who runs the Apt restaurant in Brewster, Massachusetts, handled one such situation very well by closing down the restaurant for a day, reported 7News Boston. The reason behind it was extremely heartfelt. Castellano called it a "Day of Kindness" which she started after patrons at the eatery severely insulted the servers working there and even drove them to tears.
“Patrons have crossed the line from being just like rude or upset to verbally abusive,” Castellano told the outlet. “They told one of our workers 'I hope you get hit by a car when you leave work today’.” In 2021, when the restaurant reopened after the dreadful pandemic, Castellano was struggling to manage the supplies at the store along with training young and inexperienced staff members. As a result, many customers expressed their frustrations by berating the servers and even threatening them. “It just makes them like not wanting to come to work, the young ones crying or going home and crying,” Castellano continued.
Then Castellano took matters into her own hands, closed down the restaurant for a day and treated her staff with kindness. She told them to decompress and focus on their well-being before returning to work the following day. “These are people who are showing up every day for work and they are human beings and that’s what everyone needs, just to be nice to everybody, everywhere,” Castellano said. Castellano's wife, Regina, who also worked at the restaurant as a head chef, took to Facebook to declare the reason behind closing the restaurant for a day. The post garnered widespread attention on social media and the community.
“Many of us didn’t survive the pandemic,” Castellano said of restaurants in an interview with The New York Times. “For people to be this aggressive towards the ones that have is disheartening.” Customers behaving rudely after the reopening of the store wasn't always the case. The Castellanos saw glimpses of kindness from strangers as well. “It’s like abuse,” Castellano continued about the worsening behavior of the customers.
“It’s things that people are saying that wouldn’t be allowed to be on TV because they would be bleeped. People are always rude to restaurant workers, but this far exceeds anything I’ve seen in my 20 years.” After the post went viral, many of Castellano's customers and other businesses in the community, showed their solidarity with the restaurant and its employees. One of the loyal customers of Apt Cape Cod also dropped off a gift card for the restaurant’s employees which they could use at a local ice cream shop. A local parasail and Jet Ski shop in the next town offered a day of fun to them too. “A lot of people have been like, ‘Thanks for saying what we’ve all been wanting to say,’” Castellano concluded.