Santa Cruz sushi restaurant Akira under fire after viral tweet claims racial bias

SANTA CRUZ – Sushi restaurant Akira is under fire after a viral tweet accused the restaurant’s manager of racial bias — a charge the manager, and staff who witnessed the incident, deny.

In a tweet shared more than 18,000 times, 22-year-old Jennifer Ines, of Sacramento, claimed she and a friend were kicked out of the Midtown Santa Cruz restaurant after an altercation with other customers Saturday night. The other customers, who she said were white, were allowed to stay — evidence, to her, that the white Akira manager was racially biased against the pair of women. Ines is Latina and said her friend is Middle Eastern.

She also said an Akira manager “put his hands” on herself and her friend as he ushered them out the door, called the pair “punk asses” and called the police. Ines said it was the other customers who had provoked the confrontation.

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Reached by the Sentinel for comment Tuesday, the manager, whose first name is Mark, denied the women’s race was a factor. He asked that his last name not be published out of concern for his safety. He said he asked them to leave because they had already paid their bill and appeared to be the aggressors in a verbal altercation with people seated at a table. He denied using profanity, saying he told the young women they were behaving like “punks” and called the police after the pair tried to re-enter the restaurant.

But Ines’ version of the story quickly spread online, with her story garnering more than 18,400 shares as of Wednesday. Akira’s Yelp rating quickly plummeted, driven down beneath a heap of one-star reviews accusing the restaurant and its management of racism. The page is now being monitored by Yelp for violations of its review policies which require reviews to be based on firsthand experiences.

Ines also posted Akira’s contact information and urged people to “call and ask why this establishment is racist.” Hundreds of callers have done exactly that, keeping the restaurant’s phones ringing nearly off the hook and subjecting its staff to repeated verbal abuse, according to two of Akira’s three owners, Lewis Kim Martinez and Greyson Dang-Lanzarotta-Leek.

After reviewing security footage and speaking with the manager and staff, the owners put out a statement denying the accusation of bias.

“We pride ourselves on treating all customers equally,” the statement reads. “Racism is not tolerated and we strongly stand behind our statement that race was not at all a factor in what happened July 28, 2018.”

The rapid spread of Ines’ story and the heated backlash surrounding it comes in the wake of recent high-profile incidents involving race at businesses both locally and nationwide. In May, coffee-giant Starbucks apologized and closed 8,000 of its stores to put its employees through an afternoon of anti-bias training after an employee called the police on two black men who were waiting to meet a friend.

In August of last year, Santa Cruz-based Chinese restaurant O’Mei closed after its owner admitted to donating to former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke’s failed senate bid. The revelation prompted a community boycott, from which the restaurant never recovered.

Ines said she came to Santa Cruz with three friends to celebrate a birthday, and the foursome ended up at Akira.

There, she said they squeezed past a white couple and their son who were waiting in the restaurant’s narrow hallway.

“They thought it was rude because they thought we were cutting them or something,” Ines said. The woman asked for an apology that Ines and her friends didn’t think was warranted, and didn’t provide.

The two parties were seated near each other as they dined, Ines said. After the young friends paid their bill and stood up to leave, she said the white woman called her friend a “b—-” as they walked toward the door.

What happened next was captured on surveillance footage reviewed by the Sentinel. The restaurant has not publicly released the footage, citing customers’ privacy.

The video shows Ines and her friend walking toward the door, and the seated woman appears to say something to them before quickly turning away. Ines’ friend turns around and approaches the table and can be seen speaking and pointing at the seated woman. A man seated at the table stands up and faces the friend, and Ines puts her arm between them, appearing to hold her friend back. Then the manager, Mark, enters the frame and puts himself in the middle.

Mark guides Ines and her friend toward the front door. When the friend turns back to the seated woman and gestures toward her, Mark appears to push her toward the door with an open hand to her shoulder.

The friends can be seen milling in front of the restaurant and taking pictures from outside, and Mark briefly opens the door and says something to them. Moments later, Ines’ friend opens the door and appears to yell something inside.

Akira sous-chef Michael Cho said he didn’t see the start of the confrontation but saw his manager escort the young women. “On their way out, Mark was just escorting them out saying you gotta go, you guys are being really obnoxious and just aggressive,” Cho said. “She comes back, starts cussing him out.”

Ines said she didn’t remember either of them cussing, and they only yelled after they were kicked out.

Ines said she didn’t imagine her tweet would garner the attention it has since she had fewer than 100 followers when she posted it. But she said she thinks the friends deserve an apology, and thinks the restaurant has brought the backlash on itself by not treating the two conflicting groups of customers equally.

“For it to be fair, he should have escorted the other family out to because they were also part of the problem,” she said. “But no, he decided to let them stay, let them sit — they weren’t humiliated.”

Asked if she thinks the degree of backlash is justified, Ines said she believes it is because when she called and spoke to an owner the next day she felt her concerns were brushed aside.

“I hope it just teaches them a lesson,” she said. “I don’t want them to go out of business or anything — I know there are people who live on that wage — but I just want them to teach their employees to deal with certain situations and learn how to deal with people of color.”

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Robert Graetz, who backed Montgomery boycott, dies at 92 Co-owner Dang-Lanzarotta-Leek said he thinks the restaurant’s local clientele won’t be affected, but he’s concerned about losing new business from tourists and students at nearby UC Santa Cruz.

“After six years, one person can blast your name on social media and call you something you aren’t — it’s just unethical to me,” Dang-Lanzarotta-Leek said.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story misspelled the name of Akira co-owner Greyson Dang-Lanzarotta-Leek.

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