All Katie and Kadhafi Bertho wanted to do Sunday night was relax while eating Mexican food with their sister and kids, after a long day of kayaking and swimming.
Instead, they say, their meal was cut short after an employee at Jessy’s Taco Bistro in Norfolk asked the family, who is black, about a bag that another employee wrongly suspected was stolen. Jessy’s co-owner, Jorge Romero, told The Pilot the incident resulted from a lapse in judgment, and that he’s working to ensure that nothing like it happens again.
But the fallout has reverberated across social media — and will briefly shut the restaurant’s doors today. The Ghent-neighborhood restaurant will close early as employees undergo racial sensitivity training.
The meal started usually enough, the Berthos told The Pilot.
Katie’s sister, Becca Blount, had arrived early to claim a large table, and was there with a friend for an hour before the Berthos. Blount had placed her purse on the outside of the booth, which is on a raised platform in full view of the restaurant, the Berthos said.
But after getting their appetizers, they said, they were approached by a server who had not been at their table before.
“We were all just kind of munching, hanging out, and waiting,” Katie Bertho said. “And this other server, he was a guy. He had waited on my sister and I before — it was last Monday. He came over, and I thought he was just saying hello … but he started asking my sister about her bag.”
The bag was nothing special, Bertho said, a little beige backpack that Blount had bought for $14 back in February, with lettering on one seam that read “Don’t call me babe.” (The Pilot did not request it, but the Berthos sent a picture of the online sales receipt.)
The server said that a female server recently had a similar one stolen. Blount, initially believing he was asking how to buy a replacement, affably extolled the virtues of the little sack.
“She’s going over the specs of the bag, opens it up, she’s zipping zippers. But we were all looking at her like, ‘This is weird.’ But she didn’t pick up on it, and he kept asking more and more questions. And finally, he got a serious look on his face, and he said, ‘I just need to know about this bag. I have to ask, I’m so sorry. It’s for her peace of mind.’”
The mood then shifted.
“That’s when everyone knew for sure what’s going on,” Katie Bertho said. “It’s a line of questioning, an investigation about this bag. And just when (Blount) was getting ready to pull up the order receipt from her app and explain herself, we said ‘No. This is not her bag.’ We all just sat there, like, what the hell?”
The Berthos’ young children had stopped eating, confused by what was happening. The server left, Katie Bertho said, and the staff had a series of side meetings before going back to the kitchen. She said after they returned, she stood up by the table for several minutes to get their attention, but was ignored.
“At that point I was like, ‘We need to get up, pay and leave, because this is not where we need to be eating right now,‘” said Bertho, an 11-year veteran of the Navy’s cybersecurity team. “I stood by the table. Nobody came over, nobody looked at me, nobody did anything. … I’m hard to miss. I’m 5’8,” with a huge pregnant belly.”
They paid for their appetizers and left. The Berthos said they sought out the manager before leaving, and Kadhafi also returned to speak to the manager after they had left the restaurant. But they said in both cases, the manager didn’t seem interested in a discussion.
“I said, I have my own business,” Kadhafi Bertho said. “I make good money. I don’t need to steal from anybody. But it’s like he wasn’t listening.”
That’s when they took to Facebook , relating their experiences in a video and in written accounts shared to neighborhood Facebook groups. A video posted by Kadhafi Bertho, initially on his Instagram account, has now been viewed thousands of times.
Romero, co-owner of Jessy’s Taco Bistro and three other Jessy’s locations — including a 14-year-old taqueria in Ocean View — was not present at the time of the incident, but confirms much of the Berthos’ account. He said he became aware of the incident through social media when he woke up Monday morning.
“I’m getting messages, posts, recommendations, and I rushed to the restaurant,” he said. “I took a look at the camera, talked to the staff to try to piece it together before I made any sort of reaction. People were asking for answers. I thought I had to put together a public statement before lunchtime.”
He said the server who approached the Berthos’ table was still a trainee, and that his actions were a grievous lapse in judgment. He also said his manager should have immediately gone to the table to make the situation right.
A female server had had a bag containing money and documents stolen from her car the previous Friday, Romero said, and thought she recognized the same bag while refilling chips and salsa. The male server, whom Romero identified publicly as “Erick,” had been trying to confirm that the bag was not the same bag. Romero said his server knew Monday he’d made a terrible mistake.
“The first words out of his mouth was, ‘I have no idea why I did what I did, that was so stupid.’ And there was misery on his face,” Romero said.
Romero quickly drafted an apology.
“TO THE FAMILY WHOSE DINNER WE ABRUPTLY RUINED LAST NIGHT, WE APOLOGIZE!!!” Romero wrote on social media Monday. Romero said he did not believe the incident was racially motivated, and would have fired the server immediately if he thought that were the case.
“He would have made the same bad decision if it had been, like him, a Mexican family at the table, or Guatemalan, or German, white, brown, yellow, purple, or pink,” Romero wrote Monday.
He invited the family out for ice cream, and offered to have Erick pay for a meal out of his own pocket.
But Katie Bertho, who said she and her sister are light-skinned enough to be confused for white, questions why no one confronted her sister about the bag during the previous hour, until she was joined by others who were more obviously black.
She said the problem extended to the management, not just the server who confronted them, and that no one was interested in discussing the incident until it gained notoriety on social media. She also questions what her family would gain in having dinner with the owner of a restaurant where they were treated that badly.
“It seemed like once it got some attention, suddenly there was this desire to reach us,” she said. “It was weird to read their apology, a self-serving apology that had nothing to do with us.”
“I ended up making everything worse,” Romero says now.
Romero’s and the Berthos’ posts drew hundreds of reactions and comments, ranging from thanking Romero for apologizing to accusing the restaurant of insincerity, demands for the firing of the employees, and debates over “cancel culture.”
Romero said he now thinks he made a mistake in thinking he could just handle the situation over a dinner. He said he was taken by surprise, and had panicked.
He said up to now, he would have never thought his restaurant would stand accused of racial discrimination.
“I thought, we were people of color, and we would be (the ones who were) discriminated against,” Romero said.
Katie Bertho said they’re not trying to shut down the restaurant, but they wanted to call attention to their experience in order to hold it accountable, so it could take steps to make black customers feel welcome.
“I don’t think they’ve realized the harm they’ve caused,” Bertho said. “Kadhafi described feeling like he couldn’t even hear. It’s so traumatic for a dad, while his two black sons are just staring.”
On Wednesday, Romero posted another apology, saying he planned to address the situation from top to bottom.
“To the party that was profiled at our establishment, we are sorry,” Romero wrote. “As we work to better understand the scope of your experience and the impact it may have had on you and your children, we can knowingly say that no one should have to go through what you went thru. No one should be subjected to poor service and accusation and made to feel as if they have to explain themself to a stranger. While this was a lapse in judgement on the part of our wait staff, it speaks to a breakdown in leadership, training and communication within the organization. While we cant undo what happened, we can work to ensure it doesn’t happen again.”
He told The Pilot that Chris Simmonds, owner of the Ghent store Less Than, had reached out to offer sensitivity training to Romero and his staff, and he had taken him up on the offer.
Romero set up sensitivity training for his managers Wednesday night, and said staff at the Ocean View location also will receive it. Romero said he doesn’t know if any staff will be fired as a result of the incident, but that he did not want to make a rash decision.
Asked about Romero’s training plans, Katie Bertho replied simply: “I think that is a very good idea and could help a lot.”
source The Virginian-Pilot