no zero stars available.
owner overtly and specifically racist.
do not eat here.
Racism is newly empowered in Ferndale. DO NOT go to The Village Grill. Read on...
VILLAGE GRILL CAFE AND "FAMILY" RESTAURANT IN ROYAL OAK:
UNDER TRUMP, EMBOLDENED TO PRACTICE JIM CROW-STYLE RACISM
Owner Sets Precedent That Employees Don't Follow
By Quincy Stewart
______________________________
Recently, I met an old friend in Royal Oak to discuss a possible business issue and afterward decided to stop in at a restaurant for brunch.
By chance, we selected Village Grill on East 11 Mile. After eating and coffee, we asked for the check and waited for the waitress, who was polite, courteous, and professional, to return with it for payment.
As we continued to chat and relax, in no hurry and still sipping coffee, the owner, a particularly grizzled older white woman, perhaps of European decent, came specifically to our table, bypassing an entire restaurant of people who classify as white, and in a coarse, obtuse manner, asked us when we were going to leave and hurry up so that people who were at the door waiting for seating who were all classified as white, could sit down.
Both of us, as you might assume, were New Afrikan (black). We were the only black folks in the restaurant.
Her entire tone and her visage were hostile, and her gesticulations were rigid and hateful.
It took me a split second to digest this, as I had not seen this kind of blatant display of racist behavior in quite a while in an establishment like a restaurant.
It was a throwback to the 1960s when my dad faced these kinds of flagrant public slights in front of my mom, brother, and me in places like Birmingham, Bloomfield, and other "white" spaces.
Reflexively, as though this were burned into my DNA, I immediately responded, in a very audible voice but not glaringly loud, "With all these people in here, why would you come to our table and ask us to leave?"
She glared back at me without a word, turned, and walked away without a hint of remorse or apology, and her gait punctuated an angry traverse back to the people waiting at the door uttering something to them that I could not hear but could read.
As a so-called black man, I am born with the antennae to read racism and racist body language.
Whatever she told them, they were as mystified by her behavior as her waitresses were, though I suspect, as you will read on, that they were not surprised.
When one of the waitresses returned to our table, I explained to her what had just transpired, and her young face dropped from the usual professional mask that people in the service industry must wear to a more embarrassed face oozing with empathy. "Yes, I know," she responded through a gasp of helpless bewilderment. "I understand."
What I gathered is that this young lady and the other young waitresses probably have either seen this before with other customers, or this older woman has expressed racist language or thoughts around them.
I asked the waitress who the woman was, thinking she might have been a retired widow or clean-up woman, but she told me that she was the owner.
We paid our separate bills, and as we walked out, a long-buried feeling resurfaced, like so many of my ancestors felt under similar conditions.
I felt the dehumanizing duplicitous inner quagmire of being treated as a paying customer and as a lesser participant in a normal, everyday activity due to my "race" and the feeling of boiling righteous indignation with all its obvious accompanying options.
As we left and said our goodbyes, there was a promise to not let this go and give this odious episode the airing in the public square, and so, here it is.
Let me conclude by pointing a not-so-circumstantial finger at the environment that this country has halfway swept under the rug where a very thin, superfluous, opaque sheet of decorum in benign, polite places like restaurants, cafes, pubs, bowling alleys, grocery stores, department stores, and other spaces that at one time were microcosms of institutional racism are slowly reassuming their formal roles under the Trump open-air racist regime.
Make no mistake, institutionalized white supremacy has never left--not for a second, minute, hour, day, week, month, year, decade, or century since America's inception as a white corporation.
This incident for me is but an opening salvo during this administration's first week, where this woman, who may recall a time when black people did not or could not come in her restaurant or her parent's business, and because the environment is now correct and comfortable, she felt correct and comfortable to go to our table, passing a room full of Caucasians, and ask two New Afrikans (blacks) to hurry up, pay up and get out.
We did. I will never, ever set foot in there again and be far more careful to find a black-owned restaurant to go to or to one who will treat my humanity and my hard-earned dollar with the respect it deserves.
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