Pizzeria fires worker who refused to serve officers

A cashier at a San Francisco pizza parlor who refused to serve police officers last weekend has reportedly been fired.

The employee, a trainee on his third day of work at Pizza Squared on Brannan Street, told several police officers that they were not welcome in the establishment, according to a statement from the parlor on Twitter.

The cashier was apparently told the parlor “did not share his views and that he was out of line,” and he was fired at the end of the day.

The name of the cashier was not released.

The situation came to light after the San Francisco Police Officers Association, the union that represents city officers, contacted the restaurant directly. Union representatives said they “notified the owners ... of the shameful and hateful actions of one of their employees,” after the incident, according to Twitter.

The restaurant’s apparent attempts to diffuse the uproar over the incident — including issuing an apology to the police association — did little to stymie an onslaught of negative reviews, many of them from people outside of the Bay Area, on the restaurant’s Yelp pages.

By Tuesday morning, the business, which specializes in Detroit and Sicilian style pizzas, was being monitored by Yelp’s Support Team for content related to media reports. A statement from Yelp on the business page read that the parlor “recently received increased public attention, which often means people come to this page to post their views on the news.”

“While we don’t take a stand one way or the other when it comes to this incident, we’ve temporarily disabled the posting of content to this page as we work to investigate whether the content you see here reflects actual consumer experiences rather than the recent events,” the statement from Yelp said.

Some social media users said they were critical of the restaurant’s response, including the decision to fire the employee.

“Disappointing how you handled this,” one Twitter user wrote.

The controversy is also reminiscent of past scuffles between police officers and Bay Area restaurant workers.

In 2018, employees at Hasta Muerte, a cafe in Oakland, refused to serve coffee to a police officer in uniform. Far right protesters from the Patriot Prayer group picketed outside the cafe, and within a few days, the cafe’s Yelp rating was pulled down considerably by a rush of one-star reviews.