UPDATE: JOEY TOMATO’S MAKES A STATEMENT

The restaurant owner of Joey Tomato's who blew up her entire business over birthday cake has issued a statement. Let's talk about that video. For a few days now, the internet has decided it knows everything about our restaurant based on thirty seconds of footage that started after the real conversation was already underway. No context. No beginning. Just a clip, built for outrage, and a comment section full of opinions. Thank you to the people who supported us. So let's be clear about who we are. We are a pizza restaurant. Not a party venue, not a bakery, not a rental hall. We built our name on pizza — the kind the Jersey Shore is known for. We are also Jersey Strong! Protecting our customers, employees, reputation, and brand is important. Every restaurant on this board has policies that exist for real reasons — food safety, liability, order in a kitchen running full speed on a summer night. Those policies aren't up for public vote just because one moment of enforcing them got recorded. We have persevered, one pie at a time, long before this video and long after it's forgotten. That's not going to change. Although we are considering a new tagline: We don't do cake. We do pizza. In my opinion, it should say: We don't do cakes, we do pizza pies. But I digress. Now, as the owner mentioned, they are known for their pizza pie, costing ranging in the $42 range. The customers in this video explained that they had brought a cake for their five-year-old nephew's birthday. They had ordered over $250 worth of pizza pies from this restaurant. And the owner, instead of being understanding, calm, collected, decided to do this. Instead of being patient, understanding, or maybe even just explaining why you weren't allowed to cut the cake, you were completely outraged by paying customers within your establishment. And many people pointed out the very disturbing amount of toxic chemical cleaning supplies that had set out near the food working station, along with other cleaning supplies like your brooms, your mops being visible to the customer in this establishment. And many people have stated that that would be some type of health code violation. In response to their statement, a lot of people have just come back and said there was such a different approach you could have taken and doubling down with a chat GPT response was not the way to do it. In addition to the statement that it was a busy summer night, nobody can know exactly how busy it was, but the video did capture how many people were in the establishment at that time, and it didn't look very busy to me at all. I want to hear what you guys think. Did you guys see the response and their statement? Let me know your thoughts down in the comments.