Red Hen Owner Has No Regrets About Asking Sarah Huckabee Sanders to Leave Her Virginia Restaurant
On Friday evening, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders sat down for dinner at the Red Hen, a tiny farm-to-table restaurant in Lexington, Va.
The Red Hen’s chef called Stephanie Wilkinson, who co-owns the 26-seat restaurant. The chef informed Wilkinson of the press secretary’s arrival.
“He said the staff is a little concerned. What should we do?” Wilkinson told The Washington Post. “I said I’d be down to see if it’s true.”
It seemed unlikely that Sanders would be dining at a restaurant nearly 200 miles from the White House. It also seemed unlikely that Wilkinson’s entire staff would have misidentified Sanders, who had arrived last to a table of eight booked under her husband’s name.
Wilkinson drove to the restaurant. When she walked in, Wilkinson saw that there had been no mistake. The Red Hen is no bigger than some apartments, and the group table was impossible to miss: Sanders in a black dress, her husband, three or four men and women of roughly similar ages, and an older couple.
“They had cheese boards in front of them,” Wilkinson said. Like any other family. The kitchen was already preparing the party’s main course. Wilkinson interrupted to huddle with her workers.
Several Red Hen employees are gay, she said. They knew Sanders had defendedTrump’s desire to bar transgender people from the military. This month, they had all watched her evade questions and defend a Trump policy that caused migrant children to be separated from their parents.
Although Wilkinson believed that Sanders worked in the service of an “inhumane and unethical” administration, she knew her restaurant and its half-dozen servers and cooks had managed to stay in business for 10 years by keeping politics off the menu.
“I’m not a huge fan of confrontation,” Wilkinson said. “I have a business, and I want the business to thrive. This feels like the moment in our democracy when people have to make uncomfortable actions and decisions to uphold their morals.”
Asking Sanders to leave
Before deciding what to do, Wilkinson spoke to her employees.
“Tell me what you want me to do. I can ask her to leave,” Wilkinson told her staff, she said. “They said ‘yes.’ ”
It was important to Wilkinson, she said, that Sanders had already been served — that her staff had not simply refused her on sight. And it was important to her that Sanders was a public official, not just a customer with whom she disagreed, many of whom were included in her regular clientele.
All the same, she was tense as she walked up to the press secretary’s chair. Wilkinson explained that she was the owner, and she asked her to “come out to the patio with me for a word,” she recalled.
They stepped outside, into another small enclosure, but at least out of the crowded restaurant.
“I was babbling a little, but I got my point across in a polite and direct fashion,” Wilkinson said. “I explained that the restaurant has certain standards that I feel it has to uphold, such as honesty, and compassion, and cooperation.
“I said, ‘I’d like to ask you to leave.’ ”
Wilkinson didn’t know how Sanders would react, or whether Trump’s chief spokeswoman had been called out in a restaurant before — as the president’s homeland security secretary had been days earlier.
Sanders’s response was immediate, Wilkinson said: “ ‘That’s fine. I’ll go.’ ”
Sanders went back to the table, picked up her things and walked out. The others at her table had been welcome to stay, Wilkinson said. But they didn’t, so the servers cleared away the cheese plates and glasses. They offered to pay. Wilkinson told them it was on the house, she said.
For all the angst that evening, Wilkinson said, everything had taken place with decorum. She had been polite; Sanders had been polite; the press secretary’s family had been polite as they followed her out the door.
Backlash
On Facebook, Red Hen waiter Jaike Foley-Schultz posted a photo of the restaurant’s white board, complete with an overnight note for the morning manager. One section said, “86 – Sara Huckabee Sanders.”
“I just served Sarah huckabee sanders for a total of 2 minutes before my owner asked her to leave,” Jaike Foley-Schultz wrote on Facebook.
A fountain of alternately celebratory and outraged comments gushed from Foley-Schultz’s Facebook wall into the Red Hen’s social media accounts, then its Yelp review page.
Five stars: “Thank you for refusing to serve a person who lies to the American people for a living.”
One star: “They made some snide remark about a ‘spit souffle’ for the Florida nazi.’ ”
Between the fury and fawning of 2,000 people who almost certainly had not eaten at the restaurant, the Red Hen’s Yelp reviews almost instantly averaged out to two-and-a-half stars.
And that was before Sanders confirmed the story in a Saturday-morning tweet, including the restaurant’s name and location.
“I always do my best to treat people, including those I disagree with, respectfully and will continue to do so,” the press secretary wrote. “Her actions say far more about her than about me.”
Wilkinson had no regrets about her decision.
“I would have done the same thing again,” she said. “We just felt there are moments in time when people need to live their convictions. This appeared to be one.”