Mississippi Rabbi, Restaurant Owner Attempting to Resolve Dispute Over ‘Jewish Salad’
More: Mississippi Rabbi, Restaurant Owner Attempting to Resolve Dispute Over ‘Jewish Salad’
A Mississippi rabbi and a restaurant owner have agreed to sit down and talk about a salad order gone wrong.
Very wrong.
Rabbi Ted Riter, of Jackson’s Beth Israel Congregation, says he was kicked out of a Wraps Greek restaurant in Jackson because of his faith. But restaurant owner John Allis claims the whole thing was a big misunderstanding about a “Jewish Salad” that his restaurant sells.
The controversy between the two men began soon after Riter entered Allis’ restaurant on Tuesday.
“I asked the owner if I could have a Greek salad to go and he said, ‘The regular size or the Jewish size?’” Riter told WAPT. “He just goes into a tirade, throwing out all these expletives, ‘Get out of here.’”
Riter claims the owner told him, “You know Jews are small and cheap! Everyone knows that.”
The rabbi reportedly responded, “Did you really just say that to me?”
After asking whether Riter was Jewish, the rabbi was allegedly ordered to leave the restaurant.
“Expletives, F-bombs, and since I’d never been the recipient of that before, I was in shock, so I didn’t register it until the second or third time he told me to leave,” Riter told the Clarion Ledger. “It was a bit surreal. So I left.”
But Ellis has a different version of events. He claims the restaurant was extremely busy at that time and that Riter was acting indecisive. Ellis says he harbors no ill will toward the Jewish people.
“The guy said he didn’t want to do any business with us. He was probably offended because we offer different salads — that’s all,” Ellis told WAPT. “I said, ‘Greek salad or Jew?’ We have different salads. We have Carlito’s Way Salad. We have Grecian Salad. We have Jewish Salad. We have Greek Salad. We have Cesar Salad — we have a lot of salads. Names of salads derive from people; they don’t derive from the sky.”
Personally I would not have even entered that restaurant, I only eat at restaurants that are strictly kosher. It would appear this menu item was kosher, that is, it contained only vegetarian ingredients but it may have come into contact with non-kosher ingredients while it was being prepared. However that was not the cause of the dispute. The cause of the dispute was that the restaurant owner is a bigoted asshole.
That said, I hope the rabbi & his friends never enter that restaurant ever again.
