A waiter was fired from a restaurant in Huntington Beach, California, after asking customers to prove their citizenship before being served.
“Can I see your proof of residency?” the waiter asked a group of four Latina women after they were seated at Saint Marc. “I need to make sure you’re from here before I serve you.”
One of the women, Diana Carrillo, recounted the experience on Facebook, saying the after the waiter forced the women to show their IDs, they asked to speak to the manager, who apologized and offered them new seating arrangements. But the group decided to leave anyway.
“For a few seconds, I thought maybe he was being a smart ass or joking but the fact that he said, ‘I need to make sure you’re from here before I serve you’ was completely unacceptable,” Carrillo said in her post. “How many others has he said this too [sic]?”
https://www.facebook.com/diana.carrillo.969/posts/10211955070859929?pnref=story
Though Saint Marc later fired the waiter and apologized on social media (Carrillo also posted a review on Yelp), management later took down the apology, leaving Diana’s sister, Brenda Carrillo, feeling upset.
“To us, that makes us feel like they weren’t really sorry,” Brenda told the Los Angeles Times.
Saint Marc’s Senior Director of Operations Kent Bearden explained to the Washington Post that the waiter in question “had never received so much as a write-up” prior to the incident, and that it was the first time the waiter had ever asked customers for residency identification before being served.
“I don’t know if he had an agenda or not. My concern is, he violated a company policy,” Bearden explained to the Post. “We’re very specific about how we treat our guests. That individual did not treat a table of guests to the expectations that we set forth in that company policy, and that caused him to be terminated.”
