A South Florida man quit his job at a restaurant after he said the name of a menu item of blackened chicken wings was changed to "I can't breathe."
Brandon Gonzalez was running a plate of the chicken wings to a guest on Saturday at Hole in the Wall in southwest Miami-Dade when he noticed something unusual and offensive with the kitchen ticket.
"I guess he thought it was funny to change a customer's order from 10 blackened wings to 10 'I can't breathes,'" Gonzalez said.
Gonzalez said the owner then went into the kitchen and had this explanation.
"He's like, hey, we’re not gonna write blackened anymore, we’re gonna write, 'I can’t breathe' and he started laughing, and I stayed quiet," Gonzalez said.
That is until Gonzalez decided to put the restaurant and its owner on blast.
"There's one main reason what absolutely offended me and baffled me, and it was the fact that they have a 90% Black kitchen," he said.
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"I can't breathe" has been the rallying cry at nationwide protests for Black Americans who were killed at the hands of cops. It was also some of the last word spoken by George Floyd.
"You're pretty much joking about the BLM movement," Gonzalez said. "You think it's a joke that George Floyd was saying 'I can't breathe' an x amount of times, like, you think that's funny? That’s not funny."
The owner wrote in a social media post, “I want to apologize for my insensitivity in a lame attempt at humor. My intentions were never to offend or make any employee or customer uncomfortable."
He went on to say in the post that he hopes to learn from this incident and that he truly is sorry.
"I think that joke came from a place where you wouldn’t find things like that funny unless you were a racist, to be honest," Gonzalez said, "I just think the problem is deeper than that. It’s not just, 'I’m sorry, my bad.'"
