A California restaurant has been forced to permanently shutter its doors after a video went viral falsely claiming its Southeast Asian owner abused dogs and used dog meat in the food.
At first, the owner of Tasty Thai in Fresno temporarily closed the restaurant on May 16 due to an outpouring of negative reviews, but he claimed the hate messages got so intense that there was no way his business had a chance of recovering.
“It quickly got to the point where there was almost no return,” David Rasavong told The Daily Beast.
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In the video that went viral across social media, a woman films a panting dog tied up outside a house, with a short leash and no access to water in the heat.
“Look at this poor dog, guys,” she says after walking onto the premises. “Fucking ridiculous.”
An older man of Asian descent answers the door after the woman knocks to yell at him about why the dog is in the heat with no water. However, there appears to be a communication barrier between the two. Eventually, the man fills the dog’s bowl with water, and the woman filming yells for the cops to be called.
ABC 30 Fresno interviewed the woman, Maria Alvarez Garcia, who insinuated that the dog’s conditions were caused by the owners of a next-door restaurant and that the restaurant could have been selling dog meat.
“At the beginning, yes. A lot of people believed that [the restaurant sold dog meat],” Garcia told ABC 30. “A lot of people thought that they were related and that they were connected together.”
She did not immediately respond to The Daily Beast’s request for comment Thursday.
The post gained so much traction that the Fresno Police Department stepped in on May 16, writing in a Facebook post that they had investigated the situation and determined no animal abuse had occurred.
“Recently, a short video depicting a female pit bull was uploaded to multiple social media accounts,” the post read. “The video alleged the pit bull was being abused. Fresno Police officers were quicky [sic] alerted to the situation and thoroughly investigated the incident. The short video posted on social media was a snapshot and did not show the complete and thorough picture of the incident. We are happy to report that the investigation revealed the dog is not abused. …We would like to thank the community members that were concerned for the safety of the dog."
Nevertheless, negative comments and reviews began inundating Tasty Thai. Rasavong, who is of Lao descent, said he initially figured they may have been pranks or people leaving fake reviews, so he reported them to Google to be deleted. However, within a day he realized it was a bigger issue.
“That’s when I started realizing it wasn’t just Google,” Rasavong said. “It was also Yelp, and then it was Facebook, Instagram, and even direct message. And I remember thinking…they all say the same thing. So, that’s when I started to look into the matter.”
At first, Rasavong tried to handle the situation by personally messaging every person who left a negative review to say that his restaurant had no affiliation with the house next door, that he didn’t know his neighbors, that they certainly didn’t serve dog meat. But Rasavong continued to be bombarded with racist comments and stereotypes.
“People [were] calling us ‘disgusting, evil people,’” Rasavong told The Daily Beast. “‘Your name shouldn’t be Tasty Thai. It should be Tasty Dog.’ Those are the ones that really stuck in my head.”
Rasavong also said pictures of the tied-up dog were attached to restaurant reviews along with comments from people telling him to leave the U.S.
“I received phone calls, multiple phone calls,” Rasavong said. “The one that really, really got me…the lady…said, ‘You’re torturing dogs. …Go back to the country you came from, you dog-eating motherf-er.’”
“We just made the decision right then and there,” he said. “We have to close until we get our truth out there so that it doesn’t get any worse.”
Rasavong also filed a police report once he discovered threatening voice messages left at the restaurant during the closure.
Garcia, whose Facebook is full of animal welfare videos, later uploaded a video to her page apologizing for wrongly placing the blame on Tasty Thai.
“The situation got out of hand,” she says in the video. “I’d like to apologize; this is not the person I am. …It’s been a hard situation to handle.
“I am sorry that David and his family are going through this. There’s no justification for the hate that this has spit out. …It was not my intention for it to go this way.”
But the damage was done, and Tasty Thai never reopened after May 15. Rasavong told The Daily Beast he didn’t want his parents, who are older and loved to spend their time at the restaurant, to deal with any negativity that could stem from the video.
“[My parents] always wanted to pass on our tradition, the richness of our [culture],” he said. “That's probably the most fulfilling thing for them is to say, ‘Hey, we can actually share with the community and the community enjoys the food, the service we provide.’”
Rasavong said his parents are immigrants from Laos and took shelter in multiple refugee camps before making it to the U.S. He is the first member in his immediate family—between his parents and siblings—to have been born in the country. He said the ordeal reminded him of growing up as an Asian American in San Francisco and kids of other cultural backgrounds asking if his family ate dogs.
“It was extremely hurtful as a kid, and you're embarrassed and you're scared and all of those emotions. But when you get older, you think kids are going to be kids,” he said. “So now that this has happened to us based on this disgusting Asian stereotype, it was almost hard for me to fathom.”
