He said the staff is a little concerned

Jun 23rd, 2018 | By
Category: Notes and Comment Blog

The Post has details on what went down at The Little Red Hen. Nothing lurid, just what people were thinking and how it played out.

The owner was at home yesterday evening when the chef called to tell her Sanders was there.

“He said the staff is a little concerned. What should we do?” [Stephanie] Wilkinson told The Washington Post. “I said I’d be down to see if it’s true.”

It seemed unlikely to her that President Trump’s press secretary should be dining at a 26-seat restaurant in rural Virginia. But then, it was unlikely that her entire staff would have misidentified Sanders, who had arrived last to a table of eight booked under her husband’s name.

As she made the short drive to the Red Hen, Wilkinson knew only this:

She knew Lexington, population 7,000, had voted overwhelmingly against Trump in a county that voted overwhelmingly for him. She knew the community was deeply divided over such issues as Confederate flags. She knew, she said, that her restaurant and its half-dozen servers and cooks had managed to stay in business for 10 years by keeping politics off the menu.

And she knew — she believed — that Sarah Huckabee Sanders worked in the service of an “inhumane and unethical” administration. That she publicly defended the president’s cruelest policies, and that that could not stand.

She doesn’t love confrontation, and she doesn’t love putting a big target on her restaurant but

“This feels like the moment in our democracy when people have to make uncomfortable actions and decisions to uphold their morals.”

This is after a week in which Sanders has been defending Trump’s loathsome actions on immigration and the abduction of immigrants’ children.

When she got there she found that it was no mistake, there was the press secretary.

Several Red Hen employees were gay, she said. They knew Sanders had defended Trump’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.

“Tell me what you want me to do. I can ask her to leave,” Wilkinson told her staff, she said. “They said yes.”

So, without any joy, she did.

“I said, ‘I’m the owner,’ ” she recalled, ” ‘I’d like you to come out to the patio with me for a word.’ ”

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.’ ”

Sanders said that’s fine, and the others in the party went with her. They offered to pay for the cheese plate and drinks they’d already had but Wilkinson said no, it’s on the house. (Sanders didn’t mention that in her official press secretary tweet.)

The restaurant is closed for this evening; Wilkinson doesn’t know if this will destroy her business or not.

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