Restaurant Shuts Down for a ‘Day of Kindness’ After Customers Make Its Staff Cry

The verbal abuse from rude customers got so bad, the owners of one farm-to-table restaurant on Cape Cod said, that some of their employees cried.

The final indignity came last Thursday, when a man berated one of the restaurant’s young employees for telling him that they could not take his breakfast takeout order because the restaurant had not opened yet, said Brandi Felt Castellano, the co-owner of Apt Cape Cod in Brewster, Mass.

“I never thought it would become this,” she said.

So Ms. Felt Castellano and her spouse, Regina Felt Castellano, who is also the head chef and co-owner, announced on Facebook that the restaurant would close for part of that same day to treat the restaurant’s employees to a “day of kindness.”

The move drew widespread attention in the community and on social media. Other restaurateurs shared similar anecdotes that they said demonstrated the strain that fully reopening was placing on an industry that was battered by the coronavirus pandemic.

“Many of us didn’t survive the pandemic,” Brandi Felt Castellano said of restaurants in an interview on Tuesday. “For people to be this aggressive towards the ones that have is disheartening.”

This was not always the case. Earlier in the pandemic, customers overwhelmingly exhibited kindness, Ms. Felt Castellano said. The restaurant’s motto, which is posted on its website, is “Come as Strangers, Leave as Friends.”