Isaac Becker is officially over social media.
The chef/co-owner of Bar La Grassa and 112 Eatery said that he's "been sick of it for a while," but the dealbreaker was a run-in with the Twitterati two Saturdays ago.
It started when Bar La Grassa manager Michael Lecy fielded a late-afternoon call from the concierge service at American Express. Could a party of five take a 7:30 table that evening? Sorry, we wish we could accommodate you, but we can't, was the response. "I couldn't even get a table for five if I was calling on a Saturday for that night," Becker said with a laugh.
AmEx followed with a second call ("They said, 'The customer is willing to release his name,' " said Becker, left) and a third, but there were no tables at 7:30. Honest. "The only way we could accomodate them is if we screwed someone else over, and we don't do that," said Becker. Other available times were offered but not accepted.
The customer? Bob Harper, aka Bob the Trainer on NBC's "The Biggest Loser," in town for a Mall of America appearance. Enter Twitter. "OMG!! The manager at Bar Lagrasa in Minneapolis was SO RUDE to me. I wanted to have dinner there. Why are people so mean sometimes?"flashed across Harper's Twitter account. Next up: "And Minneapolis is one of my favorite places...why did the manager at Bar Lagrasa have to be like that?? I still love it here!!:"
There's just one hitch. "This guy never talked to Mike, and he's portraying himself as a victim, and getting people wound up about how rude we were to him, and he never spoke to anyone at the restaurant," said Becker. "He has 125,000 Twitter followers, and we don't have any kind of recourse."
Nancy St. Pierre, Becker's spouse and hyper-hospitality focused business partner, did some investigating. She called American Express, and guess what? All the conversations were recorded. They reviewed them.
"They were very cooperative, and they agreed that it was all very civil, that there was nothing inappropriate on any of them," said Becker. "How he got this rude thing is so far-fetched."