Winnipeg restaurant owner 'terribly sorry' after Indigenous patrons told to pay up front
'We just felt as if we were aliens,' Ellen Rae says of her experience at Kum Koon Garden
The owner of a restaurant in Winnipeg's Chinatown is apologizing after a First Nations woman accused a server of telling her and her friends to pay before they received their meal.
Geoffrey Young said he is sorry for the treatment that Ellen Rae, her boyfriend and their friends received at his restaurant, Kum Koon Garden on King Street, last weekend.
"I'm terribly sorry for the staff['s] inappropriate service and I will take total and full responsibility for this matter," he said, adding that he's offering Rae and her friends a free meal.
"I would like to bring them in, if they accept my sincere apology, and then I will give them a dinner and I will sit down with them."
But after hearing about Young's apology and offer, Rae told CBC News she still won't go back to Kum Koon, as she believes they were treated poorly because they are Indigenous.
"We were pissed off. The people that were there with us, they asked us if that was normal. I said, 'No, that's not normal,'" said Rae, who was visiting Winnipeg from Sandy Lake First Nation in Ontario.
"There was a lot of other people in that restaurant," she added. "We just felt as if we were aliens or something."
'Do you do that with everybody?'
CBC News initially reached out to Rae after seeing a Facebook post, dated July 31, in which she described the experience her table of seven had at Kum Koon the day before.
"We had placed our order and then after a while another lady comes back and then says, 'You guys have to pay … before you get your food. You have to pay first,'" she said.
"My boyfriend asked, 'Do you do that with everybody?' And then she wouldn't answer us."
Rae said while her boyfriend went to the front counter, she asked several other customers if they also had to pay in advance.
"They were white people," she said. "They said, 'No, we don't have to pay first.'"
Meanwhile, Rae said a male employee at the cash register wouldn't say anything when her boyfriend asked him the same question.
"He wouldn't answer us because I think he knows that that lady was just doing that because we're Native people," she said.
"Then my boyfriend asked him, 'Are you doing this just because we're Native? How come you don't make them pay first?' We just got our money back and then walked out of there."
'Dine and dash' a problem
Young offered a general explanation, saying servers are responsible for bills that are not paid by their customers.
"We have some bad experiences with people in this area — they come to eat and then they just left without paying," Young said.
"The serving personnel will be responsible for this kind of thing; they have to pay. That's why I think sometimes they ask people like that."
Young could not say how often "dine and dash" situations happen at Kum Koon, or how much money servers lose as a result, but said "over a year, it's quite a bit."
He stressed that Rae and her friends were not targeted because they are Indigenous.
"We are Chinese; we are a minority people. We will never do things like that because we treat everybody fair and square," he said.
"But the problem is, like, we have too many people walk out without paying. Any kind of people can do that, you know, it's not just one special [group of] people."
Young said he will make sure his staff receive sensitivity training and ensure this does not happen again.
With files from Christopher Read