Houston Chronicle by Emily Foxhall Aug. 14, 2018
Someone important was coming to Domenic Laurenzo’s restaurant, but he didn’t know who. He knew only that the Secret Service planned to arrive at El Tiempo Cantina on Navigation Boulevard in a historically Hispanic community, one of eight locations in a city that embraced his family’s cooking almost as fervently as it does its diversity.
But when Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the enforcer of President Donald Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration, walked through the door and posed side-by-side, smiling, for a photo with Laurenzo, he unleashed a backlash against El Tiempo that four days later was unabated and forced the suspension of the restaurant’s social media accounts.
The photo of the pair, posted to Facebook, drew immediate and unforgiving vitriol. “We had the honor to server [sic] Mr. Jeff Sessions,†read the caption, captured in screenshots. Patrons demanded a boycott of the Tex-Mex chain, founded by Laurenzo and his father, an immigrant family. Both gave interviews distancing themselves from Sessions’ policies. Others criticized their response, or came quickly to their defense.
There was a time when a celebrity visit to a restaurant was cause for celebration, and possibly a smiling photo on the wall. But the outcry over Sessions’ visit to El Tiempo is the latest in a string of incidents nationwide in which senior members of the Trump administration have been heckled or, in the case of Sarah Huckabee Sanders, asked to leave while trying to eat out, and again revealed an America divided and quick to react — another flash point in the debate over whether politics should affect the way we treat others, personally and as patrons.
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