In July, the Phoenix restaurant Oven + Vine reopened indoor dining, with a catch: customers would have to present a vaccination card.
It only took a few days for the protests to begin.
For the past few weeks, the cozy neighborhood wine bar on West Van Buren Ave in Midtown has unexpectedly been the center of a right-wing harassment campaign after news of its vaccine needs went viral.
“It was a little scary,” said Michelle Bethge, who owns the restaurant with her husband Dylan Bethge. On Tuesday the scene at Oven + Vine was peaceful; At one point, a couple stopped to praise Bethge for the restaurant’s security measures while diners sipped wine on the shaded terrace.
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But just a few weeks earlier, a group of several dozen protesters had demonstrated the restaurant, sang “Freedom” and harassed customers according to videos posted on the group’s Telegram channel. The restaurant received a spate of threatening phone calls and emails; Bethge’s home address and personal telephone number were posted online. She feared that things would get “violent,” she said.
“I didn’t do it because I thought it would be a problem,” said Bethge of her decision to make vaccination mandatory. Some members of her family are at high risk for Covid, she explained, and because the restaurant space is “really small”, Oven + Vine has not allowed food indoors since the pandemic began. When the restaurant decided to open inside in mid-July, vaccination records seemed like a natural safety measure.
Oven + Vine guests are asked to show their vaccination card to be served indoors, but customers without a vaccination certificate can still sit outside – “I don’t care what concerns them,” said Bethge. She assumed the restaurant was small enough that the policy would “go under the radar”. It has not.
The harassment campaign was initiated in part by a notorious anti-mask protester in the Phoenix area, Ethan Schmidt, who showed up to Oven + Vine days after AZFamily posted a story about the restaurant’s vaccine policy. In the video, Schmidt confronts Bethge, warns that she will be “blown all over the Internet” and refuses to leave the property. At one point he turns to the guests and scoffs: “You are communists, I suppose.” He was later arrested, as documented in videos from his Instagram page, for doing similar antics in a sports bar in Scottsdale.
In a phone call, Schmidt bragged to the Phoenix New Times that he was “heavily banned on the entire Internet” and that he was fighting for “human rights”. Oven + Vine guests, he claimed, had “allied against and harassed me,” although his video of the incident only shows one customer calmly telling him to leave when he refuses.
However, this video went viral, garnering more than 200,000 views on TikTok, and finding its way onto various channels of Telegram, an app that has emerged as a breeding ground for right-wing misinformation about the pandemic.
Oven + Vine got phone calls – hundreds, said Bethge, that have slowed down but haven’t stopped yet. When she spoke to the New Times, an unfamiliar number called her phone, which she put on voicemail. “That could be one,” she said. The callers left numerous voicemails, some of them threatening: “Hello Michelle,” said a caller in a voicemail played by Bethge. “We all know what you are doing. It’s against the constitution, it’s against civil rights. ”One caller, she recalled,“ said she hoped our building would be struck by lightning and burned to the ground. ”
E-mails that Oven + Vine received were similarly rough: “Are you not a person ?! Are you a communist ??? DISGUSTING !!! “reads an email Bethge shared with the New Times; others called the owners fascists.
Of course, despite the protesters’ claims, vaccine mandates by private companies aren’t illegal (and the question of vaccine status doesn’t violate HIPAA, which Bethge said was a common refrain among critics). If a disability prevents a person from getting a vaccine, companies need to provide shelter, some legal experts say – but Oven + Vine at least does it by providing outdoor seating.
Yet protesters have seized the few local companies that have started implementing vaccine mandates. This could be a reason Phoenix companies have been more reluctant to do so while cities like New York enact vaccine requirements for restaurants. Oven + Vine is currently one of the very few restaurants in town that has taken on the requirement. A search on Yelp that now allows you to filter establishments based on their vaccination policies returned no results for restaurants in Phoenix that require proof of vaccination. In Los Angeles, by comparison, nearly 20 were found.
A local restaurant owner who asked not to be identified for fear of inciting further harassment was also protested and dooxed after mandating a vaccine: “The response was visceral,” he said, adding that he made the allegations who thought protesters was absurd, but “hundreds of people telling you you’re a Nazi” was still hard to take. In a matter of days, its restaurant’s Yelp rating dropped a full point as protesters flooded it with bad reviews.
The tide could turn, however: This week, the cocktail bar MercBar announced that proof of vaccination will also be required for the service. And at least Oven + Vine has no plans to change the policy. The harassment, said Bethge, “is in waves” as her address and phone number are republished. But she added, “We got a lot of love too.” The restaurant had found new customers who felt safer with the compulsory vaccination. All in all, said Bethge, the business was “busier than we expected”.
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