Latest / Best of: Features / SF chef of Brenda's French Soul Food goes viral for reading unhinged Yelp review

Transcript

SF chef of Brenda's French Soul Food goes viral for reading unhinged Yelp review · Best of: Features

• 0:05
  SF Chef of Brenda French Soul Food, goes viral for reading Unhinged
• 0:08
  Yelp Review. Written by Jessica Yadegarin. This article is being read
• 0:14
  by an automated voice generated by Everlett. Like most of us, Brenda
• 0:20
  Bonvi's feelings about social media are mixed. The chef and restaurateur of
• 0:25
  Brenda's French Soul Food, one of San Francisco's most reviewed restaurants, has
• 0:29
  read it all, from the swooning marriage proposals over her beignettes to
• 0:32
  write ups so mean they gave her Yelp PTSD. Now, after nearly
• 0:37
  twenty years of business, she barely reads reviews any more. But when
• 0:41
  an unusual, slightly paranoid and ultimately entertaining complaint recently hit her twelve
• 0:46
  thousand eight hundred and forty six review Yelp page, Buen Viaje's social
• 0:50
  media manager Michelle Suarez encouraged the chef to read the review, aloud
• 0:54
  on Instagram. Buenvia never imagined the video would be viewed forty seven
• 0:59
  thousand three hundred times. Part of the reason it's gone viral, you
• 1:03
  quickly learn, is because of the irony. The one star review is
• 1:07
  about how and why every dish the customer ordered, from a sandwich
• 1:10
  to oysters, came out hot. In the video Buen Viahe is standing
• 1:15
  in front of her tenderloin restaurant, clutching a printout of The
• 1:18
  review with a sauce stained towel tucked into her black chef's apron.
• 1:22
  My food was served so hot, temperature wise, that the food burned
• 1:26
  my tongue and the roof of my mouth, and all of my
• 1:28
  food came out that super hot. Buen Viahe reads, totally deadpan. The
• 1:32
  catfish was first. I
• 1:33
  couldn't believe it. I had to wait for fried fish to cool
• 1:36
  down. I feel like I'm being gaslighted as if you don't eat
• 1:39
  a sandwich right when it's served to you, right? I'm not crazy,
• 1:43
  right? The review goes on, with the customer saying that the only
• 1:47
  food usually requiring cool down time is soup. Then it was time
• 1:51
  for the baigne. No surprise here? It was hot as hell, reads
• 1:55
  the Louisiana native, her voice echoing for dramatic effect as the camera
• 1:58
  suddenly goes black and white and zooms in on her face. I
• 2:02
  can't even tell you how the food tasted because my taste buds
• 2:05
  are all burnt off. The weirdest dining experience of my life. Got
• 2:09
  me paranoid like someone had to bribe y'all to kill my taste
• 2:12
  buds. Because why did that happen with all the dishes I ordered?
• 2:15
  I'm never going back. General manager Andrew Bloom responded on Yelp with,
• 2:21
  We're sorry to hear you didn't enjoy the hot food, and recommended
• 2:24
  the kale salad for next time. Buen Viahe called the whole thing
• 2:28
  comedic gold. Oh my God, it's so funny, she told S F
• 2:32
  Gate of the Review. That's the genius of how it turned itself
• 2:34
  on its head. It's satire. What it does is it gives us
• 2:37
  a place to really make fun of where we are now as
• 2:40
  a society. She wasn't always able to laugh about social media. Buenviaje
• 2:45
  has experienced its highest highs, Brenda's is the number two most Yelped
• 2:49
  restaurant in the Bay Area, number five in the state, and its
• 2:52
  scornful lows. Back in twenty twenty she was almost cancelled after people
• 2:56
  falsely accused her of pretending to be black. Her restaurant appeared on
• 3:01
  a widely circulated list of black owned businesses, but Buen Viaje, who
• 3:05
  is Filipina and originally from the New Orleans area, did not put
• 3:09
  Brendas on the list and has never claimed to be black. It
• 3:12
  escalated to the point that diners left without paying. Others stormed into
• 3:17
  the restaurant just to threaten her staff. It was really rough, she
• 3:20
  said. It caused me to pause in so many ways, and it
• 3:23
  took me a few years to come out of it. Buen Viahe
• 3:27
  still remembers when Yelp first launched in San Francisco in 2004. She
• 3:30
  opened her tenderloin restaurant a few years later, in 2007. The Divisadero
• 3:36
  location opened in 2014. Oakland followed in 2019. Yelp was just taking
• 3:41
  off and we had throngs of customers, she recalls. I was being
• 3:45
  Yelp to death, and obviously not all the reviews were complimentary or
• 3:49
  constructive. Imagine giving birth to this baby, and people go Brenda is
• 3:54
  effing ugly and not worth the wait, she said. That is deeply
• 3:58
  personal. You know if someone injures you that badly it's going to
• 4:01
  come out in other was People told me I should stop reading
• 4:04
  them. She did for the most part, eventually appointing her management team
• 4:08
  to take over the chore, keeping watch for anything of substance. To
• 4:12
  this day the reviews that irk her the most are what she
• 4:15
  calls the would be professional, or expert in the room, talking about
• 4:20
  the one time they went to New Orleans and how it wasn't
• 4:22
  like Brenda's. I get that your mom's gumbo was thinner, she said.
• 4:26
  Just come in and enjoy it. For years Buen Viahe regretted naming
• 4:31
  the restaurant after herself, like it made her a more vulnerable target
• 4:35
  on social media, but now she realizes it was more of a
• 4:38
  blessing than a curse. One of my biggest life issues is not
• 4:42
  getting credit for all my efforts as a woman and Filipina in
• 4:45
  food, she said. But now I realize that I actually did myself
• 4:48
  a huge favor. And she added, she's not afraid of Yelp or
• 4:52
  any kind of public scrutiny any more.