What happens when a restaurant is accused of racial discrimination against Asians and others in viral social media posts? The operators and employees of Great White in Los Angeles are finding out.
The local chain of popular all-day cafes is facing allegations of discrimination after intensifying social media videos claim that Great White segregates customers based on ethnicity and race, which its owners and some employees deny.
Restaurateurs Sam Cooper and Sam Trude operate four locations of their Australian cafe in Venice, Larchmont Village, Brentwood and West Hollywood (the latter of which is also referred to as Great White Melrose for its location on Melrose Avenue).
The Times could not independently verify the discrimination allegations against Great White beyond the verbal claims.
But their spread online sparked chatter of similar alleged practices at another restaurant formerly operated by the Great White owners, Gran Blanco, which has been under new ownership since June 1. When asked about the separate claims, the restaurateurs also called those false.
The Times spoke with nine past and current employees of Great White and Gran Blanco, the Venice restaurant and bar formerly owned by Trude and Cooper. Some employees said they were told to use prejudicial practices such as turning away “ethnic” customers, while others refute the claims. (Gran Blanco’s current owners also issued a separate statement this week saying the restaurant is welcoming to all.)
The recent backlash began with a video posted to Instagram Sept. 29 from a woman sitting at Great White.
“I don’t know if it’s just me but they put all Asians in one corner, and it’s all white people,” diner Cassidy Cho said in her video. She quickly pans around the alfresco area, revealing what appear to be multiple people of color seated on the patio, but patrons who appear of Asian descent are seated along the sides.
Cho could not be reached for comment.
Her video reached thousands of new eyes when social media personality Ed Choi, whose combined TikTok and Instagram accounts have nearly 800,000 followers, shared her account with his own commentary, and has posted more than a dozen updates on the topic since.
“We have never tolerated racism in any way and never will,” Great White owners Trude and Cooper said in a joint statement. “We’ve worked intentionally to create a workplace and community that bring people together from many different backgrounds and cultures around the world. With that comes a responsibility, to ensure that everyone who walks through our doors feels welcome, respected, and safe. These are standards we hold ourselves to every day.”
‘I saw one review that said, “Well, my salmon was undercooked, and now I know it was because I was Asian.”’
— Sage Wiley, server at Great White
With the social media videos on Great White, a fresh string of allegations surfaced about Gran Blanco when it was operated by Trude and Cooper.
Sarah Rose Brier worked at Gran Blanco between 2021 and 2022 in roles including hostess, barback and server. Brier and two other former employees alleged that hosts and doormen at Gran Blanco were told by managers to turn away prospective guests based on race, ethnicity, weight and “vibe.”
Managers at the time at Gran Blanco could not be reached for comment.
“We were told we should not let in ethnic-looking people, that the owners really don’t want that, they want to keep a certain vibe in here,” Brier said.
Brier also said Gran Blanco’s DJs were told to avoid playing rap and hip-hop so as to not attract “a certain crowd in here to make it ‘ghetto.’”
The restaurant Gran Blanco, visible lower left, has been under new ownership since June.
(Alon Goldsmith / For The Times)
Montana Pine, who worked as a Gran Blanco server for roughly three years, said she reported discriminatory statements against employees to management, but “they weren’t receptive to any sort of feedback.”
“It has never been a policy or practice to treat customers differently based on race or any other factor,” Cooper said in response to the Gran Blanco allegations.
Other current and former employees said there are no practices of discrimination within the company, whether pertaining to seating, wait times or internal hiring practices. Such alleged activity would violate California law.
“The allegations are very frustrating,” said Passion Lyons, a former Gran Blanco employee who now works as a manager at Great White. “That hasn’t been the culture there at all.”
Sage Wiley, a server at the Melrose location where Cho’s video was filmed, said that the seats in question are the restaurant’s most requested. “We have people all day long asking to move to outside corners or just an outside table,” she said. “We try our best, but even then people will come up with 1,000 excuses for why they didn’t get what they asked for, or for why they weren’t the ones that got to move outside.”
Wiley said she was working when Cho came to dine and was seated in a corner of the patio. That day, she witnessed multiple people in the video pick their own seats on the patio. Given the restaurant’s popularity, she added, staff members seat diners wherever they immediately can.
Wiley characterized the chatter online as “ridiculous. […] I saw one review that said, ‘Well, my salmon was undercooked, and now I know it was because I was Asian.’ So now you’re saying not only is this front-of-house, but the back-of-house is also trained to apparently racially profile and cook food in that way?”
One commenter online alleged they were seated in a corner because they were wearing a cross necklace. Wiley said that some of the negative comments came from guests whom she’s served for years, which she said hurt her personally.
One of the breakfast bowls at the Great White cafe on Larchmont Boulevard in Los Angeles.
(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)
The onslaught from critics has extended beyond comments on social media posts.
Some staff members said they have received messages calling them racist for defending the restaurant online, and some said they are afraid to come to work. They also said fake reservations and catering orders are now common and some include hateful messages under the memos.
Cooper and Trude’s families are being targeted with harassing phone calls and messages, including being sent photos of Trude’s children’s school, the restaurateur said. Hostesses have fielded callers asking where the restaurant seats certain ethnicities, sometimes using racial slurs over the phone. Multiple employees said this has been particularly distressing as people of color themselves.
“To be someone who has been racially discriminated against, to be someone who’s been called every name under the book, to think that I would actively work at a place that told me I would have to segregate people or start seating people based on their races is, to me, so disheartening,” Wiley said.
“I’ve watched celebrities retweet this — not even ever coming in — automatically assuming we have to be racist,” she added. “This is also just a lesson for me as a human being to not take everything I see online so seriously.”
Much of the allegations’ spread traces back to social media personality Choi, who summarized Cho’s original video on Oct. 2 and who has regularly posted video updates of his own.
Upon seeing Cho’s post, Choi said he began searching for online reviews that might echo the sentiments and found posts alleging racist practices at Great White. Some dated to more than one year ago. Some of Cho’s videos provide screenshots of the negative reviews, along with texts and messages from former employees alleging discriminatory practices and toxic work environments. (Reviews for Great White are currently disabled on Yelp.)
The restaurant’s name is derived from the great white shark species. In one video, Choi likens the shark and the restaurant owners to “colonizers” because the species migrates across the world.
“Great White is named after a shark,” Cooper and Trude wrote. “It has nothing to do with race. Any notion that we have mistreated customers or employees or seated people based on their ethnicity is absolutely outrageous and completely false. Everyone is welcome here.”
Choi also labeled the restaurants’ use of Asian cuisine appropriation and “a restaurant embodiment of colonization.”
The restaurant’s locations serve a broad spectrum of dishes, from avocado toast, smoothie bowls and overnight oats to pizza, falafel, pasta, coconut curry, poke and ceviche. A since-deleted description on Great White’s website called the menu “Coastal Californian, a blend of cultures and backgrounds that … could be found in most coastal areas of Europe, Australia, and the Americas.”
“We have a very diverse staff,” said Lyons, a current employee. “With our food, a lot of Australian dishes are inspired by different cultures, and that’s what we do at Great White. We’re celebrating that.”
As the Great White controversy continues, Choi has since released a video condemning harassment of Great White’s owners. “Making fun of them in the comments and being snarky is one thing, but obviously I do not condone any harassment or anything of that nature,” Choi said.
Last week Choi encouraged former and current Great White and Gran Blanco employees to contact him to potentially coordinate a lawsuit against the businesses.
Choi, a former stand-up comic and clothing brand co-founder, began creating videos recapping social justice-focused news items in 2021, spurred by the Atlanta spa shootings. Multiple comments on Choi’s Great White and Gran Blanco videos accuse the content creator of “attacking” the restaurants for attention and social media engagement. Choi denied this.
Choi was also involved in spurring another online controversy of a restaurant that spread so rapidly it eventually led to its closure. San Francisco’s Kis Cafe closed its doors in July after allegations of rude treatment toward a social media influencer went viral. Chef-owner Luke Sung credited Choi with some of the incident’s virality and vitriol directed at his other restaurant, Domo.
“A guy [on TikTok] named Ed Choi pointed the hate army toward Domo,” Sung told the San Francisco Standard. “People have been leaving hate comments all the way from Copenhagen, England, Malaysia.”
“I woke up today being like, ‘I really hope there’s not an update I have to do today on Great White,’” Choi said. “It’s not great for my mental health to stay on stuff like that because I’m driven a lot by empathy. That’s part of the reason why I do this. I don’t really like to dwell on stories.”
As of Tuesday afternoon Choi had posted 14 videos on Great White or Gran Blanco.
Some Great White employees said that business was down across the restaurant’s locations for the last week.
“I wish that there was more of an effort to really understand the things that have been posted online, because it’s really damaging and it’s not true,” Lyons said. “It doesn’t just affect the [owners]. There are hundreds of employees who come from many different backgrounds, whose lives are being affected by this and [it] could potentially affect their paychecks, their livelihoods.”