The telephone at Aqua Blu Kitchen & Cocktails has been ringing off the hook for days.Its electronic mail inbox has been flooded with loads of passionate messages.The eating place has been a well-liked fixture of the Toms River scene for the previous 13 years. However consideration like this?By no means.“It’s a nightmare,” proprietor Cathy Varriale stated.The rationale: the Proud Boys Burger, a short-lived particular that Varriale stated she deeply regrets.“We in reality do express regret,” she advised NJ Advance Media in an infrequently emotional telephone interview. “It was once a foul choice. It was once stupidity. It was once lack of understanding. However we don’t fortify hatred or Nazism or any of that.”The Proud Boys Burger was once placed on Aqua Blu’s menu on Thursday. An outline of the burger — product of “white American cheese, onion ring layers of fact, resilience pickles, freedom fries, cancel tradition coleslaw, and liberty sauce” — was once posted by means of a buyer to social media, the place it temporarily won traction and fueled outrage.The Proud Boys are a far-right extremist group designated as a hate workforce by means of the Southern Poverty Legislation Heart.In 2023, 4 of the gang’s leaders have been convicted of seditious conspiracy for his or her section in inciting the Jan. 6 Capitol riots. One, Enrique Tarrio, was once sentenced to 22 years in jail, the most harsh punishment passed down with regards to the assault.Tarrio and his co-conspirators, along side greater than 1,500 different rioters, have since been granted clemency by means of President Donald Trump this previous week. Aqua Blu posted an apology to Fb, announcing it will “replicate and be told from this revel in,” and closed their feedback. However that hasn’t stopped the backlash.Folks have known as the Aqua Blu workforce Nazi-lovers, threatened to carry a rally out of doors the construction, and accused her of backpedaling, consistent with Varriale.“I do know this may increasingly sound ridiculous, however I didn’t know what a Proud Boy was once,” she stated. “I assumed it was once, you already know, a proud boy.”The burger was once an concept hatched by means of one in all her cooks, consistent with Varriale.Each and every Thursday for the previous 8 years, Aqua Blu has completed a themed burger night time. Previous specials were named after sports activities groups or the eating place’s regulars. Sometimes the burgers are political — there’s been each a Sleepy Joe and a Trump Burger — however they’ve at all times been supposed as a lighthearted shaggy dog story, Varriale stated.This week, the kitchen was once requested to create two burgers in keeping with a server’s circle of relatives.The primary burger, a “flavorful tribute to a lifestyles smartly lived,” consistent with the menu, was once supposed to memorialize the girl’s father, who’d simply died. The second one was once supposed to honor her husband, who’d simply returned from deployment.The ensuing burger was once touted in a since-deleted submit at the eating place’s Fb web page as “layered with boldness and liberty.” Varriale stated that server’s husband has no hyperlinks to the Proud Boys.She were out of the eating place for many of the day, attending a funeral that morning and a the town corridor assembly within the afternoon. She didn’t notice anything else was once mistaken till her telephone started humming, she stated.Perplexed by means of the fury she was once seeing on-line, Varriale stated she requested her chef whether or not the title of the burger symbolized one thing disrespectful. Her personnel took down the posts and reprinted the menu, nevertheless it was once already too overdue.“Now that I do know what it’s, I utterly perceive,” she stated, getting choked up. “However how do you repair it? I don’t understand how to mend it.”Whilst she was once chatting with NJ Advance Media on Saturday, Varriale needed to pause to box a number of different telephone calls. Throughout one, she might be heard apologizing to the individual at the different finish of the road, a Marine Corps veteran who advised her that the burger was once “disgusting.”“You might be completely appropriate, sir,” Varriale responded. “Any person made a foul choice and we’re paying the results. I express regret and I admire you calling.”Thanks for depending on us to give you the native information you’ll accept as true with. Please imagine supporting NJ.com with a voluntary subscription.AJ McDougall is also reached a amcdougall@njadvancemedia.com. Practice her on X at @oldmcdougall.
