Trumpers attack wrong Red Hen restaurant [View all]

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Threats, Bad Reviews For Connecticut Restaurant After Sarah Huckabee Sanders Was Refused Service At Virginia Eatery With Same Name

Shelley Deproto, who has owned the restaurant (in Old Saybrook, CT) for five years picked up the phone and “They said, ‘You’re done, and we’re coming to get you’. She soon realized the callers didn’t care. “You calmly and politely explain there’s no affiliation, but they’re so wound up it doesn’t matter what you say,” she said. “They’re ready to go. They say what they were going to say, which is usually something incredibly insulting and threatening.”

Soon, the Facebook pages and Instagram accounts of the Old Saybrook Red Hen were flooded with vitriol. Deproto took them down. The restaurant’s online reservation system was flooded with fake bookings for large parties. A “Nancy Reagan” and a “Sarah Sanders” took out reservations. Callers placed large, expensive takeout orders for 100 people that Deproto was not naive enough to fill.

She changed the voicemail greeting to stress her restaurant was in Connecticut. But the calls kept coming, mostly from area codes in North Carolina, Colorado and Texas, she said, a new snarling voice every 15 seconds. “As fast as I could delete the messages, we’d get another one.”

She’s now working with Yelp and TripAdvisor to expunge the scores of poor reviews left by people who have never set foot in Connecticut. She has not ruled out a name change.

Full story here http://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-news-red-hen-old-saybrook-20180624-story.html