NJ Restaurant Calls Controversially Named Burger ‘Ignorant Mistake’
Aqua Blu Kitchen & Cocktails stirred the pot now they wanna simmer down the complaints.
PV productions | Shutterstock Fire up the grills for another controversy that will make you wonder why small businesses even get involved in politics. Aqua Blu Kitchen & Cocktails is a restaurant in Toms River, New Jersey. Known for its variety of menu items, from Italian dinners like Enzo’s focaccia della casa to its Americanized burgers like the Aqua Burger, a cheeseburger that includes spicy mayo and hand-cut fries.
According to owners Vincenzo and Caterina Varriale, everything in their restaurant is made from scratch. If this is the case, then it's not just the dishes that they make fresh but also the ideas for their menus.
The owners of an NJ restaurant are removing their controversial MAGA-inspired menu items after receiving customer backlash.
In November 2024, weeks after election night, the restaurant released a promotion featuring new menu items on their Facebook page, which included a burger called The Border Czar and fries called Make Fries Great Again. Both items featured what they thought was the hilariously punny Magadonald’s sauce.
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Outrage over the politicized menu found an outlet on social media, and the attention began to hurt the NJ restaurant's business.
Critics took to Reddit to discuss their opinions on the situation, with many saying that the owners "knew exactly what they were doing."
Others pointed out that the restaurant had done this before when they released a "Sleepy Joe Burger" meant to ridicule former President Joe Biden, who was given the moniker by President Donald Trump.
The controversy ramped up when they did a follow-up menu item called The Proud Boys Burger, named after the American far-right, neo-fascist militant group. The Proud Boys Burger came with white American cheese, onion ring layers of truth, resilience pickles, freedom fries, cancel culture coleslaw, and liberty sauce.
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The NJ Restaurant owner said, ‘It’s a nightmare,’ regarding all of the backlash they received over an ‘ignorant’ mistake.
In an interview with NJ Advance Media, Cathy Varriale said, “We truly apologize. It was a bad decision. It was stupidity. It was ignorance. But we do not support hatred or Nazism or any of that.” She continued, “I know this may sound ridiculous, but I didn’t know what a Proud Boy was. I thought it was, you know, a proud boy.”
Varriale claimed that the idea came from one of the chefs on staff at the restaurant, and while this could have been a simple mistake, there’s evidence to prove otherwise. In fact, on November 29th, 2024, five days after the promotional release of the burgers, Varriale was featured in an article for Industry Magazine. In the article, Cathy praised the restaurant's chef, Oscar Toro, who rejoined the team in 2021 after working for them in 2011.
To be ignorant is to lack information about something. To be a gaslighter is to try to manipulate people into doubting their feelings and memories about an event. The restaurant owners would have people believe that they just coincidentally came out with a Proud Boys Burger in November after an election where tensions in the country were already high, and the winner of that election was the president who praised the same militant group back in 2021.
The restaurant removed the controversial items from its menu, but as with most things nowadays, they live on thanks to the internet. Ultimately, customers and consumers have more power than they realize, as evidenced by the fact that Aqua Blu Kitchen & Cocktails suffered financially for its choices.
Sylvia Ojeda is an author with a decade of experience writing novels and screenplays. She covers self-help, relationships, culture, and human interest topics.