Imagine Vegan Café, a family run restaurant in Memphis, Tennessee is the latest establishment to become famous on the internet for the wrong reasons. After the restaurant received a two-star review on Google, the owner pounced on the reviewer refusing to admit any wrongdoing even after thousands of comments.
meanwhile in memphis: a vegan cafe is losing its mind on facebook because a yelp reviewer said the owner's kids showed them their butthole pic.twitter.com/LgkrTGsojW
Chelsea Bartley started her Google review of Imagine Café by admitting that she would probably eat there again, even though “a bare butt naked baby was running around” when she ate there. The most shocking part of her review is that Chelsea goes on to claim that this same free-spirit naked baby “bent over to show me it’s butthole,” inspiring the #ButtholeGate hashtag and providing hilarious mental images for anyone who happened to come across this story on their Twitter timelines today.
But the owner of Imagine was not about to let this negative review go without a fight, and launched a full on personal attack on Chelsea and anyone who might agree with her on the restaurant’s Facebook account. Imagine's entire Facebook account has now been deleted, but not after enough screenshots were taken to fuel Twitter for a couple of hours.
Imagine’s owner responded to many of the thousands of comments on their original post. These responses managed to maintain the same level of fiery rage as the first post, with the owner claiming that “One of the reasons Imagine exists is to allow children to be children,” “Imagine isn’t about business or being professional!” and even bizarrely claiming that “Buttholes are completely different” without explaining what they are different to.
These kinds of incendiary replies to restaurant reviews are seemingly always bad for business and end up sounding downright ridiculous - the entire phenomenon has even inspired a pretty funny Jimmy Fallon skit - but that was clearly not an issue for the owners of Imagine to the delight of everyone who has been following #ButtholeGate. “For anyone who reads this and instantly is scared this might affect our business, I cannot begin to tell you how much we do not care. Haters are not welcome at Imagine!!!!” wrote the restaurant’s owner in the original Facebook post, proving this had already crossed the line into personal territory and that the health of the restaurant took second place.
