Dallas restaurant owner receives backlash after a viral video alleges racial discrimination

Warning: The embedded video below includes profanity.

Downtown Dallas restaurant Ravenna Italian Grille & Bar survived pandemic-related shutdowns in 2020 and went unscathed when several nearby businesses were damaged during protests last year. But the restaurant’s future is now uncertain after a TikTok video alleging recent racial discrimination triggered a social media backlash last week.

Owner Milan Karadzovski, who opened Ravenna in 2007, says he made his restaurant’s Facebook page private after it received negative comments and reviews. His Yelp reviews are also paused after an overwhelming number of negative reviews in just a few hours. He shut off the restaurant’s phone, because he says he was bombarded with calls from people calling him a racist. He says callers even threatened to burn his restaurant down and made death threats. His blood pressure got so high that he went to an emergency room.

Business has also rapidly declined, Karadzovski says. One woman canceled her food order because she watched the video while sitting in his dining room. She abruptly paid for her drink and left. “I can’t give you my money!” she wrote on the receipt. “Stop the racism!”

Karadzovski says he is worried about his safety, and he will “probably” have to permanently close.

The incident happened on July 30. But the TikTok video gained traction on Wednesday when it appeared on several Instagram accounts.

The video made by Cierra Wright, a makeup artist from Houston, shows her family turned away from Ravenna because one of the men is wearing a tank top, which is against the restaurant’s dress code. The dress code does allow women to wear tank tops, so the man switches shirts with a woman, and the group heads back to the restaurant. But Karadzovski still refuses to allow them inside. He also sticks up his middle finger at the family in front of a dining room full of customers. The group walks away, calling Karadzovski a racist.

Karadzovski says three men initially showed up smelling of marijuana. He says they were loud and walked past check-in and started looking for a table, and he asked them to wait until everyone in their party arrived. A few more people in their party arrived, he says, including the man wearing a tank top. Karadzovski told the men about the dress code and says they seemed to have no problem leaving, but an argument started when the women in the group arrived. They argued that some of the customers inside were wearing tank tops, he says, and he explained that the dress code allowed women to wear sleeveless tops.

“I had Black people sitting inside,” Karadzovski says, adding that a few customers told him they didn’t feel comfortable with the group coming into the dining room. “They got very loud, arguing and yelling. One table yelled back and told them to be quiet.” He says they left but returned “about a minute later,” and the man was wearing a different shirt.

Karadzovski says it was an intense exchange with at least ten people, and he worried it would continue to escalate. When another shouting match started and Karadzovski took offense at being called a racist, he called the police, he says, but officers arrived after the group left.

“If I was what they say I am this would have happened many years ago,” Karadzovski says, adding that he opened his restaurant downtown knowing that it would draw a diverse crowd. “Every restaurant with a dress code is apparently racist. I don’t know what to say about that, but I do have a dress code, and I can’t have people in here smelling of pot and yelling.”

He regrets using his middle finger, but says it was in response to the group yelling obscenities at him. “I need every dollar,” Karadzovski says. “I didn’t want to lose $500 in sales. But I had to protect the people who were already in here spending money, as well as my employees.”

Wright, who filmed the 2-minute video and posted it on her TikTok account, says she and 12 family members ended up having dinner at Hawthorn in the AT&T Discovery District, and they added a $200 tip to their $500 bill. The family was in Dallas celebrating the birthday of her mother, who is a financial analyst with a PhD, and she disagrees with Karadzovski’s version of the events. Wright insists they did not make it past the front door or yell inside the restaurant, and she says no one in her group was high. She says her group got upset when Karadzovski said he didn’t like them, which he denies.

Wright believes her family was turned away due to racial discrimination and adds that many people obviously came to the same conclusion after viewing the video online.

“I believe it happened because we were a large group of African Americans,” Wright tells The Dallas Morning News. “There were no people of color in there. We tried to abide by their dress code, and we were still denied, so what was it then motivated by?”

She says her group, which included children, walked away “distraught and hungry.”

“We were celebrating,” Wright says. “We just wanted somewhere nice to sit down. He ruined the family vacation. He didn’t like us from the moment we walked up. I’m not out to end the restaurant or anybody, but what I would like to come of this is simply for people to treat each other better. That’s what I’m advocating.”

Wright and Karadzovski spoke together on a conference call last week, in which Karadzovski apologized for the negative experience. Wright’s family is considering the possibility of making another video at the restaurant showing that the two parties have reconciled, with Karadzovski making a public apology.

Ravenna Italian Grille restaurant in Downtown Dallas

(Ben Torres / Special Contributor)