Delco Country Club Restaurant Tavola Hit With Racial Discrimination Suit
A former employee alleges that white workers routinely refused to serve Black customers and that she regularly was forced to listen to racist jokes.
The subject of the lawsuit is Tavola, the restaurant at Springfield Country Club in Delco. / Photograph by Victor Fiorillo
I’ve never been to the restaurant Tavola at Springfield Country Club in Delco. What I’ve heard about the restaurant over the years is that they serve mediocre country club food at inflated prices. And then there was the alleged food poisoning of a bunch of people at Tavola. Those incidents led to the restaurant temporarily shutting down. So I haven’t exactly been itching to get over there. And now, one Delco woman has filed a federal lawsuit against Tavola and three managers there, making it sound like a pretty bad place for Black people.
Amanda Tucker, who is Black, filed the suit. She named as defendant the LLC that operates Tavola. Tucker also named restaurant managers Steven Smith, Jacqueline Wagner, and Sophie Portnoy, all of whom are white.
Tucker says she started working at Tavola as a server in 2021 and that during the time she worked there, she and her sister were the only Black servers. According to Tucker, white workers at Tavola routinely made nasty jokes about Black people, white servers at Tavola refused to take tables of Black customers even though the tables were in their sections, and management would force Tucker and her sister to take tables of Black customers even though they weren’t in their sections.
She alleges that on one occasion, a large table of Black customers was seated, and another server asked Tucker, “Are they your cousins?” Another time, she claims, a manager told her that her braids in her hair “looked ghetto.” She says that once, when a table walked out without paying their bill, management told her she had to cover the cost of the bill, despite the restaurant routinely comping such checks when it happened to white servers.
Tucker names server Joe Christina as one of the worst. She alleges that he frequently made racist jokes and other disparaging remarks about Black people. She also claims that Christina was one of the servers who refused to serve Black customers. He wouldn’t even serve Eagles player Brandon Graham, she alleges.
The lawsuit says these are just a few examples of many.
According to the suit, Tucker reported these issues to management, but nothing was done. So she went to an executive at the country club to see if she could get help there. But, she says, the executive didn’t do anything to help her. And she claims that after she went to him, managers and servers at Tavola started referring to her as a “snitch” and a “rat” and retaliated against her in various ways that negatively impacted her paycheck. Eventually, she alleges, management retaliated against her by firing her.
“This is hardly surprising,” says a Black restaurant server in Delco who asked that we not use her name. “Unfortunately, this has been the norm in my restaurant life here.”
Shortly after we published this article, Tavola provided the following statement:
At Tavola, we are deeply committed to fostering a safe, inclusive, and respectful environment for both our employees and guests. Any suggestion otherwise is upsetting to us and does not reflect our values or how we operate. While we are limited in what we can share due to ongoing legal proceedings, we look forward to the opportunity for the facts to be presented in court and are confident that the truth will prevail in our favor.
More on this as it develops.
