A racist and ranting white customer threatened to call federal immigration officials on workers at a Midtown restaurant — because they spoke in Spanish.
A viral video of the Tuesday lunchtime explosion captured the condescending patron declaring the employees were in “my country” before ripping into the manager of the Fresh Kitchen on Madison Ave.
“Your staff is speaking Spanish to customers when they should be speaking English,” the man announces. “Every person I listened to — he spoke it, he spoke it, she’s speaking it.
“This is America. Your staff should be speaking English, OK?”
The fuming man then informed the manager that he planned to follow up by contacting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for a possible raid on the restaurant.
“My guess is they’re not documented,” he announces loudly. “So my next call is to ICE to have each one of them kicked out of my country. If they have the b—s to come here and live off my money?
“I pay for their welfare, I pay for their ability to be here. The least they can do is speak English.”
The manager told the Daily News that the unidentified customer, clutching a cell phone in one hand, completely misread the situation.
A lunchtime regular was speaking Spanish with a Hispanic employee as they did most days when the man began his diatribe.
“They were speaking Spanish because they are friends,” the manager said. “He got mad, waiting in line for his food. He stormed out.”
The manager said he was infuriated by the customer’s remarks but refused to respond in a similar fashion.
“He’s a customer, so I had to stay professional and ask him to leave,” the manager said. “That’s what I did.”
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