Many residents in the Castro were amused when a nondescript restaurant on 18th Street transformed five years ago into an Indian/Pakistani restaurant called Curry Boyzz perhaps in an attempt to pander to the neighborhood's gay population. But here's a story about them that should amuse no one. An SFist reader recently had a run-in with the restaurant's delivery person Sunday night that's pretty shocking given how many deliveries he likely makes to gay households on a nightly basis. And, after contacting the restaurant to tell them about the treatment he received, this reader did not receive so much as an apology from them, despite the verbal attack coming with a delivery order that was two hours late.
Here's the account, from five-year resident of the Castro Gary R., which includes the odd coincidence that two separate orders were placed from his household to Curry Boyzz (including a roommate's), which is just a few blocks from his house.
My partner and I were having a lazy Sunday and decided to get delivery rather than cook or go out to dinner. We settled on Curry Boyzz, we could've walked there but again, lazy Sunday (we live about 6 blocks uphill from the restaurant on Corbett). After 1 hour 45 minutes of waiting on our food I called the restaurant to make sure they were still coming. They claimed that we had just ordered, which wasn't true. Turns out our room mate had just ordered from there (crazy coincidence) and they were going to send both orders, ours just insanely late.
2 1/2 hours after we ordered, our food shows up (just our order, not the room mate's). No explanation or apology. The driver quickly handed off our food to our room mate and ran down the stairs. Our room mate Drew said he would take a shower and asked us to listen for his delivery. About 15 minutes later the driver showed up and tried to hand off his food and book it.
I asked him what was up with the ridiculous wait, and why we didn't get any explanation the first time. He barked at me "if you wanted your food fast then don't order delivery!" I angrily said "Excuse me? What kind of horrible attitude is that, we waited over 2 1/2 hours for food.." but before I could finish he was screaming at me "FUCK YOU FAGGOT! FUCK YOU YOU FUCKING FAGGOT!!!" as he got back in his car. I was horrified and naturally extremely pissed off.
After Gary called the restaurant to complain and insist that the driver be fired, he says he was offered no apology, only an insincere pledge that the owner would "talk to" the driver, whom Gary describes a tall man in his late 20s, possibly of South Asian or Middle Eastern origin.
They said they would ask the driver what happened. They really just shrugged it off. They offered to chat with him and when I said that wasn't good enough and they should fire him the manager sarcastically said "oohhhh sure, yeah we will definitely fire him... Uh huh". All I could get the manager on duty to agree to was to have a talk with the driver. No apology was given, though when I asked him if this seemed like acceptable service he said "no.. It isn't acceptable." That's as close to an apology I received. Not even so much as an offer for a refund, though to be fair I didn't ask for one either.
On their website, Curry Boyzz describes itself as a "family-friendly restaurant," which can sometimes be code for "anti-gay," though Gary says he's never had trouble with them before and hadn't heard of anyone else experiencing anything like this either.
Just two weeks ago, however, there was a review on Yelp describing a similar problem with an extremely late delivery, and a rude response from the restaurant claiming that the lateness of the food was not their fault. Also, here's another from November.
Will the neighborhood stand for this? There's certainly no excuse for any service-industry person, or any person at all for that matter, to spew hate like that in 2015, let alone in the Castro.
One can assume an apology might come if noise about this incident comes back at the restaurant. Stay tuned.