People on the Internet never cease to amaze me with the way they dig random things up and catch people doing the craziest, most bizarre stuff. Yesterday, some folks at 4Chan somehow tapped into the unsecured security webcams that are allegedly in the kitchen of Jersey Joe’s Pizzeria in San Diego, and they caught the gentleman in the above image whackin’ it.
Naturally, once the image went viral, people absolutely had a field day with Jersey Joe’s Yelp page, which obviously has the restaurant’s owner, Giusepp Scire, rather pissed off since, you know, he denies that the kitchen is even the same as the one in his restaurant.
“It is not me [in the photo] and that’s not my pizzeria,” Scire told HuffPost Weird News.
Scire said that he “fired two guys recently” and suggested that he might be the victim of a disgruntled ex-employee.
In the restaurant today, Scire said he hadn’t heard of the tongue-in-cheek Yelp reviews, saying, “I’m just going to call the cops.” (Via HuffPo Weird)
Two thoughts on this:
1) An easy way to determine whether or not the man in the image is Scire or one of his employees would be to look at Scire and his employees and compare. It sucks that people can just randomly unleash an Internet PR assault on your restaurant, but as we learned from the Arizona psycho bakery debacle, there’s a good way to handle this kind of accusation and bad ways. The good way is to just call the news and give an interview or give any of the websites running these kinds of stories – and some of them are much worse in terms of “guilty until proven innocent” – a picture of the staff in the actual kitchen. Otherwise, people are going to unload every bad sausage joke they can think of because of an image like this that leads people to believe that is Scire, in the kitchen, with the meat pipe:
2) I obviously don’t want an innocent man’s business to be affected by some awful Internet prank, but if you’re currently in San Diego for Comic-Con 2013, maybe make sure that the people making your food have washed their hands.
In the meantime, here are some of the Yelp reviews: