Miriam owner does nice thing, ends up with cringeworthy Daily News article

Photo credit: Todd Maisel/NY Daily News

No good deed goes unpunished. Rafi Hasid, the owner of the popular middle-eastern restaurant Miriam on 5th Avenue, teamed up with an assistant principal at PS 221 in Crown Heights to invite her students to come to his restaurant and learn proper dining out "etiquette."

This is not some big, groundbreaking, new thing that has never been done before. I know that Two Boots has classes from schools throughout the neighborhood come in and they learn how to make pizza and then they get to sit down in the restaurant and eat the pizza. It's called a field trip. 

I'm guessing Mr. Hasid thought, "Hey, I'll call the Daily News and tell them I'm doing this and I'll get some free publicity and shit!" I get it. Nothing wrong with that. Except there's something about the tone of the whole article that makes the whole endeavour sound like some kind of foodie Fresh Air Fund.

First up, the intro:

A restaurateur in chic Park Slope is running a makeshift etiquette academy for some unrefined public school kids.

From this opening sentence, you can tell it's all going to be downhill from here.

“Kids from Park Slope, they come in here with their parents, but kids from other places, it’s a treat. They are from a different economic class,” said Hasid, 38, explaining the motivation for his de facto finishing school.

“It is a big thing for them. They are used to McDonald’s. They are like ‘Wow! I am in a restaurant.’”

But it's not like they want to make these kids more like Park Slope kids. Oh, hell to the no. That would be terrible, as a waitress eagerly points out:

“Each kid leaves me a dollar,” said server Jessica Kimmel, 25,. “They are very polite. They say, ‘Please’ and ‘Thank you.’ And they don’t leave a huge mess when they leave. The Park Slope kids leave crazy messes.”

Oh, those terrible, spoiled, entitled, horrible Park Slope kids. They are disgusting. But at least they know what kale is, unlike Barbara Strum-Downes' students:

“They don’t even know what a vegetable is. They think French fries are vegetables,” Strum-Downes griped. “They have to know that dinner isn’t Chuck E. Cheese’s, McDonald’s or Burger King.”

Wow. Could you sound more judgmental about their parents? Plus, I'm pretty sure both the Big Mac and the Whopper have tomatoes, lettuce and onions. Last I checked, those were vegetables.

Look, I think the owner of Miriam and the assistant principal are doing something great. Too bad the Daily News had to make it sound so obnoxiously classist.