A confrontation last weekend between the owner of downtown ramen shop Table to Stix and a customer over tipping has gone viral on social media, with CBS News Chicago even covering the incident on Thursday.
On Saturday, April 19, a customer at the restaurant paid for a $19.89 tab with a $20 bill, which kicked off a dispute. Kenny Chou, who owns Table to Stix, followed that customer out of the shop and down Davis Street.
That’s when someone started recording the confrontation, and the two proceed to exchange words. In the video, which has since been removed from a Reddit thread by the site’s content moderators, Chou demands that the young man tip or not come back. The customer tells Chou that he paid what he owed, and that a tip was optional.
As the recording continues, Chou grows angrier as the customer tells him to back off. “What are you going to do?” the young man asks repeatedly, then saying that the video will “blow up on social media.”
The RoundTable couldn’t reach the customer, who later filed a police report for harassment, according to the Evanston Police Department and Councilmember Devon Reid, who mentioned the incident at his ward meeting Thursday night. An EPD spokesperson said Friday that officers are currently following up to investigate the matter.
In Chou’s telling, before the confrontation shown in the video took place, he asked the customer why he hadn’t tipped, and that the customer suggested that if the restaurant was struggling to make ends meet, Chou should raise prices. Chou said he then asked what a reasonable price point would be for the order, to which the customer suggested $25. He then asked if he could charge that amount instead, which is when the customer left.
Chou admitted that he snapped out of frustration. He said this particular customer had tried his patience during previous visits, and that the baseline stress level for most restaurant workers and owners is high, especially of late with the Trump administration’s tariff plans.
Still, he made no excuses for losing his cool.
Regardless, the video went semi-viral on multiple Reddit forums. In the comments, people took both sides, with many accusing Chou of racially-motivated harassment of the customer, who is Black. Others said Chou’s frustration was justified over the lack of a tip, and that restaurant workers rely on tips for their wages.
On Monday, messages appeared in chalk on sidewalks around downtown Evanston, including one in front of Table to Stix that said “Anti-Black, Do Not Eat Here.”
A group of Black community leaders and local activists announced Friday that they’re holding a press conference and boycott outside the restaurant from 3 to 5 p.m. Saturday to protest “a confrontation that community members have condemned as racially motivated, dangerous, and unacceptable,” legislative advocate Meleika Gardner said in a Friday newsletter.
“This boycott is about real consequences and real healing — not branding exercises, not performative gestures,” Gardner wrote. “The community is asking for an act of courage: that Kenny Chou reach out to the young man and ask what repair looks like to him. And if he is sincere, to offer a public apology to the Black community in person, not just through media outlets.”
City commission joins the discussion
The incident also entered the realm of official city business on Thursday, when a vaguely worded item — “Community concerns regarding an incident at a local business” — appeared on the Equity and Empowerment Commission’s meeting agenda.
According to the website for the nine-member commission, its goal is to “identify and eradicate inequities in City services.”
Ensconced in the City Council’s new digs at 909 Davis St., members first discussed the drafting of an equity scorecard before casting their attention one block away.
Speaking to the RoundTable in his restaurant an hour earlier, Chou was unaware that his actions would be the subject of commission debate. To judge by the gathering’s attendance (the audience consisted of two people, not including this reporter), very few were.
Nonetheless, some commission members spoke passionately on the subject.
“This is not the first time that Black residents have mentioned that they’ve had incidents of harassment at restaurants in Evanston,” said Christine S. Escobar, although she was unclear about what had become of one other business she referenced, also a noodle shop.
Escobar wanted to know: Could the commission issue a statement condemning owners like Chou or supporting the aggrieved diners? What policies or legislation did Evanston have on the books related to “hate crimes”? And could fines be imposed on business owners who “harass somebody in this manner?”
Fellow commissioner Jacqueline Mendoza offered a a sympathetic ear, agreeing that “as people of color, we don’t want that kind of behavior.” She had encountered it herself, she noted. But, she asked, “Does this actually fall under our purview?”
Deputy City Manager Stephen J. Ruger interjected to say that the city lacks any clear ability to intervene.
Across town on Thursday night at his last Eighth Ward meeting as a councilmember, Devon Reid noted that the incident was reported to the Evanston Police Department, which is starting to investigate the matter, an EPD spokesperson said Friday.
Several commissioners brushed past Ruger’s comment, though. Commissioner Amari Radcliffe said that “a lot of people” who had written complaints about Table to Stix on Google, Yelp and other review pages “have been silenced” because of those websites shutting down comments. Yelp, for instance, currently shows an “unusual activity alert” on its Table to Stix page.
“This business recently received increased public attention, which often means people come to this page to post their views on the news,” the Yelp alert says. “While we don’t take a stand one way or the other when it comes to this incident, we’ve temporarily disabled the posting of content to this page as we work to investigate whether the content you see here reflects actual consumer experiences rather than the recent events.”
Radcliffe took issue with review services disabling comments, though, saying that “this is real stuff that’s happening to our Black and Brown communities, and it’s not fair to keep it quiet.”
Commissioner Molly Malone weighed in, too. The commission “should do something,” she said, although a statement struck her as somewhat insufficient. Could the commission “bring restaurant owners together and talk to them and provide better resources,” or find “a more impactful way of supporting our community members who are experiencing the discrimination?” she asked.
Ultimately, commissioners decided they should draft a statement or letter of some sort and await legal approval from the city to to send it.
Impact on business
How a commission-issued condemnation would affect Chou, his business or simmering racial tensions in the community is unclear.
Meanwhile, Table to Stix has unplugged its phone lines and deactivated its social media. The CBS Chicago story depicted one among a number of threatening, expletive-laden calls the business has received since the incident. The backlash has kept Chou’s wife awake at night, he said.
Chou added that he immigrated to the U.S. from South Korea with his family when he was 5, and he grew up in Lincolnwood. He’s run Table to Stix with his wife for the last 10 years.
As patrons began filling up the restaurant’s handful of tables and ordering dinner on Thursday evening, he told the RoundTable he had spoken with the customer’s brother and sent him home with his favorite meal, on the house, along with a handwritten note. He referred to the apology he made on television as the “first step” in a “learning process … a lesson in awareness.”
But despite his stated desire to make amends and return to some semblance of normal, Chou said he’s uncertain what else he can do to bring unity. That, he said, is “the scariest thing.”
Gardner said the boycott group had invited Chou to address the demonstrators on Saturday, but Chou has not yet replied, though “community members are hoping he will choose to be present and take responsibility in a meaningful way,” she wrote.
A future solution?
Reid, the Eighth Ward’s outgoing councilmember, briefly addressed the situation at Thursday night’s meeting at the Levy Senior Center.
While he noted that the police are looking into the incident, he suggested that one way to prevent these kinds of incidents in the future is by eliminating the subminimum wage for tipped workers (although Chou’s personal situation is a little bit different as the owner of the restaurant, too).
As of Jan. 1, the Cook County minimum wage is $15 an hour for non-tipped workers and $9 an hour for tipped workers. Reid has proposed doing away with the subminimum wage so that service workers no longer have to rely on tips to make up the difference.
“I would encourage businesses in Evanston to look into alternatives to tipping. It’s unfair to servers that they have to rely on the generosity of patrons. It’s unfair to patrons to not know what the cost might be up front,” Reid said Thursday. “There are a number of states that have banned tipping and moved toward a service fee model, or let the businesses determine how to appropriately pay their servers a living wage. That’s been quite successful.”
