Recently, I walked into Pancho’s Cantina with some friends for dinner. While we were waiting to be seated we looked over the crayon drawings covering the walls. The drawings were quite disturbing. They were of the Twin Tower, which could have been a nice tribute, but they were graphically violent. I thought it was a bit distasteful to see guns and knives and bullets going through men’s head’s with blood coming out the other side. I also thought it was a bit worrisome to see these drawings were clearly meant to represent Muslim men; they were wearing turbans. I hoped that they were meant specifically to be Osama Bin Laden. Although I am not a revengeful person and hate to think of children depicting such violent scenes of vengeance and brutality, I had some measure of understanding that this is a tragedy that we went through as a country which is difficult to come to terms with. Aside from the fact that I think there are better ways to deal with it than drawing bloody cartoons all over the walls 9 years later, I was horrified when I saw a sentence scrawled out in crayon: “damn towel heads”. I gasped. My friends pointed out to me that the drawings and words were probably the work of adults; not children. It hadn’t occurred to me, but seemed correct. We immediately left. We would never give our business to a company we knew to depict racist and hateful images and words. I could only imagine how discomforting and threatening such a sight would be to a Muslim family if they came in for some good Southwestern food. Poncho’s will never receive business from me or anyone I know if this is not amended. I imagine that others feel the same way and I hope they have written too to show their displeasure. Alienating a portion of your consumers and offending a portion of the human race is no way to conduct business and I am appalled it was allowed to happen.
Pros: Good Sampler of Buffalo-wings, etc
Cons: Offensive Wall-drawings
more