WASHINGTON — A famous restaurant that just opened a location in D.C. has been receiving backlash nationwide after racial allegations surfaced against one of the former owners of the business.
Tadich Grill is being hammered by critics on Yelp, prompting the site to post a warning saying it would delete comments “that appear to be motivated more by the news coverage itself than by the reviewer’s own customer experience.”
The restaurant has been in San Francisco for more than 166 years, and it recently opened a D.C. location on Pennsylvania Avenue in Northwest.
The negative reaction against the business follows a Washington Post article that leveled the allegations against Steve Buich, whose family owns the restaurant.
Buich’s daughter, Terri Upshaw, told the Post that Buich disowned her and has not spoken to her in more than 30 years because she married a black man.
Buich denied the claim in a statement to the San Francisco Chronicle, saying the family rift “has never been a matter of race, but rather the sanctity of marriage.”
Upshaw met the man she would later marry, NFL star Gene Upshaw, in the early 1980s when he was still married to someone else but going through a divorce.
“This personal family matter has nothing to do with Tadich Grill, which I retired from over 20 years ago,” said Buich, a former owner of the restaurant.
“Simply because a dispute involves people of different races does not mean that the dispute is racial in nature.”
Terri and Gene Upshaw married in 1986. They stayed together until Gene Upshaw’s death from cancer in 2008.
