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Dallas restaurant owner Kyle Noonan told Fox Nation's Tomi Lahren that he received overblown, negative media backlash after he legally reopened his business.
"What was fascinating to me was our guests, our consumers, our communities – we got almost zero pushback," said Noonan in an eye-opening new episode of Fox Nation's "No Interruption with Tomi Lahren."
"The only place we got pushback is really two entities – one was the kind of Twitter mob that really, frankly, isn't our guest anyway and then the other entity was the media."
On May 1, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced that select businesses in certain counties were allowed to open their doors again. Restaurants were permitted to reopen at just 25 percent capacity and on Friday that limit will be raised to 50 percent.
Noonan said that when he learned that restaurants were allowed to start serving customers again, he was more concerned with the public reaction than anything else.
"The restaurant industry has worked with local, state and federal health agencies for decades on running clean, safe sanitary environments for not only the staff, but also the guests," he told Lahren.
"My real concern," he continued, "was the pushback that we might get when we opened that 25 percent, which we were allowed to do."
"We had a lot of reporters come out and try and skew stories negatively toward the restaurant industry," he claimed, saying that the coverage ignored that, "business owners... were just trying to survive and thrive during this pandemic and feed their families and employ their teams."
"The media was kind of pushing back on us. That became a really disheartening unintended result of this," he said.
Laura Rea Dickey, CEO of Dickey's Barbecue Restaurants Inc., who joined Noonan on "No Interruption," echoed that sentiment.
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"I... worried about the media more than anything, coming in with a perspective as opposed to just come in and see what's happening," she said. "It's a really wonderful thing to have folks back in the dining room, to be able to add hours back to our pit crews, because it absolutely is the difference in existing and living."
Finally, Noonan and Dickey said that their biggest concern moving forward is whether the pace of the reopening of the country will be too slow to help struggling businesses.
"Movie theaters closing is a bad thing for restaurants because there is that thing called dinner and a movie," said Noonan. "We want movie theaters open and we want parks open. But we want malls open. We want travel, because it's all interlinked. And so the quicker we can do that as a country, the better off we all are. And so that's my biggest fear, is that it takes too long."
To watch all of "No Interruption," and hear more stories from business owners struggling to cope with an unprecedented time, go to Fox Nation.
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