North End restaurant owners upset by last year's outdoor-dining fee now claim Mayor Wu hates white, Italian men

The owners of several North End restaurants have amended their lawsuit over the fees Boston charged North End restaurants to set up tables on sidewalks and in parking spaces last year to add a new charge: That Mayor Wu imposed the fees only in the North End because of her hatred of white, Italian men.

In the latest version of their suit, filed today in Boston federal court, the owners of Vinoteca di Monica, Monica's Trattoria, Antico Forno, Terramia Ristorante and Rabia's Dolce Fumo present what they claim is irrefutable proof: A joke Wu told at last year's St. Patrick's Day breakfast in South Boston and her promotion of a Boston tourism campaign aimed at Black and brown people.

On March 17, 2022, Defendant attended a St. Patrick's Day breakfast in South Boston, at which function she made a speech and specifically stated "I'm getting used to dealing with problems that are expensive, disruptive and WHITE."

It is commonly known that the traditional owner of a restaurant in the North End of Boston is a white male of Italian descent, and the North End is generally regarded as the last true ethnic Boston Italian neighborhood.

Judge Indira Talwani, who is overseeing the case, got her BA at Harvard and has been a judge in the federal courthouse in South Boston since 2013, so she might be aware of the nature of the St. Patrick's Day breakfast as a place for politicians to tell bad jokes that most people forget by the next day. Also, two of the plaintiffs are not white, Italian men, but women, and three have last names not traditionally thought of as Italian.

But even aside from that, the restaurant owners say more proof of the mayor's alleged visceral hatred of white, Italian men comes in the city's current $1.5-million All Inclusive Boston campaign, aimed in large part at convincing minority residents of other areas that Boston is actually a fun multi-culti place to visit, rather than the racist hive many people still think it is.

Wu, they allege, committed such affronts as ensuring "the overwhelming majority of the marketing, promotion and contractors were women and/or minorities" - including, if it can be believed, giving a contract to Black woman in public relations who publicly announced the goal of "driving visitors and residents alike to visit some of the traditionally under visited small businesses in neighborhoods like Roxbury, Chinatown, Dorchester, the South End, and more."

Worse, one video produced for the program doesn't show a single white guy, save for a three-second blip of Red Sox players, and certainly no white, Italian men, the complaint alleges.

The complaint alleges that the Neighborhoods page on the All Inclusive Web site completely omits the North End, although the page, at least as of today, does have a link to a North End page that even lists two of the restaurants involved in the suit as places to eat in the neighborhood.

In addition to playing the racism card, the new complaint also swaps in a couple of new plaintiffs. Gone is Christian Silvestri, originally listed as the owner of Rabia's Dolce Fumo on Salem Street. Instead, the suit now lists Jason and Kim Silvestri as Rabia's owners.

Much of the rest of the complaint is a recap of their initial complaint, in which the restaurant owner allege their due-process and equal-protection rights were violated by being forced to pay $7,500 for the 2022 outdoor dining season when restaurant owners in the rest of the city did not, and by being excluded from a meeting about the fees, which Wu claims were aimed at paying for the unique costs of letting private restaurants take over parts of public sidewalks and streets in the the densely packed, restaurant-heavy North End: Increased trash and rodent and police issues and the loss of parking spaces used by residents.

They also continue to argue they are owed $1.5 million each in damages.

In October, Talwani told the restaurant owners - the Silvestris, Carla Gomes, Jorge Mendoza and Patrick Mendoza - she was inclined to dismiss the case completely, after city attorneys argued the restaurant owners had no legal "standing" to bring the case, in part because any alleged damage the city did was to the corporations that own the restaurants but the suit was brought in the name of the individuals who own them, in part because Boston had "a legitimate government interest" in treating the North End differently than other neighborhoods. However, she gave them additional time to file an amended complaint

In a filing arguing why the case should be dismissed, city attorneys wrote:

It is reasonably conceivable that the collective impacts of temporary license expansion in the North End poses a significant quality of life burden in the form of aggregate noise, trash, traffic, difficulty of pedestrians navigating sidewalks, and parking loss that is different in magnitude and kind than experienced in other neighborhoods. In light of such a "reasonably conceivable state of facts," the City could have rationally chosen to regulate restaurants seeking to expand into the public right of way in the North End differently than it regulated restaurants in other areas that did not pose the same collective impacts on quality of life. Making the regulations address the direct residential parking impacts and charging a fee to permit the government to provide additional services to ameliorate the impact that on-street dining in the North End has is rationally related to the City's interest in ensuring that the expansion of private businesses onto the public right of way does not overwhelm the quality of life in any neighborhood.

Two of the restaurant owners - Gomes and Jorge Mendoza - were also plaintiffs in a suit against Boston over its three-month requirement that people show proof of vaccination to enter most indoor public spaces. In January, another federal judge dismissed that case in which Gomes, Mendoza and other plaintiffs sought $6 million apiece in damages.