A social media post propelled a New York City coffee shop into controversy, spurring a federal inquiry and prompting protests right outside its doors.
Poetica Coffee, which has multiple locations across the city, was not expecting Rep. Dan Goldman, a New York congressman, to reply to their post last month in which they said they had refunded him after a visit with his daughter. The shop used the post to criticize the Jewish congressman’s support for Israel, and banned him from their stores.
Goldman did comment, however, and the post went viral, leading to a wave of national media attention.
That was late June, right before Goldman’s primary to keep his district (he ultimately lost to Brad Lander, the city’s former comptroller.) And although news headlines have moved on, the coffee shop’s owner, Parviz Mukhamadkulov, still deals with the repercussions, he says, by way of death threats, suspicious packages delivered to Poetica stores, and protests.
“For Mr. Goldman, perhaps it was just an opportunity,” Mukhamadkulov told USA TODAY Network. “An opportunity to get more news headlines. But now, I’m left with real consequences.”
Mukhamadkulov claimed the situation started after the congressman’s visit, when the barista wanted her tip refunded back to Goldman.
But the incident spiraled after the post received mass media attention.
“We don’t serve racists, fascists, homophobes, genocide enablers or anyone in between,” the post, made on Poetica Coffee’s social media, said in June. “Too bad we didn’t recognize you right away, or we would have turned you away.” It featured a photo of Goldman checking out at one of the company’s locations.
Goldman, in the comments, said that the barista “could not have been nicer” to him and his 7-year-old daughter. “I hope you at least make sure she gets the tip that she deserved.”
“All of a sudden, every news channel was writing about it,” he said.
“It felt like at that time, there was a political value that they saw in it.”
The post eventually caught the attention of Harmeet Dillon, the DOJ Assistant Attorney General to the Civil Rights division, writing on X at the time that the agency opened an investigation into the shop.
Goldman responded to the inquiry, saying that “there are other people in the Jewish community who are really scared and that the focus of the Civil Rights Division should be on them, more than a public figure,” according to the New York Times.
“This is not the first time I posted about him, and was not the first time I was reaching out to him to have a conversation with him as his constituent,” Mukhamadkulov said in an interview.
“Since the war on Gaza started, he does not talk to us. He avoids us. We’ve reached out millions of times through different channels, he never talks to us.”
Among the string of criticisms placed against the business, Mukhamadkulov said Poetica has had to push back against claims of anti-semitism. Protestors organized by #EndJewHatred, an advocacy group for the Jewish community, descended upon one of the locations last month, calling for an apology, according to an article by Business Insider at the time.
“If we simply had a public disagreement about the policies he supports, that would have been fine,” Mukhamadkulov wrote in a statement after.
“But conflating criticism of those policies with antisemitism did something else: it used the influence of a sitting member of Congress to smear a local, immigrant-owned small business for possible election-eve media exposure.”
Mukhamadkulov has reached out to Goldman in hopes of calming tensions. But the congressman has yet to respond.
“I emailed Dan Goldman’s office so we can work to make sure that everybody’s safe,” he said. “I’m still waiting.”
USA TODAY Network also reached out to a Goldman representative for comment, and has not heard back.
“Often everybody asks if I would do it again. And I thought about it for quite some time,” Mukhamadkulov told USA TODAY Network.
“And I would like to add that I would do it again. With the words of Khaled Hosseini from his book, the Kite Runner, ‘a thousand times over’ — for all the kids in Palestine killed.”
He said he’d still like to speak with Goldman, and offered him another coffee sometime.