What the Foie? This New Year's Eve Protest Wasn't on the Menu at Mizuna

Local restaurants that serve foie gras have been the target of protesters over the past year. On New Year's Eve, they arrived at Mizuna, where Jaqueline and Frank Bonanno had a packed house celebrating the end of 2024. Here's Jacqueline's account:

I’m uncaging a champagne cork in the middle of a small, full, happy restaurant when the laughter comes to a jarring halt. Six individuals in masks explode through our entryway, push John Paul behind his host stand and set off handheld sirens and airhorns in the Mizuna dining room. Emi, the manager, tries to block them, but three use their bullhorns as a means to keep her at bay while they shout obscenities at our guests, at our co-workers, at me — words mostly garbled under the weight of the shrieking sirens and chaos. One of our guests has ducked under his table, and Frank, cooking, believes we are under attack. He leaps across the Mizuna line to confront and protect. Michael follows suit. Then Allan.

Johnny leaves his expo station, a force of calm, the guy you want around when the elevator begins to free-fall or the truck starts careening down a mountain road. Johnny sees the group for who they are, tells them firmly that they are trespassing, asks them to leave.

They don’t leave.

They continue shouting as we manage to corral them out the front door with a sort of human body fence. They are't gunmen; they are terrorists of a different sort.

For the remainder of New Year’s Eve, this small group of protesters make themselves bigger with sirens and horns and expletives on our sidewalk, spilling into our greenhouse, verbally threatening anyone trying to enter our restaurant for their New Year’s celebration. They convene on our patio and take breaks in our private parking lot; break our front doors trying to regain entry; accost our guests and passersby. Neighbors call the police, as do several guests, someone from the brewery up the way, and a few Mizuna employees, myself included. After two and a half hours, the police arrive, ultimately arresting the organizer for assault, trespassing and destruction of property. The rest of the group scrambles away immediately, leaving behind their picket-sign photos of slaughtered duck and fluffy ducks and (weirdly) bunnies. Two hours of ranting and defending, a dozen calls to 911, the fear of gunshots and destruction, and all over what?

Because we had foie gras on our December menu.

Frank and I run restaurants that have been in the very thick of demonstrations these past four years. We had two venues on Larimer Square, one by Union Station and four on Capitol Hill during the height of COVID-era protests, and our teams have become seasoned at boarding and unboarding windows and bearing witness to unrest — even participating at times, carrying our own signs, engaging in the Discourse of Change.

This was not that.
In the two weeks leading up to New Year's, this group — whose actual leader lives in a different state, and whose membership is mostly outside of Colorado — peppered our social media with vitriol and one-star reviews. They threatened to come to my home and the homes of our directors and investors (a strategy they’ve had some success with). We don’t have a board or an investment group, though, and when we blocked their faceless, anonymous membership from online engagement, they went to Emi and Allan’s personal accounts and offered to slit the throats of their pets. Because Mizuna had foie gras on the December menu.

Of all the meaningful conversations to be had over restaurant practices — over food resources and cooking techniques and wages and active shooter insurance and taxes and climate chang — we were confronted by a group that did not want engagement. Only compliance. What would you do?

At Mizuna, we celebrate artists, small producers, ethical farmers and ranchers, and we do our best to understand their practices. Because to raise an animal as food is inherently problematic, we do our best to mitigate it. Frank’s visited every small vendor site, and we applaud businesses like Hudson Valley, whose ducks and chickens waddle freely, who have triumphed in the face of a myriad of threats, lawsuits and attempts to end their small business, yet continue to produce foie gras in the most humane way possible — raising heritage breed, free-range, certified organic Moullard ducks of which they use every part.

And here’s the rub: We no longer have foie gras on the Mizuna menu. It was a seasonal offering, a treat for the holidays. Are we permanently removing it? Mizuna so rarely offers it anyway: Is it worth the fight? What would you do?

Isn’t it always worth fighting bullies? Bullies who share graphic, violent, skewed footage from European farms shuttered an era ago. Bullies who threaten my staff of eight and my family of four. Bullies who come into our family restaurant to disrupt private celebrations, and bullies who slur my name and my husband’s name from behind their masks and anonymity.

I am at a loss here other than to wonder: How has discourse come to this? How does anyone have the right to enter a small business with sirens and bullhorns?

Experts have weighed in on this controversial menu item.

Here’s Anthony Bourdain visiting Hudson Valley farms, where we source our foie gras. (He visited us at Mizuna, too — how great is that?)
Kenji Lopez-Alt, New York Times food columnist, chef and historian, addressed science, ethics and Hudson Valley Farm, where our foie gras is sourced.

And Dan Barber offered a TED Talk on ethical foie gras; he's a legendary chef, farmer, scientist and whole-food advocate. We cross-train at his farm and restaurant!).

See what the experts have to say, and then tell me: Where do we go from here?

If you owned a restaurant, what would you do?

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