A birthday celebration at a New Jersey boardwalk pizzeria turned into a viral controversy after a family said they were confronted for bringing a cake into the restaurant.
The restaurant owner later responded to the backlash, saying the widely shared video did not show the full interaction.
The dispute began during a Saturday birthday outing at Joey Tomato’s, a pizzeria located on the Jenkinson’s Boardwalk in Point Pleasant Beach, New Jersey, where Jurkowski said his family had gathered to celebrate his young nephew.
According to Jurkowski, the dispute began after a family member asked to borrow a knife to cut the cake.
He said restaurant owner Doreen Sullivan-Karcich became upset, prompting him to begin recording what he described as “the craziest thing I’ve ever experienced.”
In the video, Sullivan-Karcich tells the group, “You don’t just walk into a restaurant and do whatever you want. How about if I just come to your house with a cake?”
The clip quickly spread across multiple social media platforms, drawing criticism online and sparking debate over outside food policies at restaurants.
Following days of criticism online, Sullivan-Karcich addressed the controversy Wednesday in a statement titled “Every Story Has Two Sides.”
“For a few days now, the internet has decided it knows everything about our restaurant based on thirty seconds of footage that started after the real conversation was already underway,” she wrote, according to Patch. “No context. No beginning. Just a clip, built for outrage, and a comment section full of opinions.”
Sullivan-Karcich said Joey Tomato’s “a pizza restaurant,” not “a party venue” or ” a bakery, arguing that the restaurant’s policies are based on food safety, liability and operational concerns.
“Every restaurant on this boardwalk has policies that exist for real reasons — food safety, liability, order in a kitchen running full speed on a summer night,” she wrote. “Those policies aren’t up for a public vote just because one moment of enforcing them got recorded.”
She ended her statement by saying the restaurant has faced challenges before and joked that it may adopt a new slogan: “We don’t do cake. We do pizza.”
Jurkowski said his family had spent the day enjoying the beach, boardwalk, rides, and arcades before stopping at Joey Tomato’s.
He said the group purchased four large pizzas with various toppings and five large drinks, spending about $250 before asking to borrow a knife for the birthday cake.
In an update posted Tuesday, Jurkowski said he had received numerous media requests following the video’s circulation but did not plan to discuss the matter further.
“We just wanted to spend a day at the beach, boardwalk, rides, arcades and get some pizza,” he said. “We spent money at this place, we just wanted to borrow a knife to cut the cake, and the response caught us completely off-guard.”
The controversy also led to online fallout. Joey Tomato’s Facebook page was removed following the backlash, while Yelp temporarily disabled reviews because of a surge in activity related to the incident.
Jurkowski also urged people to stop posting negative reviews targeting an unrelated South Carolina business that was mistakenly identified by some social media users.
The incident continued to draw attention online as users debated the restaurant’s policy on outside food and the circumstances surrounding the viral video.
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