A message HoneyHole ownership says was sent by a disgruntled employee after they were fired Sunday

It has been a rough two years and three months in the sandwich business in Seattle.

Sunday, things got a lot rougher for the HoneyHole.

“HoneyHole Owner Harasses Employees,” isn’t the kind of subject line you typically see on a marketing email blast to thousands of customers on a Sunday afternoon. HoneyHole’s social media accounts also lit up with the same message. “For the last two years under new ownership, hundreds of employees have been retaliated against, harassed, discriminated against, demeaned, degraded, and treated like a subhuman species,” it began.

“We Were Hacked,” read a second message that arrived a couple hours later.

But the damage was done. The first message spread across social media with calls for everything from a boycott to a sandwich protest as fans lamented possibly having to go without The Gooch and the Veggie BLT.

HoneyHole owner Kristin Rye, who purchased the legendary Pike/Pine sandwich shop and bar with her husband Patrick Rye and moved to the area in 2021 to grow the business, tells CHS that the HoneyHole remains open on E Pike and the “hack” was the actions of a manager who Rye said was fired Sunday.

A Sunday refrigerator failure was unrelated, she said — but Rye said the day also added the loss of “thousands of dollars worth of meat” to the insults.

“We did have to fire a manager today,” Rye said. “It’s standard to lock someone out of our accounts but this person hacked our Instagram and our marketing to say some pretty personally hurtful and not factually accurate things.”

The HoneyHole is an inclusive and diverse workplace, Rye said.

It is also struggling with staffing and management issues.

In March, CHS reported that the HoneyHole’s E Jefferson expansion had been shuttered for weeks with no word from ownership about the sudden closure. Rye didn’t return calls or emails about the situation then. But in the wake of Sunday’s emails, the HoneyHole owner tells CHS that major challenges with a death in the family and staffing struggles led to the “financial, personal and staffing decision” to “cut things down to a core group of excellent people” and temporarily focus the business on the original E Pike location.

Kristin and Patrick Rye in happier times in 2021 (Image: HoneyHole)

Sunday’s blowup came as Rye said HoneyHole was making preparations to restart the Central District shop with hopes for a mid-June reopening just in time to take advantage of the E Jefferson location’s big patio and — maybe — get plans moving again for wider expansion of the HoneyHole brand.

Rye said she isn’t sure the June reopening will be possible after Sunday’s problems.

The “[email protected]” response

As for next steps, Rye wasn’t sure on Sunday but said there will be “consequences for those actions” suggesting legal action could be an option. The fired manager, meanwhile, told HoneyHole customers to watch for the “biggest lawsuit ever” over the allegations.

The HoneyHole emails episode of workplace protest comes amid ongoing challenges with staffing during the pandemic recovery that has snarled everything from corner cafes to bus service.

It also comes during a continued a surge in labor organizing at Capitol Hill businesses large and small. CHS reported here on the latest as an employee and ownership pact at Glo’s made the newly reopened diner the first full service restaurant in the city to unionize. On the other end of the scale, the labor fights around Capitol Hill Starbucks locations continue to be part of nationwide unionization efforts targeting the Seattle-based coffee giant.

So far, we haven’t heard from any workers at HoneyHole about efforts to organize and nobody has said the staffing issues at HoneyHole are related to organized unionization efforts. We’ve reached out to HoneyHole employees to learn more about the situation.

In the meantime, HoneyHole remains open and serving customers on E Pike where it has been doing business for nearly 25 years.

UPDATE: CHS has been in contact with employees about the situation at HoneyHole and we’re working to get more of their voices safely in our report. One worker who left last summer after a year said she found the email incident “absolutely not surprising” and that HoneyHole under its new owners has particularly struggled with supporting its queer staff.

The former employee at the Jefferson location said she ultimately quit, tired of being “really disappointed” and after watching “a lot of queer employees leave due to soft harassment.”

“It took them a year to get rid of the gendered restroom signs, even with my constant reminding the owner and offering solutions,” she tells CHS.

Meanwhile, people familiar with the situation around HoneyHole over the past two years said they were not aware of active labor organizing at HoneyHole before the weekend but that current and former employees are now preparing to speak out in the wake of the company’s actions around the firing.

UPDATE x2: A current employee provided more information to CHS about challenges at HoneyHole and said current workers have, indeed, talked about organizing and unionization but that it is very early in the process.

Ironically, some of the frustrations make it harder to get organized.

“I hope for a union,” the employee said. “The hard part is getting people to stay long enough.”

UPDATE 5/24/2023: Owner Patrick Rye contacted CHS to provide more details around the fired manager and to point at the HoneyHole’s records with the health department he says refute some of the issues raised by the rogue marketing email.

The Jefferson location, for example, boasts an “excellent” rating across three historical county health inspections.

As for other issues identified in the mail, Rye said HoneyHole has been proactive in firing a manager who repeatedly misgendered an employee and acknowledged workplace issues around staffing and schedules that needed to be fixed before the E Jefferson location could reopen.

UPDATE x2: Here are portions of two inspections the Ryes provided:

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