A Palestinian/Lebanese restaurant in Toronto is calling out UberEats for listing its pizzeria under Israeli cuisine.
Levant Pizza co-owner Nader shared what happened in a video posted to TikTok where he said a customer had informed him about the situation, which prompted him to post about it online.
“Palestinian restaurants, including ours, have shifted from the ‘Palestinian’ cuisine to ‘Israeli’ on their platform. This move attempts to erase Palestinian identity by actively contributing to the suppression of Palestinian cuisine on a global scale,” the pizzeria wrote in a recent Instagram caption.
Levant Pizza, which is located near Bloor St. and Ossington Ave., said the whole ordeal was deeply troubling and called the move a “blatant anti-Palestinian action” and that “as advocates for preserving Palestinian culinary heritage, we cannot tolerate this, even if it affects our visibility on UberEats.”
The restaurant also alleges that over 300 other establishments were also being reported as Israeli. It added that soon after UberEats apologized and said it would fix the issueon the backend, that number dropped down to 16.
“We were shocked and disappointed at the realization that we were being labeled as an Israeli restaurant on the UberEats app. The team at Uber Eats Canada have been willing partners and we are hopeful that we will get resolution and greater global representation of Palestinian restaurants on the app going forward,” Levan told Now Toronto on Monday.
UberEats has since apologized for the incident.
“This unintentional issue has been fixed, we’ve apologized to the restaurant, and our engineering teams are working on changes to help prevent it from happening in the future,” the company told Now Toronto in an email statement on Monday.
UberEats further explained how its search engine works, and how just like Google, a search can return different types of results including “exact” and “similar.”
As a result of what happened, the company says they’ve made changes to ensure only “exact match” results are shared with customers and that if they search for terms, such as Palestinian and Israeli, now the results will only show restaurants with menu items with that exact term in their name.
However, the pizzeria has requested a comprehensive investigation and said that these actions constitute a “clear case of cultural appropriation.”
