Juli Ghazi was called Charlotte’s worst restaurateur. It doesn’t bother her one bit.
When asked how she reacted last month upon learning that Charlotte’s most prominent alternative newspaper had labeled her as the city’s “worst restaurateur” of 2021, Juli Ghazi’s eyes light up and a broad smile spreads across her face.
”When I saw what it was, I was like, Holy (expletive)! That is funny,” recalls the owner of the eatery that has been serving up farm-to-table pies on Central Avenue for the past 6-1/2 years.
“I laughed out loud. I really did.”
She says she was amused because she believes the people who foisted this label on her were the same people who wrote an article in 2015 that painted the initial news of her restaurant opening in Plaza Midwood in a negative light — or, at least, she perceived things that way.
This was entirely different, though. This wasn’t about her pizza at all.
This was about the fact that she has used her restaurant’s social media accounts to openly and aggressively oppose mask and vaccine mandates during the past several months of the pandemic, often offering snarky responses or sniping at people who criticized her decision-making.
And, to Queen City Nerve staffers at least, as argued in their Dec. 3 feature, “Hall of Shame 2021: Charlotte’s Worst of the Worst,” it was about the perception that Ghazi wasn’t the “ally to the marginalized in her community” she had seemed to them to be.
But Ghazi’s counter-argument is simple: If the things she has said about COVID mandates seem out of character to you, then you don’t really know her at all.
‘Your health decisions are not my business’
Ghazi has made and remade a name for herself several times in Charlotte over the past two decades, as a fashion trunk-show vendor, as a PR goddess, and as a yoga studio co-owner.
For nearly 10 years now, however, she’s been best-known as the owner of Pure Pizza, which started as a 250-square-foot quick-service stall at 7th Street Market in uptown, rocketed to popularity for its healthy pies and complex flavor combinations, and expanded to Plaza Midwood in 2015.
Not long after that, Ghazi achieved legend status in the LGBT community.
That’s because her second location was equipped with a unisex restroom, and because she posted a sign inside the restroom explaining why it was unisex: “Sometimes,” the note read, “gender specific toilets put others into uncomfortable situations.” After a friend shared a photo of the sign on Facebook, the photo went viral; eventually, media outlets including ABC News, USA Today, Yahoo!, and The Daily Mail in London wrote stories about Ghazi and Pure Pizza’s commitment to inclusiveness.
In a column she wrote for Business North Carolina in February 2020, Ghazi pointed out that Pure Pizza has sponsored a float in the Charlotte Pride Parade and regularly offers space to PFLAG (Parents and Families of Lesbians and Gays) meetups.
Then came COVID, which shut down her 7th Street Market stall — first temporarily, then permanently.
The Plaza Midwood location, meanwhile, never closed. And for nearly a year and a half, she says, Pure Pizza asked customers to wear masks and had signs up requesting the same. But this past August, when the city of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County began requiring masks in public indoor spaces again, she announced that she would refuse to enforce the mandates.
“Your health decisions are not my business,” she wrote on social media, adding, “We are not Health Bouncers. Meaning it’s not any of our business to enforce, mandate, threaten, intimidate, or not give service to someone who is not wearing a mask.”
Two and a half months later — on the day in November when President Joe Biden announced an Occupational Safety and Health Administration policy requiring employers with 100 or more employees to ensure all workers are fully vaccinated, or to test them for COVID-19 on at least a weekly basis — Ghazi dug in her heels again.
‘Is this really what I want to support?’
“Not only are all employers over 100 employees forcing people into this (expletive),” she wrote in a post on Pure Pizza’s Instagram page. “OSHA is now saying it might even include small businesses under 100 employees into this nefarious plot. I will never comply.”
Of the dozens of comments on her post, many were harshly critical.
“Sucks to have to see this from a place I enjoy,” one said. “Eventually, you just have to ask ‘is this really what I want to support?’ Unfortunately, the answer is no.”
“You have a problem with the government asking you to help curb a pandemic that has killed 600,000 + people?,” another asked.
Ghazi’s response: “Yup! I do!,” with a heart emoji.
One month later, Queen City Nerve called her out in its “Worst of the Worst” feature.
“COVID has upended our lives in so many ways. One that’s less talked about is how it really laid bare the values and science acumen of people we thought we knew,” staffers wrote in a short essay, in which they noted Ghazi has donated pizzas to people protesting against police brutality and helped in efforts to feed the homeless.
“When her longtime patrons, including some who are disabled and immunocompromised, expressed their disappointment at her shift in values, she dismissed them as ‘trolls’ and doubled down. A bevy of alt-right and evangelical commenters swarmed, vowing to drive from out of town, without masks, to patronize Pure Pizza. She did not dismiss them or even check their rhetoric.”
After laughing it off, Ghazi sent a message to Queen City Nerve via Instagram saying, “It’s funny how you labeled me as someone ‘you thought you knew’ when the reality is you don’t (expletive) know me.” She also called the newspaper “a left-wing neighborhood rag.”
Then she took a screenshot of her message and posted it on Pure Pizza’s Instagram page.
All of this, of course, begs the question: If Ghazi isn’t who people think she is, then who exactly is she?
‘I was able to give myself permission to question’
She says she has had three significant experiences “that really helped shape how I translate the world today.”
One, she says she was raised in a toxic family environment and grew up believing it was dangerous to express any sort of individuality because it always seemed to lead to something bad happening to her.
Two, similarly, she says she was “raised in a religion where God is the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong. ... And in my household and in my church, the ultimate sin was questioning authority.”
The third experience Ghazi describes is the one that finally broadened her mind.
In her early 20s — fresh off of graduating with the class of 1994 from Valdosta State University in Georgia, where she studied business and German — she landed a job working on a military installation in Germany at a university that offered master’s degree programs to U.S. Air Force officers. There, she says, she met a professor who openly challenged the idea of America being the defender of freedom and democracy for the world. And she says the university didn’t try to silence his voice, but rather encouraged it.
“I was able to give myself permission to question,” she says, “which is all that I ever wanted to do as a kid. ... So now all of a sudden, like, Well, I’m questioning everything.”
Today, one of the things she’s questioning hardest is the mainstream media, which she says largely push a “pro-vaccine mandate narrative.”
In fact, she had a couple of stipulations ahead of her interview with the Observer.
The first was that the reporter had to agree to join her in a pre-chat EFT meditation session, which involved reciting affirmations about open-mindedness, tapping with fingers on different parts of the body, and breathing exercises. This, she stated, “will help us create the container to step into better communication around this sensitive area.”
The second was she wanted to see the questions beforehand.
She came into the interview with long, pre-written answers, and spent chunks of time reading them mostly verbatim, although she did go off-script frequently and — though she had said prior that she might not be open to them — she responded to many questions not on her list.
So what did we learn?
‘There is no political party that I subscribe to’
Although she can understand why people might be confused, she doesn’t think that her views have changed at all.
“I continue to say that I’ve always stood for body autonomy,” Ghazi says. “Any social issue you go back and look on, it’s not a red or blue. It’s not a left or right. It is a body autonomy issue, of being able to live free and sovereign within your body, and to live as you choose and freely participate in society.”
She sees mandates related to COVID as “medical tyranny creating a class of who’s in and out based on your health status, in a very ... aggressive type of way.”
On masks: “If, say, I was in a doctor’s office ... sure, wear a mask, no problem. ... I’m in a restaurant, people have reason to be taking their mask off.”
“There are a lot of people out here that want to be able to walk into spaces and feel some sense of normalcy two years after (the beginning of the pandemic). See, I wasn’t doing this and saying this this time last year. I wasn’t doing this in the summer of 2020. I wasn’t saying, ‘(Expletive) you, I’m not doing this.’ No, when people came in, we asked them to put masks on. There were signs that were up.
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“But now we’re at a two-year mark, and we know what we know. Yes, people are still dying. But people are also dying from other things as well, and I can’t save the entire world.”
On vaccines: “We know how many — like hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people — that have had injuries just this year from this vaccine alone. I’m supposed to now tell somebody to put that in their body?”
(“As of December 24, 2021, there were 709,085 reports of adverse reactions after COVID-19 vaccination,” Martha Sharan, a CDC spokesperson, recently told USA Today; at the same time, the story noted that the CDC has said serious injuries related to COVID-19 vaccines are rare.)
For the record, she says, in case you’re still wondering: “There is no political party that I subscribe to. There’s no ideology that I am beholden to.”
“You have a choice: Wear your mask, or don’t. Get a vaccine, or don’t. That is my position. I am pro-choice. I am anti-mandate. I can co-exist within that paradigm and not be considered a Trump supporter, or be a liberal. I can stand in that space and hold that, and if people want to think what they want, that’s fine. I don’t care.”
But why dive into these issues on her restaurant’s social media channel?
‘I want to learn more about myself’
“I speak on my business platform,” Ghazi says, “because I know that my voice is more amplified in creating a larger community conversation. ... And utilizing my capitalist business to speak on social justice issues, I mean, this is going back (years).”
“I’m not going to hire a PR team and write something up. No. Because I want you to feel me. I’m the owner, right? So there doesn’t need to be a veil of a PR team between you and me to hear my voice. This is my voice and this is how I feel.”
“If you don’t want to come buy my pizza because you don’t like the fact that I have a gender-neutral restroom, and I feed Black Lives Matter protesters, and stand up for workers’ rights and immigration rights and LGBTQ rights, and the-ability-to-choose-your-own-medical-treatment rights — if that offends you, I’m OK with that. There are other places for you to go eat pizza.”
Ghazi has no regrets whatsoever, she says, about speaking out on her platform in the way she did, and when asked if all of this has had any effect on Pure Pizza’s bottom line, she replies, simply: “The impact has been positive.”
In short, she says she isn’t sweating what Queen City Nerve said about her.
“I mean, that’s your opinion,” she says is her feeling towards the newspaper. “You can have that. I’m fine.”
She did, of course, send that strongly worded message to Queen City Nerve’s Instagram account — and wanted to make sure everyone saw what she said to them, by sharing the screenshot.
When asked about it by email, Queen City Nerve publisher Justin LaFrancois replied: “In regards to a DM received from the @purepizzaclt Instagram account and then posted to their social media pages, *insert shrug emoji*. We said what we had to say, and so did she. We can all move forward as a more informed community now.”
But Ghazi says that if you know her — like, really know her — you know that that is 100% her.
“We’re taught from the beginning that everything we need to know is outside of ourselves,” she says. “‘I don’t know how to take care of myself, so I’ve got to go to the doctors in the hospital system. I don’t know how to educate myself, so I’ve got to go to the schools that the government tells me to go to. I don’t know how to take care of my money, so let the banks (do it). Churches that say, You don’t know God. Let us tell you how to know God.’
“We are taught that everything is outside of us. And it’s not. It’s all right within here,” Ghazi says, holding a hand to her chest. “And that can be a really scary place to go. I know it was terr-i-fy-ing for me when I started on the journey. Sometimes I would just kind of dip in and be like, Ooo, that’s too much.
“But now I’m just like, Get me in deeper. I want to learn more about myself. Why I am the way that I am. What causes me to be the way that I am. So that way then I can show up in my fullest capacity to take up as much (expletive) space as I want to take up.
“For the first 20 years of my life I had to play small. But I will never play small again.”
This story was originally published January 24, 2022 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Juli Ghazi was called Charlotte’s worst restaurateur. It doesn’t bother her one bit.."
