Bunny dinner

Tempe restaurant serves controversial course on Easter

Excerpt:

A Valley restaurant went ahead with plans to serve a controversial course on Easter Sunday despite receiving death threats.

Caffe Boa in Tempe offers customers a six course meal. All but one of those courses was made with rabbit.

"It's fabulous," said customer Felicia Windsor. "The food is wonderful, the service is great. Bunny is yummy, they're right."

In conjunction with the holiday, Caffe Boa's rabbit-themed menu featured everything from carrot soup with rabbit confit to rabbit-stuffed ravioli.

"For some people, Easter represents certain things, for other people it represents the Easter Bunny, for us it represents food," said owner Jay Wisniewski.

Almost immediately after unveiling their plans last week, Caffe Boa started getting backlash.

Executive chef Payton Curry even received a few death threats.

"Someone told me serving rabbit on Easter was the same as killing me and serving me to my family on my birthday," said Curry.

A protest planned for outside the restaurant Sunday never materialized.

In fact, you could say just the opposite happened.

Caffe Boa expects the Easter menu to bring in more than 500 people for brunch and dinner.

"For us, it just proves there's no such thing as bad publicity," said Curry.

Bad publicity or not, Windsor made sure it didn't keep her from enjoying a tasty meal.

"We heard about the controversy and we decided if there was a picket line we'd be sure to cross it," said Windsor.

Based on the apparent success, Caffe Boa may just make serving rabbit a habit.

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