An unnerving phone call shook a Utah restaurant’s staff and stirred painful memories for its owner

Bountiful • The office of Andrea Bennett — or Annie as she’s widely known at her business, Annie’s Cafe — is stocked full of love.

Her desk is surrounded by walls decked in photos of her friends and family; snapshots from recent celebrations and ones from years prior. Among them, a mini Argentinian flag hangs.

The sentiment from the decor is in sharp contrast with a cafe order sheet that hangs from the fridge next to her desk, held up by a magnet. The text on the sheet is simple, scrawled in frantic but legible handwriting.

Ticket #137011. Andrew Jons (missing the “h”). Badge number #4170.

This is all the information Bennett has on an individual who called her restaurant in June and posed as a police officer. The first call came on a Friday, Bennett said, and one of her servers at the front of the house answered.

“He took the phone to the back of the kitchen, and when I looked at him, he looked very, very scared,” Bennett recalled nearly a month later.

The order form is now a sour reminder — not only of the unnerving phone call, but also of the painful experiences of anti-immigrant sentiment Bennett has endured.

When Bennett asked her employee what was wrong, his response was, “‘Somebody’s calling saying that they’re looking for Latinos. And Jose. They want to talk to the owner or the manager.’”

Bennett has never had an employee named Jose at the establishment, she said.

Once Bennett took over the call, she said she found the caller to be “very, very aggressive,” she tried to get him to identify himself, but he refused, and in return, kept asking for information on all her Latino employees.

When Bennett didn’t comply, he told her he was going to come to the cafe, “break the windows” and take all the “Latinos out.” The caller ID said the call was private. After it ended, Bennett sent her scared staff home for their protection and called the Bountiful Police Department.

Police respond

Bountiful police Lt. Andrew Smith said officers took a report from Bennett and conducted an investigation “with what they could.”

“The call was an anonymous call claiming to be immigration enforcement,” Smith said. “There wasn’t much for us to follow up on outside of reassuring the staff at Annie’s Cafe that they were in no harm, and that unfortunately people just try to take advantage of people and cause fear, and so to be extremely cautious of that.”

He said the department checked with federal partners, but the case “didn’t really go anywhere” because the call was not from a local caller.

Hillary Koellner, a spokesperson for the Utah Department of Public Safety, which works with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, said the state agency has not seen any patterns with these types of phone calls.

“Obviously, it’s a crime to impersonate a police officer, and when somebody does this, they’re usually trying to scare, prank, [or] scam you,” Koellner said, “If somebody ever thinks that they’re dealing with a fake officer, we highly encourage them to immediately contact their local police department.”

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to a request for comment.

Lasting impacts

At Annie’s, the caller rang again a few days after the first time. It was the same person, repeating what they said in the initial conversation. This time, Bennett asked for specifics about the alleged officer’s identification. That’s what lives on her refrigerator now.

The man would end up calling the business three to four more times. Some of Bennett’s employees didn’t show up to work out of anxiety. But since then, Bennett said customers have flocked to the shop to give her support and business has generally been the same.

“We are in a very tough time today. It’s hard to be a Latino, it’s hard to be dark,” Bennett explains. She is half Italian and half Egyptian and immigrated to the U.S. three decades ago from Argentina. “I’m here in United States for more than 34 years. I’m USA citizen, but it doesn’t matter who I am. I’m a human.”

Annie’s Cafe is a French restaurant that started as a brightly painted food truck in 2014 in Reno, Nevada. Bennett moved to Utah in 2015 and started the cafe in 2019 with just two tables.

She co-owns the restaurant, which has French-style decor and cabinets full of tea china, with her husband. The menu has touches of her family all over it. Some of the crepes are named after Bennett’s kids, like The Sunrise (a nod to her son Freddie), The Diva (after her daughter Ashley) and Lucy (after her daughter Julie.)

The alarming phone calls were not Bennett’s first experience with anti-immigrant sentiment.

Right after the calls, her sister visited from Argentina, and while the two were speaking Spanish at Smith’s, Bennett said a man came up to her and told her to “speak English” because they were “in America.”

Bennett responded by saying they speak Spanish in South and Central America.

These interactions are still seared into her brain like a cattle brand, Bennett said. Especially a painful experience from 18 years ago.

Bennett’s daughter Julie got sick as a teenager and needed a liver transplant. When the mother and daughter duo were transferred to Stanford University, before any treatment started, Bennett said she was asked a jarring question.

“The first question I got asked as a parent losing a child [was], ‘Are you legal or illegal in this country? Otherwise we cannot [help],’” Bennett said. “That killed me.”

Julie, now 34, is healthy today, but the interaction is something that Bennett still thinks about to this day.

‘Stuck in the same situation’

“I’m thinking, ‘it should be getting better,’” Bennett said of all these experiences. “I wish it will be more love and kindness. It’s like we are stuck in the same situation over and over and over.”

She said her employees are still nervous, worried that they’ll continue to be targeted for their skin color, but they all continue to come to work.

Ultimately, Bennett hopes people will hear her story and remember to be compassionate to others around them.

“People, they don’t want to go out, do their life, go to the park [or] store, because they are afraid,” she said. “We are not criminals, we are good people.”

When people walk into Annie’s Cafe, they’ll see a small chalkboard sign at the foot of the welcome counter. It says, “An Annie a day makes everything OK.” To Bennett, this means that even though you might face difficulties in everyday life, it will all ultimately be OK.

“I am here. I’m not a criminal. I’m proud to be a Latina. I’m proud to be a woman in business …” Bennett said, “I’m not going to duck down to these things [that] try to smash me.”

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