A Memphis pizzeria owner who turned away four uniformed National Guard members says his business has roughly doubled since the incident, while critics, including a Tennessee congressman, call the refusal a slap at the men and women serving their country.
Miles Tamboli, owner of Tamboli's Pasta & Pizza, refused service to four uniformed members of the Memphis Safe Task Force on July 11, telling them he opposed the federally led initiative that put them on Memphis streets. Five days later, he told Fox News Digital he had no regrets.
"I stand behind that decision completely," Tamboli said.
President Trump established the Memphis Safe Task Force in September 2025, combining local police, federal agents, Tennessee National Guard troops, and state troopers to enforce public safety laws in the city. Tamboli frames his refusal as a protest against that deployment, not against the individual soldiers. But the distinction has done little to cool the backlash from conservatives who see the move as disrespecting service members doing a lawful job.
The online fury was swift. Social media users called for a boycott. U.S. Rep. Tim Burchett publicly condemned the decision, the New York Post reported. Review-bombing campaigns targeted the restaurant's online listings.
Tamboli says none of it hurt. In a statement to Fox News Digital, he described the week after the incident as the busiest stretch his restaurant has ever had:
"Business the week after roughly doubled our normal volume. It was the busiest stretch we've had in this building, with a line out front before we opened most nights. I hear the real question in yours, whether this is a blip, and it isn't. The support hasn't slowed down, I expect it to last, and I'm running my business like the lasting increase it is."
He declined to release his sales records, saying he would not "turn my private sales reports into a public document." Supporters have characterized the surge as a "buy-cott", customers spending money at the restaurant specifically to reward the owner's stance.
The Guardian reported that on a recent Friday, the restaurant opened to a full house with a line waiting by 5:30 p.m. Waitstaff told the paper the shop was never that crowded that early. Extra crew had to be brought in to handle the volume.
Tamboli also claimed he has not lost a single regular customer over the controversy:
"I have not heard from a single regular customer telling me they won't be back. Not one. I don't track anyone's politics and my register doesn't record it, and I serve every guest who walks through my door the way I always have. The one exception is the uniformed deployment, and that was the entire point."
Two customers who visited the restaurant voiced support for Tamboli's position. Sarah Jones told Fox News Digital she understood the Guard members did not choose the deployment but still endorsed the refusal.
"While I do not blame the National Guard for being in Memphis since it was not their choice, I stand by businesses refusing service as a form of resistance and protest."
Carol Bigam, a retired FedEx worker, framed it as a free-speech issue.
"If you have a business, a small family-owned business, that says, 'You know what, I'm sorry, I can't serve you, I just don't believe you should be here,' it really should be OK. Is he not allowed free speech? He was very professional about it. Give me a break, man."
Tamboli himself leaned into that framing in his statement to Fox News Digital, casting the boycott movement as the real affront to American principles:
"A small business owner using his First Amendment right to run his place by his own conscience is about as American as it gets. The people trying to punish that speech, the ones review-bombing me and the ones cheering the government on, are the ones who walked away from the Constitution they claim to love. You do not get to wave the flag and boo free speech in the same breath."
It is a clever rhetorical turn. But it papers over the core problem with Tamboli's position: the four people he refused to serve were not politicians, bureaucrats, or policymakers. They were uniformed service members carrying out a lawful assignment. Punishing the individual soldier for a policy dispute with the White House is not principled dissent. It is misdirected protest dressed up in constitutional language.
In his longest statement to Fox News Digital, Tamboli shifted the conversation away from the refusal and toward what he described as the human cost of the Memphis Safe Task Force. He claimed four people have died "at the hands of this task force" since it arrived in Memphis. He named two of them.
"One of them, Tyrin Johnson, was 20 years old. Another, Jonah Neal, was in the middle of a mental health crisis when a federal agent killed him, and I'd bet most of your readers have never heard his name."
Tamboli also claimed Johnson was "shot and killed by National Guard troops during a foot chase, with no body camera footage and no answers for his family." He did not provide documentation for any of these claims, and Fox News Digital's reporting does not independently confirm the circumstances he described. No official statement from the Memphis Safe Task Force, the Tennessee National Guard, or any federal agency appears in the reporting to address Tamboli's allegations.
He also asserted that Memphis's violent crime rate had "already fallen to a 25-year low" before the task force arrived, a claim that finds some support elsewhere. Earlier Fox News reporting noted that Memphis Police Department data, confirmed by a Tennessee Bureau of Investigation audit, showed crime at a 25-year low through the first eight months of 2025. An independent state audit cited by Tamboli attributed that progress to local law enforcement efforts, not the federal deployment.
Tamboli used that data to argue the task force is counterproductive, claiming its arrests overwhelmingly stem from routine traffic stops rather than violent crime investigations:
"What the Task Force has actually done is make this city harder to live in. Its own records show that the overwhelming majority of its arrests began with routine traffic stops, not violent crime. Families in this city are now afraid to drive to work, afraid to take their kids to school, afraid to be seen."
He cited no specific records to support those claims, and the reporting does not identify the source documents he referenced.
Tamboli wants this story to be about the Memphis Safe Task Force. He wants reporters asking about task force shootings, about traffic-stop arrest statistics, about whether a federally directed law enforcement operation belongs in a city where crime was already declining. Those are legitimate questions. They deserve scrutiny, investigation, and answers from the officials who authorized and run the operation.
But Tamboli did not file a lawsuit, organize a city council hearing, or petition the governor. He refused to serve four people in uniform who walked into his restaurant on a Saturday night looking for dinner. And he did it to make a political point at their expense.
Tamboli told Fox News Digital he sees the refusal as constitutionally protected expression. He is almost certainly right on the law. Private businesses generally have wide latitude to refuse service for reasons unrelated to protected classes under federal civil rights law. National Guard service is not a protected class.
But legality and decency are not the same thing. The same conservatives who rightly objected when progressive businesses refused service to Trump staffers and Republican officials should recognize the mirror image here. The principle is the same: using a cash register as a political weapon against individuals who did nothing wrong.
Tamboli insists he opposes the policy, not the people. His customers believe him. His sales figures, if accurate, suggest plenty of Memphians agree with his stance on the task force. None of that changes what actually happened on July 11: four Americans in uniform were told they could not buy a slice of pizza because of the patch on their shoulder.
If a conservative restaurant owner turned away a federal employee over a Biden-era policy, the left would call it bigotry. Tamboli's supporters should ask themselves whether the principle changes when the uniform does.
