Tony's Leads The New Auto-Play Offenders

Tony's Pizza Napoletana. [Photo: Flickr/victor_lee]

After opening the call for new nominations for restaurants that deserve a public shaming for using auto-play music on their websites, an Eater commenter has snitched on Tony's Pizza Napoletana. The popular North Beach spot has a website that greets potential patrons with a wanky saxophone and drum duet. Luckily, there's an option to skip that intro and go to the homepage, which has no sound, but it's smaller and at the bottom of a page. We are relieved to report that this violation against mankind has not been repeated on the website for Gemignani's newest restaurant Capo's, so maybe there's hope that he will see the error of his ways and take the smooth jazz off of the Tony's site. Bad music doesn't have to happen to good restaurants.

The latest in-house nomination for auto-play humiliation goes to Caña, the Cuban restaurant from Oakland that recently opened a second spot in San Francisco. Not only does the website feature auto-play music, it features a continuous loop of one song, probably calculated to drive customers crazy. This needs to stop.

Even brand-new restaurants are committing auto-play crimes: Noir Lounge, which we featured yesterday, has a trippy spoken-word/jazz thing going on.

Since the last Hall of Shame post was published, Amélie caved in and swapped the self-important bluegrass renderings of Soundgarden for a quiet site, but longtime violators Cliff House and Level III are still holding strong in bad judgment.

Those who have nominations of restaurants with horrible auto-play music on their sites are encouraged to e-mail us right away.

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