Del Ray Pizzeria Explains 'Grab Her By the Pizza' Promo, Gets Even More Backlash

ALEXANDRIA, VA -- Del Ray Pizzeria is weathering a storm of its own making: Naming a pizza "Grab Her By the Pizza" that debuted during the presidential inauguration and Women's March weekend in January.

The phrase references a 2005 audio clip of Donald Trump saying: "I'm automatically attracted to beautiful [women]—I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. ... Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything."

The pizza name struck some as insensitive and now an "explainer" by DRP is fueling the fire.

DRP tried to explain itself in a post on its Facebook page Wednesday; the explanation generated 53 mostly negative comments, but some from folks weighed in to defend the restaurant and tell others to get over themselves.

Here's the restaurant's explainer:

"Friends and neighbors, we need to set the record straight here... Just over a month ago as we were playing with a new menu, we decided that we would like to try out a seafood pizza and see how well it sold. The concept was a clam chowder style pizza with alfredo as the base to make it creamy, bacon, fontina cheese, mozzarella, parsley and olive oil on top to keep the clams from drying out in the oven.

As some of you may know, we enjoy naming our pizzas after songs, quotes, places and people. Some of them have given us bad press (people would call us telling us they would never eat here again because of the "Barack My World" and "Obama Rama"). After discussing it with the restaurant manager - a hard working single mother - and the other strong, intelligent women who work here, we launched the "Grab Her By the Pizza" for a trial run as a dinner special during the inaugural/women's march weekend - knowing full well that we would get comments and maybe even complaints about the name.

Believe it or not, everyone loved it, including the name. We had women and families in from all over telling us how much they loved it. No one complained about it or told us they were offended, so we put it with our other pizzas when we launched the new menu. Let us make this very clear: this pizza is not a joke to us. With it, we meant to show our support of women, the LGBT community, and the immigrants we know and love in our lives. We never even imagined that someone would see this as an attack on women or sexual assault victims! That is was meant along the same lines as the "nasty woman" beers just recently put out by several breweries. That we meant for it to be empowering to women and raise awareness as a conversation piece amongst our (adult) guests.

We are a community driven and neighborhood restaurant, surviving on the interactions with our staff and our guests to build relationships. We deeply apologize that this was so grossly misunderstood, and hope that our neighbors will give us the chance to re-earn their respect."