These vegan restaurant owners began quietly eating meat. Then their customers found out.

When Matthew and Terces Engelhart began eating meat again for the first time in 40 years, they tried to explain why they had started to “harvest” some of the cows they owned on their Northern California farm.

“Cows make an extreme sacrifice for humanity, but that is their position in God’s plan as food for the predators,” Matthew Engelhart blogged in 2015, accompanied by a photo of him eating a hamburger. “Cows maintain the grass, predators maintain the herd by culling the weak and sick. We can be part of that sacrament. Sacrifice is part of life.”

There was one wrinkle: the Engelhart family owns Cafe Gratitude, one of the largest vegan restaurant chains in California, and their diners disagreed.

When their blog posts resurfaced last month, patrons vowed they would boycott the chain and accused them of hypocrisy.

“Liars,” one wrote.

“Too bad you murder animals,” wrote another.

The chain of restaurants, which includes Gracias Madre, extends from California to Kansas City. They are best-known for menu items named after affirming feelings of being “grateful” or “whole,” and for drawing a bevy of flashy Hollywood celebrities to their Los Angeles outpost, the New York Times reported in 2011.

But none of that eponymous gratitude made it to the negative Yelp reviews or the Facebook group threatening to boycott the restaurants after the posts began to circulate online last month.

One post showing beef broth and pastured beef being made on the Engelharts’ farm prodded a commenter to suggest the couple had decided they might as well make a profit on their cows “since they die anyway... Hypocrites!!!!"

Many commenters simply expressed anger and sadness, but the Engelharts told the Hollywood Reporter that they had also gotten death threats. "People have taken up the mob mentality,” Matthew Engelhart said.

It’s not the first time the Cafe Gratitude owners have come under fire. The Engelharts were sued in 2011 for allegedly undercompensating employees and forcing them to attend expensive training programs. When the lawsuits were filed, the Engelharts suggested they would have to shut down all of their Northern California sites.

“For seven-and-a-half years we’ve been willing to work and tolerate low margins because our real wealth was the transformation of our people,” Terces Engelhart told SFGate at the time. “And now that’s being threatened by the lawsuits.”

The Engelharts eventually settled out of court and kept one of the area’s restaurant open until 2015.

But after the backlash against their meat consumption, the Engelharts have buckled down.

"I personally feel it's a little illogical to require my parents to remain vegan for the rest of their lives just because they created a vegan restaurant at a point in time that they were vegan," said Terces Engelhart’s son Cary Mosier to the Associated Press. Mosier, who works as Cafe Gratitude’s chief operating officer, added that trying to impose vegan beliefs or accusing them of lying “is heading in the wrong direction.”

This story was originally published May 6, 2016 at 10:18 AM with the headline "These vegan restaurant owners began quietly eating meat. Then their customers found out.."