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Restaurant owners are abandoning the age-old “customer is always right” maxim because too many diners try to get freebies through threats, making malicious complaints and underhand tricks.
Andrew Sheridan, cited as “one of the finest chefs north Wales has ever produced”, said he was tired of customers “trying it on”.
“It happens all the time,” he said. “Last week, it was a woman complaining about a golden pillar that had apparently obstructed her view.
“She said she’d had a lovely meal, with great wine and friendly service but the pillar - a steel structure that stops a Grade II building from falling down which no one has ever complained about before - spoiled her evening to the extent that she wanted a free meal and vouchers,” he said.
The demand is on a par with another Sheridan received from customers that he pay the fine they incurred by driving in a bus lane en route to his restaurant. “They said our website should have warned people not to drive in it,” he said.
Sheridan also cites a family who demanded a free meal because they were not happy with the quality of the roads leading to the restaurant, despite the roads being owned by the council. Others have demanded money back from restaurant gift vouchers.
While being careful not to discriminate between constructive and destructive criticism, Sheridan has now had enough.
“Everyone is a restaurant critic now and online reviews have given them a mass audience to vent if their personal preferences haven’t been met, regardless of whether that’s fair.
“I recently asked customers to get out halfway thorough their meal,” said Sheridan, who added his attitude changed last year after being blackmailed by criminals who threatened to flood his restaurants’ online listings with fake one-star reviews until Sheridan paid thousands of pounds.
“They arrived complaining that the location of the restaurant wasn’t right on Google Maps, which it is,” he said. “Then they complained about the lighting, then the style of the plates and then the food.”
Sheridan is now unmoved by threats to post bad reviews. “Five years ago, chefs used to be really worried when people wrote bad reviews, but now chefs are increasingly saying that the customer isn’t always right,” he said.
“I respond to every unfair, bad online review, explaining why it’s unreasonable.”
Sheridan is supportive of Chris D’Sylva, the owner of the renowned Notting Hill bistro Dorian, who this week said he was so tired of complaining customers that he now reviews them.
“Everything gets marked,” D’Sylva said. “Good behaviours and not favourable behaviours get noted on the … tiered system whereby we rank how much we like the customer and the value of the customer, or the destructiveness of the customer.”
Ben Murphy, the Michelin star chef who won National Chef of the Year, believes the “bond of trust” has broken between restaurants and their customers: “You don’t hear that thing about the customer always being right any more,” he said. “There has definitely been a change in the dynamics.”
Murphy reevaluated the “customer is always right” maxim after a customer slipped clingfilm on to her plate and demanded to be given her meal for free.
“We were really apologetic and had no choice but to comp her entire meal but something didn’t feel right,” said Murphy. “That night, I spent two hours watching the CCTV of her meal and saw her taking the clingfilm out of her bag.
“I’ve also had a customer blaming me for food poisoning, which also turned out to be completely false,” he added.
Murphy said rising prices had proved a tipping point. “There’s definitely been a corresponding rise in customers trying to get freebies,” he said.
Stefan Chomka, the editor of the Restaurant magazine, agreed that the bond of trust has been strained by the rise of social media reviewing platforms.
“The balance of power has shifted towards customers, who can now publicly voice their opinions, which can be both beneficial and damaging for businesses,” he said. “But chefs are pushing back against false negative reviews, especially during these tough economic times.”
Chomka added that the balance of power had got out of kilter: “Until fairly recently, chefs often had a ‘my way or the highway’ attitude towards customers: not letting customers use salt and pepper, not accepting dietary requirements,” he said. “High-end dining rooms often maintained a strict hierarchy where customers were treated as inferior.”
Oisin Rogers, the landlord of The Devonshire in Soho in London, however, still sticks to the “customer is always right” adage. “I absolutely do because if you start off with the vibe of, ‘You’ve got to work within our rules, and we don’t like it if you do this or that’, you’re not going to make people feel wonderful, are you?” he said.
“If customers complain, we have to understand that sometimes people have bad days, and sometimes people don’t understand what you’re doing – and that’s totally their prerogative because they’re already investing their time and their precious money in coming to to see us.
“Essentially, it’s way better to be optimistic and occasionally wrong than to be pessimistic and sometimes correct.”
