acid reflux - the customer is not always right
a rant about terrible restaurant customers, ft. Thom Eagle
Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! Last week, we announced Issue 2 of our magazine – titled ‘Bad Food’ – which goes to print this week. We’re selling through the issue quickly, so if you wish to guarantee a copy, pre-order the magazine now. If you order before 1 December, you will receive it for a discounted price, with an extra discount for paid subscribers (see the original email for details).
Since time immemorial, or at least during the past 30 years, restaurants and customers have existed in a delicate balance – a mutually dependent relationship in which each party believes the power lies with the other – and have only survived through a delicate system of checks and balances that we call ‘hospitality’.
Recently, this ecosystem has been entirely disrupted. On the one hand, you have the rise of third-party apps like delivery or reservation platforms, which have, in a very short time, inserted themselves between the restaurant and the customer. Where you might once have had to ring up Harvey’s and negotiate personally with Marco Pierre White for a table, now you can book and un-book at the click of a button, which is convenient for everyone involved, but has inadvertently created a whole new set of grievances.
At the same time, the rise of influencers and Google Reviews means that everyone can now be a critic, even though there is no real code of behaviour that explains how to navigate this new world. In a recent post on his blog that starts ‘When did an unbearable percentage of the general dining public become such insufferable, entitled, unforgiving pricks?’, Mangal II owner Ferhat Dirik writes that customers turn to review platforms on a hair-trigger, that the ‘smallest imperfection immediately is met with a 1*’. There is no accepted way of dealing with this: some complain publicly, others seethe and try to get them taken down, others – as I have written about — decide to turn the tables and give as good as they get.
I do not think it’s a coincidence that the biggest viral restaurant story of this year (Don Ciccio closing in Highgate and choosing to go out in a fireball of anti-customer invective) and the biggest viral restaurant story of last year (The Yellow Bittern) are both, at their hearts, about wounded restaurateurs trying to navigate this new world. I have been to many restaurants that give you a QR code to their Google page at the end of a meal, sometimes asking you to do it there and then (one 4.9* rated restaurant, in Alum Rock, Birmingham, has been accused in its own review section of using customers’ phones to write the reviews for them).
Others, however, take to Vittles. So in this week’s acid reflux, I’m handing the reins over to chef Thom Eagle of Bottega Caruso in Margate to explain why customers have become so unbearable.
The Customer Is Not Always Right, by Thom Eagle
Restaurants and bars have always been spaces where certain sectors of society can behave like toddlers. The infamous Bullingdon dining club at Oxford University, nurturer of future government leaders and the guardians of our economy, is notorious for giving its members the chance to live out every toddler’s dream, i.e. acting out a tantrum without fear of consequences, destroying toys and playpens in the process; the application of large amounts of money ensures that everything will be fine again in the morning. Most people would agree that smashing up a restaurant and then waving enough money at the owner for the problem to go away is abhorrent behaviour, but in a way it is just an extreme perversion of the dictum that the customer is always right, the final logic of the assumption that if you are being served and paying money for the privilege then you can do whatever you want. It is the logic of the toddler, who can’t control their emotional responses, and the logic of the bad customer, who can.
I could make a list of the behaviours that have in my experience made for bad customers, and while it would certainly start with things like setting fire to the curtains, shitting on the toilet floor and being remarkably racist, the meat of the list would be more like:
ordering off-menu and being arsey about it
arriving very early or very late and being arsey about it
sleazing on the waitress and then being arsey when called out on it
talking to the waitress like they’re an idiot
talking to me like I’m an idiot