We’ve got a local Chinese restaurant that we order from on occasion; there have been a couple of times where the place is packed and the person who usually is at the front desk is in the back, getting take-out orders to bring to the front. I’ve never had the front desk person ignore me, even when busy, and if it seems to the waitress like I’ve been there a while and not been welcomed, she’ll come over and make sure I’m taken care of. It’s probably about the same size as the place you went to (small with few staff), but it’s well-run enough that they can handle regular take-out orders on top of several folks dining in.
Chalk it up to culture gap and the fact that often indy restauranteurs are often bad business people. They’re good at the food, but they’re lousy at the business-- including customer service. Plus, this restaurant is their baby; they’ve probably put every last ounce of energy, time, money and sweat into making this the best restaurant they possibly can. Seeing this negative review on Yelp probably terrifies them beyond comprehension. This place is their life (and livelihood). You might as well have called their son an ugly, stupid, pathetic person. He may BE an ugly, stupid, pathetic person, but they’re going to fight to defend him without any thought or reason.
That said, you have no obligation to take down any of your reviews. If they want to ultimately succeed in this business, they need to know how and when they have failed their customers. They need to know what their customers expect of them, and they need to know if they’ve let their customers down, so that they can fix the problem for the future. Positive feedback may bring customers in, but negative feedback will (hopefully) make the restaurant better.
I wouldn’t post the correspondence you’ve gotten from Max and the mystery woman. It wouldn’t serve any positive purpose that I can see.
I’m not sure what your motivation is for continually updating reviews of one restaurant.
This guy is a small business owner and is trying his best to make a go of it.
I’m not sure how you would feel if there was, say, a Facebook or Twitter update of your daily work activities.
DiosaBellissima really dropped the ball this morning when she forgot to book the conference room for the Johnson account. (I don’t know what you do for a living.)
Anyway, jeez, I feel for the restaurant owner and if he’s trying to start up a business, one bad experience that could drive away potential customers isn’t going to help. We all have off days and again, I don’t know what motivates you to be the “Jamie Oliver” of your neighbourhood.
Give it a rest. You sound like a certain other member here who MOL once appropriately called “Captain Handicap.”
Plenty of people do multiple reviews for one place on Yelp. I personally find it useful when I see repeat customers talking about how a place is doing.
If he wants to make a go of it, then he should stop sucking. I don’t want to know about kitchen problems other than can you make what I want. She posted 2 glowing reviews when she got good service and a negative one when she got bad service. This is what Yelp and other review services are for. People who don’t care about her opinion don’t have to read it; they don’t even have to go on yelp. They can throw a dart at the yellowpages or whatever it is they do to decide where to go for a meal.
Leaffan, Diosa didn’t supply all of those reviews, those are just examples of reviews for the restaurant put up by other Yelp users. She wrote two good reviews to help get the place noticed because she liked it and wanted other people to go. Your description of her as being obsessive is a little off target I think.
OK, before there’s a pile-on, I have no idea what Yelp is and it sounds like I’m out of my league.
I’ve read reviews on restaurants, and hotels and the like on-line, but my take on it is that only complainers actually take the time to post comments. If I go to a restaurant and get what I expect, why the hell should I bother telling the world about it?
People actually do multiple reviews of one place? People have the time and patience and actually care to do this? Why?
You may as well get off my lawn while you’re at it.
ETA: As with Facebook, I see no need to update the world with my day-to-day experiences. I don’t care about yours and you should have no interest in mine. Bah.
Yelp: It’s a user-driven site. Meaning, the content is primarily produced by the users. And like other user-driven sites, it’s only as good as the content people provide. Yelp is a very reliable site thanks to people like the OP.
Another user-driven site, with the content provided by its users? The SDMB. You seem to be okay with posting here (multiple times on the same topic). Why would you find it strange for someone to post multiple times to Yelp?
[hijack]I’ll be 50 this year, and I’m fairly tech-savy. I have a Facebook account, but I don’t really use it. I have connected with some old friends though, and that is good. I really don’t get the sharing of information/social networking thing and never will. For this reason I don’t get the fact that every experience needs to be shared on-line. I post here to a selected group of like-minded people. I have no ambition to simply share my thoughts with the rest of the world. They don’t care about me, and I don’t care about them. I don’t care what DiosaBellissima has to say about restaurants. Really, I don’t.[/hijack]
So you 1) didn’t know what it was, 2) don’t find it useful, and still find a way to swipe at the OP without having anything to add to the conversation. Good talk.
What’s to stop restaurant “A” from loading up on comments from friends and family, and what’s to stop restaurant “B” from having family members trash restaurant “A?”
Hey, there might be controls in place, but are there? Otherwise, again, I’m not sure of the usefulness and it still seems like a waste of personal time to actually be the neighbourhood Jamie Oliver.
What exactly do you think Jamie Oliver does? It’s the second time you’ve mentioned him in this thread. Yelp is no different from any customer feedback site. What’s the point of rating things on Amazon when the owner of a competing product can just post bad reviews of another? It’s the same issue inherent in any system with the same model, it just means you have to filter through some stuff to get valuable information, not that the whole model should be scrapped because you don’t get any personal value from it.