So yesterday, Sarah and I joined Carl for lunch at a local noodle house we frequent. We’ve gone to this place many times and the waitress knows us. We order our normal food but one of the dishes was too salty and sour for our taste. We told the waitress this and she took it back to get it corrected. The new dish wasn’t much better. At this point Sarah ask to speak to the boss. The waitress goes back to the kitchen to get him but he doesn’t come out. I tried the dish a few more times to confirm its saltiness. After about 10 minute Sarah asked the waitress to bring out the boss again. This time the boss finally comes out and starts arguing that there is nothing wrong with the dish and we have no reason to complain!

I was very taken back by this because this is the first restaurant I’ve been to where the customer wasn’t right. In the restaurant business, the customer is always right, even when they’re wrong. In every other restaurant where I complained about the food, the restaurant would replace the dish without question and sometime they would replace it and not charge me for the meal.

I remember once going through a MacDonald’s drive through and they mixed up my order with someone else’s. I had to drive back to MacDonald’s to get it corrected. Not only did they correct it but they gave me my money back! Once at The Keg, I had a steak that was cook a little too long to my liking. I told the waitress, she told the head chef, the head chef came out, took away my steak and made me a new one. When I got my new steak I noticed it was much bigger than normal. This was because the chef upgraded my steak to a keg size without charge. One time at the Cactus Club Cafe, I told the manager that the ribs doesn’t seem to be falling off the bone like they normally do. He looked at it and said “You know, you’re right!” and took the ribs away and replaced them with a new set and removed the ribs from our dinner bill. It’s customer service like these that separates the good restaurants from the bad ones.

It’s too bad the noodle house doesn’t understand the meaning of customer service. This might explain why he still only has one restaurant and not a chain like The Keg or Catus Club Cafe. We won’t be eating noodles at his place again.