Customer who left bad restaurant review gets roasted by chef over ‘undiscerning palate’

Dealing with critical reviews online is the bane of most restaurant owners today.

All it takes is one less than favourable review on Trip Advisor, Yelp or Google to see your overall rating plummet.

But sometimes these negative comments from customers aren’t always justified - especially if turns out their entire meal was complimentary.

One such customer, who remains anonymous, ordered what they thought was a goat’s cheese omelette. But it later transpired that the omelette was made from a much more expensive Gruyere cheese instead.

According to the chef, after the customer complained that the omelette did not contain goat’s cheese, they were given the entire meal for free.

But that didn’t stop the customer from taking to Yelp to write a scathing review of the restaurant.

They wrote:

 Served a goat cheese omelette (on the menu) with mozzarella cheese!!! That’s right and they tried to pass it off as goat cheese!

The excuse… sometimes he gets confused!!! Are you kidding me? With those prices you don’t have that luxury!!! Pick another place to go.

You’ll never know what will be put in your food.

But their review backfired badly after the chef, who made the omelette, replied to the customer. (The chef's original comment was not anonymous, but their details have been redacted since the post was uploaded to Imgur.)

After recounting the story of how the customer was completely reimbursed for the meal, they made some cutting remarks about the customer’s culinary palate.

They wrote:

As the chef I also feel a responsibility to let you know that the cheese was not mozzarella, it would never be mozzarella unless we had made the mozzarella in house that is a cheese much like a burrata that can be easily made within a restaurant...

The cheese you had was a gruyere, and in its own right gruyere is a great cheese, a French bistro classic that does not even minutely resemble the texture of a true mozzarella nor does its flavor profile come close to the milky cleanness of a mozz as it is semi hard and cultured possessing a foot that a mozzarella does not possess...

They added:

You wait several weeks to write a review that states information that is incorrect and inflammatory to a restaurant like ours that goes through great lengths to be the best that we can.

If we failed in our endeavor with you I can accept that responsibility but I will not have our integrity attacked by a palate that cannot discern between mozzarella and gruyere… unless that was a mistake…. which is a luxury that those writing a serious critique of a serious restaurant do not have.

People on Imigur were quick to side with the chef.

One person wrote:

S*** if someone gave me gruyere instead of literally any other cheese I would kiss them square on the mouth. WITH tongue.

Another commented:

The kind of people that eat a an entire comped meal they complained about and then leave negative reviews anonymously online. Barbarians.

Ouch.

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