If additional stars can fill tables, it stands to reason that low ratings may well empty them. Because of that, restaurateurs are changing the way they do business in response to some criticisms.
Complaints on social media about the long waits at Bethesda’s Mussel Bar & Grille spurred the restaurant to buy an iPad so the host or hostess can text diners (using an app called BuzzTable) when their table is ready. That allows diners to walk around Bethesda while they’re waiting, says Polly Wiedmaier, who co-owns the restaurant with her chef-husband, Robert Wiedmaier.
Similarly, online groans that the Wiedmaiers’ new Wildwood Kitchen in Bethesda didn’t accept American Express resulted in a turnaround of that policy, she says.
Courtney Fitzgerald, executive director of hospitality for Geoff Tracy’s restaurants, says an online complaint caused the chain to rethink charges for lemonade refills (it wasn’t charging for soda, iced tea or Arnold Palmer refills). “It wasn’t a huge complaint, but it caused us to go: ‘Huh, maybe this doesn’t make sense,’ ” Fitzgerald says.
Online complaints about wait times at Matchbox Vintage Pizza Bistro in Rockville spurred the restaurant to create more two-tops, allowing for better flow.
After Cava reduced the size of its Greek doughnuts, online comments indicated that “people were not happy,” co-owner Ted Xenohristos says. “They wanted them the old way. We changed them back.”
And at MoCo’s Founding Farmers, online comments revealed that some diners wanted doggy bags boxed in the restaurant’s kitchen, and others wanted to do it themselves at the table. Now servers ask guests which they would prefer, Motruk Loy says.
Restaurateurs suspect that not all postings are legitimate, of course. Some may be from competitors, disgruntled employees or others with hidden agendas.
Spiro Gioldasis, owner of Pacci’s Neapolitan Pizzeria and Pacci’s Trattoria & Pasticceria in Silver Spring, says a woman recently wrote “OK” reviews of his restaurants on Yelp, while noting that another local restaurant was better. When he clicked on her profile, he recognized her as a friend of the competitor.
Yelp does have an automated review filter to weed out fake or malicious reviews, though it admits the system isn’t perfect. (You can read the filtered reviews on another page, but they’re not used to calculate star ratings.) Kristen Whisenand, public relations manager for Yelp, says the company intentionally withholds information on how the filter works so that people can’t “game the system.”
She hastens to add “that there is no amount of money anyone can pay Yelp to manipulate reviews, and our filter does not punish those who do not advertise.”
In 2011, a judge dismissed a class action lawsuit alleging that Yelp promised to bury bad reviews and highlight positive ones in exchange for advertising.
The downside to all this online information is that the complaint is always out there. At most local restaurants, genuine gripes initiate internal inquiries, where restaurateurs get the other side of the story from the server or the kitchen before following up with the diner. But there’s only so much they can do to fix things after the fact.
“It’s tough to re-cook a steak once a customer has gone home and complained on Twitter about it,” Tracy says.
Cava’s Xenohristos often asks online critics if they informed the waiter or manager of their problem at the time. But he admits that he himself is hesitant to bring up issues when he dines out. For one thing, it can ruin the mood of a meal. “Maybe in my lifetime I’ve sent back one dish,” he says. “Sometimes I’ve eaten the wrong meal and haven’t said anything.”
It would seem, in fact, that the ability to complain electronically has reduced the number of on-site verbal complaints.
“Talking has reduced drastically,” says Food Wine & Co.’s Namin, who used to own the now-defunct Centro Italian Grill in Bethesda. “At Centro, my regular customers would say, ‘Francis, we loved the food, but you need to work on the new server.’ Now they’re just putting it online.”
Or threatening to.
Gioldasis, who is also general manager of Mrs. K’s Toll House Restaurant in Silver Spring, remembers one woman who ate all the prime rib on her plate, then complained that her meal and her son’s weren’t perfect, threatening to write bad comments online if the dinner wasn’t complimentary. Since she was making a scene, Gioldasis reduced the tab by half.
Jared Rager, owner of Bethesda’s Redwood Restaurant and Bar, remembers a similar situation several years ago. If there was a wait for a table, a particularly impatient diner would say, “Seat me now or I’m going to post negative things on Yelp!”
Thankfully, Rager says, “we haven’t heard a case like that in a long time.”
Bethesda’s Critical Mass
Local restaurateurs have long said that Bethesda area diners are a picky bunch. And now there’s data to back them up.
“People are definitely more snarky in Bethesda,” says Polly Wiedmaier, who co-owns Mussel Bar & Grille and Wildwood Kitchen in Bethesda, as well as Marcel’s and Brasserie Beck in the District, and Brabo and Brabo Tasting Room in Alexandria, Va.
“I’ve heard things [from diners] in Bethesda that would seem absurd to hear downtown,” says Jared Rager, who owns Redwood Restaurant and Bar in Bethesda and Sonoma on Capitol Hill. He recalls one diner demanding to speak to the chef so she could tell him that “[he] should know better than to serve fish with skin on it.”
NewBrandAnalytics, a Washington, D.C., company that analyzes social media, recently compared online comments about fast-casual chains with locations in the District and the Maryland and Virginia suburbs. It found “a strong negative bias in Bethesda around service,” CEO Kristin Muhlner says. Service ratings in Bethesda were anywhere from 5 to 20 points lower than the brand average.
Not only that, but diners in our area perceived that they were getting less value for their money than people who patronized the same chains in Virginia or Washington, D.C. There was no statistical difference when it came to comparisons of online commentaries about the food.
Muhlner says it’s impossible to know what drives the service bias, but she suggests two possibilities: Local residents may have higher expectations, and/or the employment pool differs.
Rager says it actually took him years to assemble a good crew at Redwood. That’s because it’s considered “more hip and cool” to work at a downtown restaurant, he says, and servers often can make more money there because of later restaurant hours, more expense-account diners and a greater density of pricier establishments.
As for the matter of expectations, Rager thinks diners here are more demanding, but he’s not sure why. Maybe they feel freer to speak candidly since they’re on their home turf, he says.
Or maybe some Bethesdans feel just a bit, shall we say, entitled. Take the doctors and lawyers Wiedmaier sometimes encounters who complain when they have to wait for a table.
“When was the last time I waited at a doctor’s office?” she asks with no little irony.
We don’t mean to take sides, but we’d much rather wait for mussels.
Carole Sugarman is the magazine’s food editor.
