Dishes have always been returned in restaurants for various reasons and restaurateurs have had to deal with the dilemma of whether, in fact, the customer is always right (even when they are not). Apparently, this trend is more frequent in Anglo-Saxon countries, where it is not uncommon for dishes to be returned for reasons that go beyond the usual ones (that the cooking point is not fair or that the recipe contains an ingredient that was not specified). in the letter). There are even courses for restaurant professionals on how to act when a customer asks for a dish to be removed just because, because he doesn’t like it, or because he simply regrets having ordered it.
Without going any further, I myself witnessed a case a few weeks ago at the Mexican restaurant Quiote Mezcalería, in Barcelona, ??when two clients from London complained to the waiter that some prawns were in bad condition, requesting to return the dish and, therefore , not pay it. Despite the explanations of the chef and owner of the restaurant, Enrique Fernández, who after tasting the prawns confirmed that they were in perfect condition, they continued in their thirteenth: they were bad and they did not plan to pay for them, although they did offer to pay for the rest of the dishes that they offered. they had requested. They even praised what, in their opinion, was “one of the best guacamoles we have ever tasted.”
After a tense exchange of views that lasted a long time, and given that neither party gave in, Fernández decided to call the Mossos de Esquadra to report what had happened. Shortly after, a patrol car showed up and the two agents listened attentively to the story of both the clients and the restaurant team. Finally, they explained to the two women that they could file a complaint if they considered that the service was not adequate, but that they had to pay the bill, which they ended up doing reluctantly and visibly angry at treatment that – they insisted – had been unfair and which they even described as misogynistic.
“It is increasingly common for tourists from Anglo-Saxon countries to return dishes with any excuse simply because they do not want to pay. We have talked about it with other restaurateurs and it is a phenomenon that, although occasional, occurs more and more,” explains Fernández. His partner at the head of Quiote and also a chef, Marta Carrasco, who was in the kitchen that day, but did not go out to the room, explains that “for us, the good condition of the raw materials we work with is essential. I myself have had gastrointestinal problems and since I studied cooking I am especially careful with what I offer to clients. As restaurateurs, we risk poisoning someone and even putting their health at risk. “I would never defend a dish so hard without being sure.”
For their part, the Mossos Unit points out that “in principle, there is no intervention protocol in these cases, so the agents act as in any other citizen conflict. That is, a patrol is sent when required, whether from the Mossos or the Urban Police, and from there the agents act as mediators between the parties.” Is it common to reach this extreme? Do restaurateurs usually require the intervention of security forces in these types of conflicts? “It had never happened to us before other than on another occasion, when a client refused to pay the bill for no reason and we had to take action,” explains the Quiote chef.
Other restaurateurs, however, say that if necessary they prefer to have the party in peace and follow the old maxim that the customer is always right. This is the case of Marc Martínez, chef and owner of Roaster
Claudio Hoyos, owner of the restaurants El fille Russo and El mercader de l’Eixample, both in Barcelona, ??has the same opinion: “It has not happened to us that dishes are returned beyond the point of cooking of the meat, but in my opinion if someone He complains about a dish, obviously it is changed. “That’s how I think it has to be.”
For her part, chef Iolanda Bustos, currently in charge of the gastronomic offer at the Mas Generós hotel, in the province of Girona, affirms that these situations have always occurred and that they generate a lot of discomfort among restaurateurs. “It has always happened that people return dishes so as not to pay for them, because they order too much and in the end they are not hungry. Now there is the possibility of taking them away, so the customer accustomed to this strategy has it more complicated, but even so it continues to happen. To do? The truth is that it creates a conflict for you, because sometimes they return a dish having eaten half of it and in the end you end up not charging for it, but knowing that, in this case, the customer is not right.”
In this sense, Gemma E. Santiago, head of the gastronomic consultancy Divinos Sabores, explains that in general terms it is convenient to compensate a client when a dish is not what was expected, since luckily it is something that happens from grapes to pears. Among the bizarre situations that she has encountered throughout her career, Santiago remembers “a client who was caught by a restaurant’s security cameras putting pieces of glass in her wine glasses so as not to pay for them.” . On another occasion, a customer returned a supposed hair from a plate that had nothing to do with the color and texture of anyone on the kitchen team. “What to do in this case? It doesn’t seem like a very good idea to start arguing even though the reason is on the restaurateur’s side,” says Santiago.
Fernández, from Quiote, agrees, arguing that, in the specific case of the London customers, they returned the dish after having tried to cancel it when it had already left and rejected the take away offer made to them by the local team. Furthermore, as the restaurant team interpreted, they did it in bad ways (personally, I don’t have the same perception and I was right next door, with the place empty). “We are willing to dialogue with the customer as long as opinions are conveyed politely,” explains the chef.
The clients, for their part, warned before leaving that things were not going to stop there and were responsible for transmitting their vision of the events on their social networks and various online channels.
Thus, what could have remained a simple anecdote has been a nightmare for Quiote’s team that to this day has not come to an end, since both the two women (one of them with a certain notoriety on social networks) How many of his followers dedicated themselves to defaming the restaurant on different platforms, which led Quiote to resort to the cyber police to get some of those accusations withdrawn.
For his part, Luis Rovira, chef and cooking teacher at the Hofmann School in Barcelona, ??blames this sudden trend of returning dishes to the prevailing snobbery. “Today we believe that taking a tasting course or publishing photos of food on social networks and having followers, even if they are few, gives us the right to cross some limits that would not have been crossed years ago.” For Rovira, furthermore, the rise of social networks and the distorted image of some dishes can cause many customers to arrive at restaurants with very high expectations. The fault, then, is the Instagram filters. According to Professor Hofmann, the solution should not always be to remove the dish and prepare a new one, since it is dangerous to end up spreading what today is, fortunately, still an occasional practice. “To what extent do you make a new dish? It is the restaurateur’s decision and depends on many factors. I understand that it does not always have to be done because there is not always a compelling reason for it.”
It should also be noted that the fact that foreign customers proliferate, coming from countries with a different gastronomic tradition, can cause certain confusion that is difficult to deal with. As once happened to Martínez, from Roaster