Even bad reviews can be a positive for a restaurant
Some restaurateurs can fight hard to persuade a restaurant critic to review their pride and joy, then wonder why they bothered when the resulting review insults everything they’ve worked hard to achieve. A negative review can be irritating at best, hurtful at worst, but is a bad review always the disaster it seems?
When Claude and Claire Bosi moved their two-Michelin-starred restaurant Hibiscus down to London from Ludlow in 2007 it was big news.
Restaurant critics, who incidentally had never trekked up to Shropshire (despite invites from the Bosis) to review the restaurant when it was there, turned out in force during the first week of its Mayfair opening. In fact, the couple having never seen one critic before, got three in one night.
So did they finally get the recognition they’d wished for? “They (the critics) ate in the same ambience, from the same menu, had the same food and service, yet the reviews said totally different things”, said a baffled Claire Bosi during a debate ‘when the pen is mightier than the fork’ at The Restaurant Show in London last week.
“The first said we were the best thing that had arrived in London for a long time. The second said we should pack up and move back to the countryside and the third was ok,” she said.
The mind of a restaurant critic, demonstrated by the Bosi’s experience, can be hard to fathom. Often, as established restaurant critic Charles Campion reveals, a review can depend on how creative the critic is feeling or on the focus his or her editor wants it to take, rather than a true reflection of their experience as a diner.
“It’s much easier to write a bad review than a good review and if you want to be funny then you write to fit your joke,” he says. “We write for money and our editors, not for the restaurant.”
For those chefs and restaurateurs who have been on the receiving end of a restaurant critic’s wrath, they should take note of Campion’s comment, or other restaurateurs if you don’t trust the critics. Rowley Leigh who has been chef/patron of the busy and succesful Le Cafe Anglais for the last 20 years, refers to restaurant reviews as ‘tomorrow’s fish and chip paper’ and instead prefers to rely on restaurant guides and customer recommendations.
“Whether it’s atrocious or great, it’s still good PR,” adds Tom Aikens on the subject, whose eponymous restaurant was given a tough time in one of Sunday Times restaurant critic AA Gill’s column soon after it opened. “The only thing it affected was morale of staff. You just joke and laugh about it and move on. Sometimes critics can be a little bit too personal but they are there to do a job so I think it works both ways.”
Even Campion agrees that while reviews serve a purpose in informing readers, bad ones rarely affect trade.
“I don’t think restaurant reviews make that much difference to business. On occasions when restaurants have been given a bad review, sometimes the dish that has been most insulted by a critic sold the best afterwards,” he says.
If your restaurant has been slated by a critic lately and you’re still finding it hard to get over, then take note of Bosi, whose restaurant, despite the mixed reviews, has won a string of awards, most recently that of second best restaurant in the country.
“You’ve got to do what you do and do it well and if people don’t like it, but you think and know you’re doing it right, you have to continue to do that,” she says.
What do you think? Have you suffered a bad review? did you take any notice of it? Tell us about it by leaving a comment.
