The modern restaurant professional has concerns that their predecessors could not have even envisioned ten or fifteen years ago. In that short a time span, the dining community has seen an explosion in the voices influencing where they spend their money. Where once the newspaper and magazine critics were the nearly exclusive dispensers of media acclaim, now the interwebs are chockablock with message boards, on-line chats, and seemingly innumerable blogs about restaurants.
The smart manager/chef/owner becomes a member of these communities, participates in the forums, and skims the largely valuable feedback of core constituents – those with a sufficient passion for food to spend time writing about it for free. There should be frequent google searches to identify blogged about experiences at your places of operation. Use the good ones to motivate staff and the bad should be made whole as quickly and generously as is reasonable.
What you SHOULD NOT do is flame some anonymous blogger who identified and carefully articulated perceived shortcomings in your operation. You should not be so sack-o-hammers stupid as to conduct such flaming from a traceable IP address that leads right back to you. You should not have less understanding of this technology than a five year old and leave your real name in the email box. And if you are to be so impossibly dense as to do all of those things, perhaps you might rethink doing it after clicking on the google search “My Restaurant, My City, Blogs.”
I am fairly certain about the authorship of the flaming comments, but I have consciously not named either you or your place in a display of the gentility you lacked in calling me a: Fucking Moron, Idiot, Cheap Bastard, and a Tool. I will say that it is a good thing you don’t get paid for your literary skills.
I don’t think that readership of this blog is such that a few less than charitable words from me will seriously impact your business, but a press release just might. Just in case you’re wondering, “YourRestaurantBlows.com” is an available domain and ungentlemanly behavior just might make me angry enough to spend enough cash for it to appear on the first page of google searches. In other words, I know I don’t buy ink by the barrel, but you would still be mistaken to pick a fight with me.
Posted by restaurant refugee 
