There’s a level of trust we all give a restaurant the moment we sit down and order off the menu. It’s a basic expectation that the food served to us will be clean and safe to eat, isn’t it?
So when she found something gross in her food, that trust evaporated pretty quickly. And what started as a simple, polite request for a replacement turned into a strange standoff with the staff.
Over the weekend, this woman went out to dinner at a restaurant, and she ordered soup. She took one spoonful of it and noticed there were two strands of hair floating around in there.
She promptly and politely asked one of the restaurant employees if she could get a replacement bowl of soup, and she informed them that she had found two separate hairs in the current bowl sitting in front of her.
Initially, this employee was helpful and said she was happy to take that away and get her a new soup. She then asked if she could have the first bowl remain in front of her so that she could be sure it was new soup being swapped out.
The employee said no, and she reiterated that she wanted to be certain that she was going to get a different bowl and not the same exact one.
“I used to work in a restaurant myself, and the dodgy things chefs do at the back, and not replace it with a new plate/bowl,” she explained.
“[The] staff member then tried to take the bowl, and I said: ‘Ok, that’s fine, can I please get a refund instead?'”
The employee told her that no, she could not have her money back. So, she requested to speak to the manager about getting a refund.
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The manager walked over to her, and she respectfully filled him in on the hairy situation before asking if she could please have her money back.
The manager balked and stated that they do not offer refunds to their customers, and she felt like she had no choice but to lose the politeness she had maintained throughout the entire incident.
“Me being a Karen now: ‘You do know, finding 2 long hairs in my soup and not offering a refund is pretty bad service, that’s ok, I’ll sit here, write a review with the pictures I took of the bowl, plus I’ll just search up the number for food health and safety and file a review report,'” she added.
“Manager: ‘I’ll process your refund.'”
She was not trying to blackmail these people into doing the right thing, but she’s wondering if she overreacted about what happened at the restaurant that night.
Well, I would have done the same thing! Any reasonable and respectable restaurant would have offered to bring her a new bowl to her table or given her a refund when asked. There should have been an apology that accompanied that, too.
She wasn’t being over the top in both of those requests, and it sounds like it might be worth leaving them the kind of review they deserve on Google.
What do you think?
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By Bre Avery Zacharski
Hi, I'm Bre, Chip Chick's CEO! I have a degree in Textile/Surface Design from The Fashion Institute of Technology, and... More about Bre Avery Zacharski
