Restaurant Owner Fights Back with CCTV

In another restaurants bites back situation, a cafe owner in Ireland has posted CCTV footage of customers ‘horsing food into them’ after receiving a bad review online.

The owner of the White Moose Café and Charleville Lodge Hotel, Paul Stenson, wrote on his cafe's Facebook page that any customers eating their food and clearing their plates who then left a bad review would be caught on CCTV.

The Irish Independent reports that the owner posted this message to customers:

"Dear Guests,

Before you leave a negative review of the food in our White Moose Café on Facebook, may I remind you that we have CCTV cameras in our café that both capture and record footage of people horsing food into them and clearing our plates clean.

If you are not happy with your food, tell us AT THE TIME and whatever you do, DON'T F**KING EAT IT. We will happily give you another dish which may better suit your discerning palate. In that way, you won't have to go and write a negative review AFTER THE FACT, which could damage the thus far untarnished reputation of our café. Your issues would have been resolved there and then, no negative review would be necessary, and we would all live happily ever after".

The post seems to have been taken offline but it's not the first time the owner has thought back against customers, in 2014 he wrote an open letter to some German guests while they were staying at his hotel. And it’s certainly not the first time restaurants and chefs have decided to fight back using CCTV, one chef decided to post a video of a customer who left a bad review of his restaurant without even eating the food there and another posted a picture of two rude customers on Instagram who threatened his staff and threatened a bad review.

What do you think? Is Stenson right? Is there a better way for restaurants to have their own response to bad reviews?

We personally like this chef’s approach of turning his bad reviews into great publicity.