When you think you can get away with an inferior product..but you don't

I still remember the days when you could make a mistake or upset a customer and hope that no one will ever know. Gone are those days. I remember also clearly, when I started telling my staff in London that they could not get away anymore and it would be better to own up straightaway, rather than being caught later on. With the advent of Google Reviews, Facebook Reviews, Trip Advisor and requests for feedback at every possible chance from your table reservation software or websites like Top Table, Dine etc, people have got used to read and post reviews all the time. If you are sloppy, use inferior products or try to dupe your customers, sooner or later it will come out and it will hurt. As mentioned in my previous post when something is missing, you should tell the customer before taking their orders. If you take online orders and you run out of ingredients, before having the time to take this dish off the internet, you must call the customer, apologise and ask if you can substitute it for something else. It's easy to think that your customer won't notice you put cheap Tesco olives in their salads, instead of Kalamata olives. It's easy to forget that you need to mention this, and it's even easier to lull yourself in a false sense of security when you do this because you have a genuine emergency or suddenly run out of something and this is the second best option given the circumstances.

The problem with this is that every time you compromise, you lower your standards. If you send out a dish which is sub par one time, your team will think it's ok to send it out another time, you have set a precedent. And this is why it's good, from time to time, to receive a bad review, to be told that someone had a better meal somewhere else, or in other words to get a kick up our butts. We need this to keep striving to serve good food and good service.

What helps me is having a good review, a certificate of excellence or any other accolades up a wall and every time a dish is borderline, look at the accolade and think "if I serve this, am I still worthy of that accolade"?