Bouchon Las Vegas, Part 2
For those of you who missed the first chapter of my road trip restaurant saga, Xav and I took the kids to Bouchon Las Vegas and had an exceedingly mediocre dinner for which we paid a fortune. That story is here.
After I wrote that post, Debbie encouraged me to tell the Keller people my story and provided a link for me to do so. I immediately received a great response from their PR person who wrote:
"Thank you so much for your email and comments! While I was extremely disappointed to hear that you had a negative dining experience at Bouchon, I truly appreciate your taking the time to let us know about it. I am very sorry about this unfortunate incident; it is definitely atypical and uncharacteristic of the level of cuisine and service that we pride ourselves in providing our guests.
I am forwarding your email to Chef Keller, as well as our managers at Bouchon, in order for them to discuss this matter with you directly. Please let me know if there is anything I can do in the meantime."
Honestly, for me this could have been the end of it. Her note was nice, professional and made me feel listened to. End of story. Except that the Bouchon general manager also sent me an email:
"I am the General Manager of Bouchon, Las Vegas and I would like to respond about your recent visit in the form of a written letter.
If you will allow me to do so, may I have your address please? I appreciate your time and attention that you have given us.
Sincerely,"
(I'm not including names in this post)
Wow. A real letter? Like on paper and with a stamp? How quaint. But maybe it could be nice. I wrote him back to say it was completely unnecessary to write me (and BTW, my preference is for email) but gave him my address. I kept my expectations low.
This weekend I received the letter:
"Dear Mrs. Carbonnet,
I truly appreciate the time you took to write of your dining experience at Bouchon Las Vegas. I am sorry that you were disappointed with your experience at Bouchon. We pride ourselves with providing excellent cuisine, as well as service, and I apologize that we did not succeed that evening you dined with us in Las Vegas.
Please accept our apologies and find enclosed a dinner voucher for your next visit with us here in Las Vegas. Please do not hesitate to contact me personally at (phone number deleted) so I can assist you in making reservations.
Sincerely,"
And true to his word he included a voucher in the letter, undoubtedly the reason he wanted my physical address. Care to guess the amount? Let me save you the suspense: $50
I'll wait here a minute for you to stop laughing too.
The thing is, I was never looking for money. Furthermore I told both him and the PR person that I wasn't looking for money. In truth, I wasn't even looking for a dialog.
But now of course I'm offended. Instead of listening to me, addressing my concerns and letting it go with some personal correspondence, they tried to buy my good will for $50. Fifty dollars to eat in a restaurant where the cheapest bottle of wine is $100. Where a bowl of olives costs $6.50. A place where I have already spent $300. And to top it off, the voucher is embossed to prevent forgery and comes with a number of caveats - cannot be used for New Year's Eve, nor for gratuity, only at Bouchon Las Vegas, etc. The whole thing felt quite formulaic, to say the least.
I only stayed mad for a little while. As a marketing person I figure this guy probably deals with extortionists all the time - people looking for whatever freebies they can get. And perhaps he's become jaded and didn't believe me when I said I didn't want money.
I sent the voucher back.
Comments
1) Occasionally we serve a lousy meal and oops you got one.
2) Our food sucks, pretty much always
A specific apology would require that they fess up to one of these, and they can't, really. If they go with (1), then they will have extortionists after them, big time. If they go with (2), well, they can't. So they have to adopt the attitude that our food is always great, and you got a great meal, and you just weren't happy for some reason, so here's 50 bucks. Not really satisfactory, but it ain't nothin'.
Not sure if money is ever the issue. When I had problems with our favorite place in Palo Alto - I let them know and they sent me $100 voucher which was more than enough to cover dinner there. So we took them up on it and had another horrid meal. We took quite a while off from the place and now they seem to care about their food and service again. I think I would have been happier with them if they had taken my input and fixed the problems at the time...
I'm sure you sending back the voucher will give them the message you originally intended.
For the future, when you get pissed at people and they send you free stuff and you want to make a point by not accepting it, go ahead and send it over to me. I'll be sufficiently indignant and also take the free things off your hands. It's what friends are for.
I've never eaten there, but do have the cookbook: the skirt steak and gougeres recipes are both divine.
I disagree with the idea that fessing up brings out more extortionists, but even if it did, the price of treating everyone like a potential extortionist is too high for me. I don't own a restaurant but I do own a retail store and the best way we've found to deal with customers is to treat them with respect and honesty. As long as you do that, even or especially when there are real problems, they trust you. If you lie to them or treat them like they are creating problems, they will often feel diminished and disrespected - a very effective way to kill customer loyalty.
Bouchon, as Paul noted, was very close to getting it right. And while I am in favor of having executives face their own music, this guy would have done better to let his PR person take care of it.
that is a riot.
now if only I'd had a wendy's coupon...
i too, am disappointed. they were very close to fixing the whole thing and then blammo.
note to self: if you ever become an extortionist be sure to send the free stuff to Paul. (don't hold your breath)
if this guy was a store manager i would agree that he is probably capped in terms of what he can offer, but as the general manager he should have loads of power. He's The Man (at least in Vegas).
I'm not surprised that the Bouchon cookbook is great, after all it's filled with Keller's killer recipes. I bet they're even better when he's the one cooking them. ;-)
Here they'll probably just read the mail with the feedback and decide it's junk =/
it might be the difference between "here and there" or it might just be the difference between you and me. ;-)
I am a bit older than you and when I was younger I was a great deal more forgiving about how i expected to be treated and what kind of value i got for my dollar.
these days, knowing that customer loyalty is one of the most important things to build in business, i expect others to take it seriously too - especially restaurants. customer loyalty is, if you'll excuse the pun, the bread and butter of restaurants, and to squander a customer's good will by avoiding being genuine, or trying to save a couple of bucks seems short sighted to me.
I bet it felt really, really good to mail that back to him.
Forewarned is forearmed, I always say. ;-)
It did. But I would feel even better if I thought the gesture made him think for a minute or two about why I did it.
Just sending you a voucher, that's telling you You're a moron, come back and spend more money and here's a couple of bucks to make it worth your time.
If they were truly interested in customer service, they would have asked you specifically about what problems you ran into and what they could do to prevent it from happening in the future. Not only would that have helped to satisfy you, it's in their best interest to make sure no other customers get pissed off.
Oh... and word of mouth is deadly, since they pissed you off we all know about it now, so that's another reason to have been less condescending to you.
Sadly, customer service these days generally means "just get rid of them for now".