Top Toronto Restaurant Writes Perfect Public Response to Negative Reviewer

Leaving a negative review loaded with personal bias based on an experience you felt unbothered to address while you were actually at the restaurant is like not voting in an election and then going off in comment sections about everything that’s wrong with the world.

Toronto’s Edulis restaurant, one of Canada’s best, was recently victim to such petulance when a diner followed up their visit with a very unreasonable review on Bookenda.

The reviewer complained about not being let in the restaurant despite arriving 20 minutes before it opened, somehow blamed Edulis for their party having spent more money than intended, and capped it off with a generally terrible thing to say as a human being.

While restaurants deal with negative and unfair reviews all the time, this one hurt Edulis’ owners so much that they deemed it appropriate to respond.

“Sometimes it feels as restaurant owners/chefs we do not have a voice when people write cruel things about us,” writes restaurateur Tobey Nemeth in the Instagram caption accompanying her post. “Perhaps for these online reviewers it’s too easy to forget there are human beings behind every experience.”

She then followed it up with this:

This restaurant business can be hard. Having a very hard time today. Sometimes it feels as restaurant owners/chefs we do not have a voice when people write cruel things about us. This is my response to one of the most vicious reviews by a guest at Edulis. Can’t shake the terrible feeling it left me with. Sometimes you just want to throw in the towel. It feels like the only thing that would give people like this satisfaction would be to see you go out of business. Perhaps for these online reviewers it’s too easy to forget there are human beings behind every experience. Human beings that are – despite every effort to try to have a thick skin – deeply hurt by negative comments. This affects the psyche of our entire staff. I would also like to say thank you from the bottom of my heart to all the beautiful people who have taken time out of their busy lives to write us kind and beautiful things. Who make our day with their pleasure and positivity. Who literally make us light up when you walk in our dining room. You, also, have no idea how much this means to us.

A photo posted by EDULIS RESTAURANT (@edulisrestaurant) on Nov 12, 2016 at 10:07am PST