This week, someone left us a voicemail.
He told us he had been coming to allmine since we first opened. He remembered the service in those early days as amazing. He and his wife had recommended us to friends over the years and had apparently been some of our biggest cheerleaders.
Then they came in recently and had an experience bad enough that he ended his message by saying they would never come back.
That is difficult to hear. It should be.
What makes this particular story a missed connection in more ways than one is that he didn’t leave his name, his phone number, the date he visited, or enough information for us to figure out what happened. Our voicemail system didn’t capture his number either. So, on the off chance that he reads these notes, I hope he recognizes himself.
First, I am sorry.
I wish I knew what happened that evening. I wish I could sit down with the people who were working and understand where we failed him and his wife. Most of all, I wish I could call him back.
Restaurants are built on thousands of small interactions, and service is ultimately a very human exchange. We train constantly. We talk about how we greet people, how we move through the dining room, how we read a table and how we take care of someone without making the mechanics of that care visible. We practice because hospitality takes practice, and because we know that practice does not make us infallible. Sometimes we miss something. Sometimes we miss someone.
When that happens, we want to know.
If you have trusted us with your dinners, birthdays, Tuesday glasses of wine, visiting relatives and recommendations to friends, that relationship matters to me. It matters to us. To Erin and Sid and Eva and Carlos and Lila and Nik, and to everyone here who has chosen hospitality as their work.
We care when you leave happy. And when you don’t, we want to know. I would much rather have the uncomfortable conversation than lose the opportunity to understand what went wrong. And try to fix it and get better so that we can continue to impress you.
There were two things in his message that stayed with me.
“I don’t expect anybody to bend over backwards for me because I’ve been a longtime client…”
And then:
“We send you guys clients all the time. We rave about you guys…”
I keep thinking about the distance between those two sentences and “we’re never coming back.”
Years of good meals, good service, recommendations to friends, and then one night that changed the story. I truly understand the disappointment, but we are still the people who were so grateful you found us in the beginning. I would argue we've gotten better, because we are still trying very hard to take good care of you. And because this work is done by people, sometimes we will fall short of what we intended and of what you deserved.
So, thank you for calling. Truly. We heard you, and we are taking your words to heart.
This note is partly an attempt to find one person. If this was you, please write back. I genuinely want to hear what happened and have the opportunity to respond personally.
But it is also a note to everyone who has walked through our doors over these past years. Thank you for telling us when we get it right, and thank you for caring enough to tell us when we don't. Both matter. Both make us better.
Perhaps that is the small lesson in this missed connection: when something has been good for a long time, it may be worth one more conversation before goodbye.
Roxana
food that hugs you back.
