A few weekends ago, my wife and I went to Macaroni Grill for dinner. We had a great server who was funny, helpful, and courteous. After looking at the menu, I decided to order a meal with Chicken – some new summer entree and I don’t remember its name well. But, I was looking forward to trying something new.
Boy, did I get something new and surprising.
Raw Beef or Cooked Chicken?
We finally got our food and in the course of eating, I took a bite of what I thought was a mushroom. But, it turned out to be mostly raw beef. Here’s the picture below:
Getting Beef when I was expecting Chicken was one surprise. But, receiving raw beef was not good because it is a safety issue and is also pretty disgusting.
We told the server, and instead of not charging me for my meal, she gave me and my wife desert for free. All in all, the desert cost $7.00 – which was nice, but not quite correcting the raw beef experience. I didn’t fight it because the server was very nice and we courteously said “thanks”, paid, and then left. But, we didn’t leave with the best of memories or experience.
In the following pages, you’ll see what I mean.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Absolutely the worst thing for a restaurant is serving raw meat right up there with food poisoning and foul tasting food. You are guaranteed customers who will not return and poor recommendations. I would not bother with a survey.I will let my wallet and mouth do the talking.
Pete, I agree. I wonder though what feedback they actually got to improve the situation.
If you hadn’t filled in the text box they would have had nothing to go on.
As the old saying goes “weighing the pig doesn’t make it fatter”
James
Outside of the personal letter from the manager, my sense is that their response was fairly pedestrian. I’m not a big fan of chain restaurants in any case, but I feel this could have been handled a lot better. I took ill after eating at a smaller local restaurant in Boston early this year and wrote a letter about that experience where the general manager called me within 2 days of receiving it and followed up by sending me a $200 voucher to come back give them a second chance. That was an impressive response and it did serve to recover the unfortunate situation and I’ve been back there twice since.
What they should have done, no question about it is to change the dish at no charge. You don’t “find” beef in a chicken dish, it was simply the wrong dish.
This story has actually little to do with NPS, since there is no score compilation with many customers. The question could have been a customer satisfaction one, with any scale, or even just an open-ended question.
By the way, the beef in the photo is cooked. Raw beef is red. What’s in the photo is mostly brown, the color of cooked beef. Wrong dish perhaps but the dish you got may have been properly prepared.