It makes me wonder: are restaurants still a ‘people business’?

It’s increasingly hard to contact restaurants by phone — to make or alter a booking. It saves them money — but there’s a hidden cost.

Easy: but many restaurants these days don’t have a phone

It’s a Monday morning when the message gets through to our guy in WA. It’s confirming his restaurant reservation in Sydney for the following night. Cripes, he thinks, that’s a stuff-up. It’s meant to be for tomorrow week. No worries, he thinks, these little hiccups can occur. I’ll give them a call, sort it out.

No he won’t. Of course not. Like a disturbing number of desirable places to eat and drink these days, the restaurant has no telephone.

A lot has changed since that virus left Wuhan and our restaurants are weathering all sorts of issues, including finding staff. And you need staff to talk on the phone. Something that was just beginning to rear its ugly head way back when (the start of 2020) is in full swing now as restaurants, wine bars, you name it, ditch Mr Bell’s invention for, um, less personal, less direct communication. Email. Social media platform messaging. Anything, it seems, other than a person talking to a person. It saves money, because it frees up personnel to do other stuff.

Or does it? Maybe, just maybe, it’s counterproductive. Pisses people off, which actually ends up costing the business in the long run. It makes me wonder: are restaurants still a “people business”? That chance for us to share a bit of humanity, particularly when we are increasingly spending our days locked up at home with very few water cooler opportunities? Is it really a satisfactory fulfilment of the restaurant’s customer service obligation to communicate via an email that may, or may not, be seen for hours (or days)? Or via Instagram? I don’t know about you, but I know plenty of people who don’t even know what Instagram is.

In the context of reservations, contact and meaningful dialogue might easily mean the difference between solving a problem and forgoing a significant deposit. A place in Adelaide, for example, charges the full whack up front, $220 a head, on reservation. If I’d already paid $440 for dinner and was in a car accident on the way to dinner, I’d like to be able to call and explain. And get my deposit back.

It’s seemingly part of a greater movement within the industry to avoid actual contact with The Public. Some places not only have no phone, and don’t take reservations, but when you go to the restaurant’s website they then direct you to their Instagram account to make contact. Picture the scenario: you’re in Sydney and decide to go out to that new place in the burbs for lunch. They’ve just opened and they say on their website they’re open for lunch on Fridays. Without being able to call you show up, only to find they’re closed for a private function. Their eventual response: you should have gone to our Instagram account; that’s where we announced it.

Or, perhaps instead they should field phone enquiries from people who want to check on table availability before spending their money. Just a thought.

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