Food Dreadful 3* experience

Phil David said:
A very brief look on Companies House reveals that to be not quite as you think, Tom.
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At £1,000 a pop, they must be financial imbeciles not to make any money. One wonders what the point of setting up a business is.

And they're not financial imbeciles as they're holding on to Richard's cash (wrongly) until they know what the score is. I think the score sounds like Fat Duck nil though.
 
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Rob Lockwood said:
At £1,000 a pop, they must be financial imbeciles not to make any money. One wonders what the point of setting up a business is.

And they're not financial imbeciles as they're holding on to Richard's cash (wrongly) until they know what the score is. I think the score sounds like Fat Duck nil though.
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It is not the Blumenthal brand that historically hasn't made money but the Fat Duck in particular, which is its shop window. Whether or not that remains true I do not know.
 
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Update:

I sent another email on Thursday stating that it was my final request for a refund otherwise legal action would be taken. Just got this response:

I hope you are well.

I do understand your frustration with all the points raised below. We have had to do system upgrade, something that was necessary to deal with the amount of requests that we have been receiving. With this being a global situation and teams being at minimum levels and in different time zones, it has not been the smoothest of transitions.

Please accept my sincerest apologies once again for delay & thank you for everything. I am personally chasing this up for you.

Sincerely,


If they haven't refunded by Friday I think I will pay the £35 fee and put it through small claims court.
 
I have also reported them on the gov.uk website, after a forumite informed me there is a section been set up specifically for reporting companies using covid19 as an excuse to behave poorly. I doubt much will come of that, but tbh I'm hoping it results in them getting a taste of the level of hassle they are causing their customers!
 
Richard Ward said:
With this being a global situation and teams being at minimum levels and in different time zones, it has not been the smoothest of transitions"
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This being a global situation? Are they really global, how many restauraunts do they operate, and Richard, are you in a different time zone from the restaurant where you made your booking?
 
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It's bs. The supposed system upgrade is pure fiction. This is one small restaurant with a few covers. I'm sure most of us are familiar with online banking and various forms of software. How many refunds do you think you could process in a day? Scores? Hundreds?
 
I had a look to see whether it was making the news; only really from this point of view:

The Fat Duck sees profits rise

I can see Tom's point about this small restaurant perhaps being a frontispiece and loss-leader for the Blumenthal empire but suspect things have, er, matured recently.

This episode, of which Richard is sadly the sufferer, seems to have put most here off the resaurant which is poor business indeed. I've been a couple of times and enjoyed it, but £300 per head before drinks is far far too steep for me and the value of that £300+++ is perhaps illustrated by the rise in gross margins to 17% from 13% and pre-tax from 4% to 10%. All thing being equal they should have plenty of cash, especially if a fair bit of the revenue is collected 3 months in advance.
 
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A quick calculation on exactly how many refunds they would have to process...

They open for 2 sittings per day, each of 30 covers, 5 days a week. So that's 300 covers per week, but not 300 individual bookings - as they don't do tables for 1, each booking is at least 2 people (probably mainly 2s) so let's say 120 bookings per week.

They closed on 20th March and are taking bookings again from 1st July, so that's a period of approx 14 weeks.

14 x 120 = 1680 bookings to deal with. Possibly less.

They've now had 9 weeks of closure. You would think that was sufficient time to work their way through the pile.
 
I feel Richard’s pain and if feels wrong enjoying this thread. I await the outcome with intrigue. Regardless will never be darkening their Threshold. Made all the worse, I was tipped to go there before He gained his first Star and never made the journey, which obviously rankles in the mind in some dark space.
 
I'm married to the Head of Customer Service for a travel/transport company in Scotland. When Covid-19 hit they could only handle cancellation refunds via telephone or in writing, but within a couple of weeks had one of their software suppliers write a new online processing system so customers could self-serve. To date almost 25,000 people have used it successfully to get their refunds.

It's a bigger business than the Fat Duck, but just as my tiny Festival of Wine business could also manage it, I do think it's a case of where there's a will...

I have sympathy for all businesses affected, but just don't believe a business should be unwilling, unable, or so slow in refunding its customers. When I cancelled loads of stuff from airlines to car hire to hotels and restaurants for our abandoned Californian vacation in April, almost all refunded immediately - money back on the card within 48 hours. Westin hotels had to be chased repeatedly, taking around 8 weeks. I'd booked two Hiltons one which could be cancelled directly and easily on the hilton.com web site the other (presumably a franchised hotel) had to be contacted directly. I am still waiting 10 weeks later on that one
 
Phil David said:
It's bs. The supposed system upgrade is pure fiction. This is one small restaurant with a few covers. I'm sure most of us are familiar with online banking and various forms of software. How many refunds do you think you could process in a day? Scores? Hundreds?
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Couldn't agree more. Even if it was true it suggests they will have had to employ an IT expert to upgrade their refunds system. Would have been cheaper to pay one of the furloughed staff with experience to process the refunds. As Richard illustrates very well above it is probably a maximum of 1680 refunds or vouchers they'd have to process which could have been easily achieved within a week.
 
Tom Cannavan said:
That's the price we paid at Per Se in New York last year (actually $375 a head +20% service) and as I think I said at the time, it is probably the last time I pay that sort of money for dinner - the bill for two was £1250 with really quite modest wines and the generous 'donation' of two glasses of DP from a forumite who knew we were there. I had eaten there before, and at the French Laundry numerous times, so I think a bit of over-familarity was a factor too. Maybe a totally different style of £325 per head meal would have been different, but we did leave thinking it was 'madness' as you say Phil. I'm really not meaning to be moralistic, but spending that amount of money on one meal also made me feel a little bit guilty/uneasy.
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Per Se has been notoriously mediocre for a long time.

There was a time within the memory of some of us older members here when eating well was not an aspect of conspicuous consumption (Veblen notably did not include food in the items of conspicuous consumption that he mentioned). And so the people who searched out the best restaurants were the ones who really cared. But that is no longer the case -- and so restaurants that make "someone's" top list do a great business catering to those who don't know any better, and thus it's not surprising that the restaurants treat their clients that way. And then when someone like A. A. Gill says that the emperor has no clothes the customers get all huffy. There still are the restaurants that those who really care about eating well search out and go to, but you have to catch them now on the way up before they get corrupted.

Edited to correct a typo and fix a link.
 
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@Sean Hardon I am officially appointing you as my Senior Advisor*, I took your advice and have just received a refund confirmation email. I will believe it when it actually goes into my bank account, but after 10 weeks and a legal threat, I think may finally have won my battle.

(*note: this role does not give you permission to break the lockdown...)
 
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Claude Kolm said:
Per Se has been notoriously mediocre for a long time.

There was a time within the memory of some of us older members here when eating well was not an aspect of conspicuous consumption (Veblen notably did not include food in the items of conspicuous consumption that he mentioned). And so the people who searched out the best restaurants were the ones who really cared. But that is no longer the case -- and so restaurants that make "someone's" top list do a great business catering to those who don't know any better, and thus it's not surprising that the restaurants treat their clients that way. And then when someone like A. A. Gill says that the emperor has no clothes the customers get all huffy. There still are the restaurants that those who really care about eating well search out and go to, but you have to catch them now on the way up before they get corrupted.

Edited to correct a typo and fix a link.
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Thanks for AA quote/article as usual it is superbly written. I am glad I am at the other end of the spectrum as I always loved the Ami.
 
Richard Ward said:
@Sean Hardon I am officially appointing you as my Senior Advisor*, I took your advice and have just received a refund confirmation email. I will believe it when it actually goes into my bank account, but after 10 weeks and a legal threat, I think may finally have won my battle.

(*note: this role does not give you permission to break the lockdown...)
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:pGlad it's finally on the way to being resolved.
 
Steve Slatcher said:
What happened to your chargeback request, Richard? Curious in case I ever need to make one
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It's still being processed Steve - they told me that they normally take 7 days but due to exceptionally high numbers at the moment it could take up to 21 days (which I think is understandable and reasonable). Once the refund actually goes into my account I will call and cancel the chargeback request (they advised to do this when I made the request).
 
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