A Very Unnecessary PR Disaster
People are asking, demanding, the boycotting of a newly opened restaurant in Kuwait. Internet citizens are grilling, bashing, slamming a restaurant which is a little more than a month old! WOW!
It’s brand new for God’s sake, so how on earth did it manage to get itself tangled, literally, in a web of disasters in a record time? Alexander explains in his blog.
It started when a couple, who also happen to be bloggers who live in Kuwait, decided to visit a newly opened restaurant, Benihana. Now the couple, being the bloggers that they are, did what a blogger would do: talk about their experience! The review wasn’t even negative, and a very balanced one if you ask me. (You have to read the comments on the original post as well, some really funny stuff, obviously by the restaurant’s staff, or Mike Servo, the restaurant’s General Manager).
Now the restaurant has sued the bloggers (read the court order in Arabic here) and are outrageously demanding the following:
- An amount of 65,000 Emirati Dirhams! (or 5001 Kuwaiti Dinars. Five thousand and ONE!)
- Shutting down the “slanderous” website (the blog)
- Paying for lawyer’s fees
I am sitting here typing and I’m fuming with rage! Have these guys been living under a rock?! Do they know what a blog is? What the internet is?
What should have been a simple: “Dear xxxx, we appreciate your feedback. Your comments and those of others are valuable to us and we’ll be working hard to make sure you have a great experience next time! Thank you for visiting our restaurant!” turned into a threat.
What could and should have been a great opportunity to promote Benihana’s offering (had they improved their food and reinvited the blogger) turned into a PR disaster. And a new business that just needed a few good cooks now needs world-class crisis management. But certainly making this tale one of the best case studies on what companies should never do.
Here is what the clever general manager wrote on 2:48AM’s blog.
“Thank You for visiting us in our restaurant and dining in with your wife .I had found your comments and in your web site on Benihana. I also found it out that our rights and name is being used in a wrong way and broadcasting the video without a proper consent from us is really annoying specially Benihana is just opened up its doors to the public. We are seeking and consulting our legal dept. on how we can form a type of law suit against your website to be brought up to the Kuwait authorities. We respect opinion, but we see it in a way that Benihana name have been destroyed and abused on your website. We are eager to know your name and meet you personally if you don’t have anything to hide.”
Now people are grilling the restaurant all over the internets. Several bloggers have posted about it already. Twitter in Dubai was trending with the restaurant’s infamous name. Their Facebook page is plagued with people leaving disapproving comments (at the time of writing this post). You too can join in if you want 
(although you’ll have to “Like” the page to be able to comment, something which I don’t really like!)
After all this very negative publicity, I really hope the restaurant would have enough sense to drop the case and learn a few things form this experience, basic things like … you really can’t force people to like your service, and you certainly can’t force them to shut up.
They wanted to shut down one website, now good luck shutting down social media!
Thank you Alexander for pointing this out.
