Cape Town restaurant shows the world how to deal with racist online reviews

Online reviews can be a tricky business, especially in the restaurant trade. In between picky customers and the ego needed to make an eatery sustainable things can get very messy very quickly. That said, sometimes the customer is just plain wrong. And in the the last couple of days, one Cape Town-based restaurant showed the world how to deal with those customers.

Massimo’s is an eatery in the seaside village of Hout Bay renowned for its authentic Italian pizzas.

On Friday last week, the following review was posted to the restaurant’s page on Tripadvisor:

“Very disappointing”
1 of 5 stars Reviewed 24 July 2015
as local Hout Bay residents who frequent massimo,s regularly, we were very disappointed at the owners attitude to our complaint regarding the fact that the main pizza maker had a large plaster on his face !! With m gloves and was making pizzas in full view of the entire restaurant. In conversation with the owner, he expressed indifference to my opinion, and stated to me that I was not a “doctor” but did say that the member was from west Africa where communicable diseases are rife. We were asked to leave and only invited back if we were considered doctors!! If someone is ill , don’t put them in full view of clients! Be more professional, and don’t treat your customers with disrespect

This was the response posted by the restaurant:

Sir, you forgot to write on your review that the first thing you told me is that you were already tipsy and that you are NOT a doctor!. You then told me that as you are from Zimbabwe, and you recognized my pizza chef as a fellow Zimbabwean and because he is skinny and had a plaster on his eyebrow he must have HIV. When I told you that he is actually from DRC, you said then he must have Ebola and you did not want your food touched by him. At that point I had no choice to ask you to leave as I can’t pick and choose my staff according to the racism of my clients. Incidentally the pizza guy hit his head on a beam during loadshedding. I would gladly ask you not to frequent my restaurant in the future.

Read more: How should you deal with bad reviews online?

After responding on Tripadvisor, Massimo himself posted both the original review and the response on Facebook, as well as a photo of all the restaurant staff wearing plasters on their heads. As you can see, the post received an overwhelmingly positive response:

In addition to the two reviews, the post contains the following text:

say no to racism!!!!
p.s.: a couple of comments express concern about the pizza man not using gloves: please have a look at the 2 following videos taken in Napoli at ‘Da Michele’, considered by many the best pizzeria in the world. Nobody is wearing gloves: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lm9U1dKNpZg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-yRaPnY7Z4
I had a bone marrow transplant 18 months ago and my immune system is still quite low, so you can be assured that if i can eat our food without fear of contamination, so can everyone else. Massimo

To further drive home the issue, the restaurant then offered a free shot of Limoncello to anyone coming in with a plaster on their forehead:

The eatery also used the attention generated by the post to promote its #payitforward project, whereby for every six slices of pizza sold, it gives a pizza to one of four charities.