This week, chef and co-founder of NOMA, René Redzepi, resigned over allegations that he created a toxic workplace environment. Closer to home, I learned that a restaurant I had visited in the past had closed its doors towards the end of last year. I have mixed feelings about this particular closure. On the one hand, the UK hospitality industry is struggling with multiple cost burdens – an increase in employer national insurance contributions; an increase in the minimum wage; higher energy, rent and ingredient costs; and declining footfall due to the ongoing increase in the cost-of-living. My partner and I enjoy eating out and despite how much more we are spending to do so, it’s always a pleasure to experience different cuisines and support the people and businesses that make our high streets amazing places in which to spend our time. On the other hand, the restaurant that closed was run by… let’s say, a particularly combative owner, whose passive-aggressive responses to negative reviews made eating at the restaurant something of a social gamble.
A selection of particularly negative experiences reported by visitors during the time the restaurant was open:
- A customer was unable to order the drink they wanted. The customer felt that the owner put pressure on them rudely to order another drink instead.
- A pregnant customer wanted to use the toilet. The owner asked the customer to buy something. The customer didn’t mind this but suggested doing so after using the toilet. The owner looked unhappy about this suggestion, so the customer offered to pay extra for usage of the toilet alone. The customer was subjected to a personal remark about having children, and did eventually get to use the toilet (and buy an item before leaving).
- A customer was accused of screaming at the person serving them and making that person cry; the customer had to edit their review later to deny this.
- A customer felt the owner invaded their personal space while ranting aggressively about other people using the restaurant’s toilet all day and other frustrations.
Granted, the majority of reviews were positive, and great restaurants often have a tail of negative outlier experiences – it’s to be expected, because sometimes bad things happen to perfectly good restaurant owners, and it’s exceedingly difficult to please every single customer (and yes, sometimes the customer’s demands are unreasonable and shouldn’t be accommodated). All that is totally understandable. I also take the view that the presence of some negative reviews is usually a good thing for a business: it allows the business an opportunity to show how it handled difficult situations, it’s a sign that the business is genuinely open to feedback, and it avoids the situation where every review is a five-star review, which can look unrealistic or be a sign that the business incentivises customers to leave flattering reviews that inflate the overall score.
Anyway, when I looked through the restaurant’s social media for more information, I saw that the main reason for the restaurant’s closure, according to the owner, was a large increase in rent being asked for by the restaurant’s landlord. Fair enough; this is a common and unfortunate issue in hospitality right now. But as I read more, I grew more and more relieved that we hadn’t returned to this restaurant. The owner stated in their post that it wasn’t appropriate for customers to leave bad reviews; constructive criticism should be given privately, because bad reviews harm independent businesses rather than helping them improve. The implication was that customers leaving negative reviews were ‘paving the way’ for small businesses to close, resulting in high streets dominated by bland corporate chains; in effect, the owner was castigating their own customers for not conforming to their expectations of how customers should behave.
This is dangerous nonsense. Reviews serve multiple functions: they’re a means of expressing gratitude to a venue; describing a customer’s experience to provide information (sometimes about safety issues!) and allowing others to decide if the experience is for them; and yes, providing constructive criticism to improve the business for everyone’s benefit. Shutting down what’s often the main avenue of feedback from customers (whether mechanically by disallowing reviews, or through social pressure) on the pretext of ensuring a venue’s survival is misguided and should be viewed as a strong signal of an irresponsible business putting a low priority on safe and effective customer service – and that’s without drawing any unnecessary conclusions about the personality of the owner.
All things considered, I’m ultimately left feeling that I’ve dodged a bullet in not returning to the restaurant. Which is a shame, because I remember that the dining experience we actually had there was excellent – tasty food, decent wine, and friendly service. I was aware beforehand of the owner’s tendency to argue with customers leaving reviews before we went, but decided to try the restaurant out anyway, and was glad I did. Okay, I didn’t leave a review after my visit, so perhaps the owner would consider me partly to blame for not supporting the survival of their venue enough… but yes, while that’s a joke, the owner of Don Ciccio, an Italian restaurant in Highgate that also closed last year, did exactly that, excoriating customers for “never supporting us, not even once” in an angry social media statement that reeked of entitlement – as if it’s the customers who owe business owners a regular income, and not business owners who compete to offer potential customers a service in exchange for payment. By that logic, the fact that I haven’t become a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist this year is clearly the fault of my readers.
AI usage disclosure
I used Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.6 to assess a draft of this article, to determine the risk of the closed restaurant being identified, and made some minor textual edits to reduce this risk. The writing process was otherwise my own work.
Further reading
- Nardine Saad, March 2026. Noma head chef resigns from restaurant amid abuse allegations. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c07jr2pe5j9o. BBC News report about René Redzepi resigning from NOMA and the allegations of abusive behaviour in the workplace.
- Caitlin Maskell, October 2025. Restaurant owner who wrote viral ‘farewell message’ about lack of support talks to New Journal. https://www.camdennewjournal.co.uk/article/restaurant-owner-who-wrote-viral-farewell-message-about-lack-of-support-talks-to-new-journal. Brief interview with Marco Valente, the owner of now-closed Don Ciccio restaurant in Highgate, in the Camden New Journal. A contributor to the article suggests the restaurant’s unfavourable location was a contributing factor to its struggles.