Restaurant Owner Flames Customer on Facebook After Bad Yelp Reviews

Perhaps 9 out of every 10 times an owner responds snarkily to a bad Yelp review, it winds up making the owner look worse by comparison. If so, this is the 10th time.

Joyce Denham and her party of 20 friends were apparently having a good time at KC’s Rib Shack in Manchester, New Hampshire recently. Unfortunately, their fun times weren’t being shared by all, as the group was loudly singing along to the music in the bar and creating enough of a scene that multiple customers spoke to the manager about asking them to maybe please quiet down and at least two tables asked to be moved across the restaurant so as not to have to deal with them. After KC’s owner Kevin Cornish finally came by to ask them to please keep it down, Denham wasn’t happy, ultimately leaving negative Facebook and (possibly—see the update) Yelp reviews that have since been taken down:

Joyce Couturier Denham — 1 star • KC’s Ribs Shack WAS one of our favorite places to eat HOWEVER we just left there very unhappy. We had a party of twenty for a birthday party. We were all seated in the bar. We were having fun singing along with the radio when the OWNER came over to the table and very RUDELY told us to keep quiet others were trying to eat. Now mind you there were about 10 others in the bar and they were all laughing and having fun with us including the bartender and wait staff. When we confronted owner about him being rude he said he didn’t care! Let it be know We will NEVER EAT THERE AGAIN!!! We had a 500 dollar bill they have now lost our business! And I now will never recommend this place to anyone!!! I will never go again!!! ‪#‎KCRIBSHACK‬ ‪#‎THEYSUCK‬‪#‎ownersanASSHOLE‬ ‪#‎boycott‬

Update: Yelp e-mailed us to claim that Denham had not left a review on Yelp, but merely on Facebook. This stands in direct opposition to multiple sources that claim she did use Yelp and that the review was later deleted. However, in the spirit of generosity, let’s assume they’re right and Denham didn’t actually leave a Yelp review. Even accepting that as true, unless the Daily Dot has gone to rather incomprehensibly extreme lengths to photoshop the image in this post, someone else in the same party as Denham named “Kris K.” absolutely left a negative Yelp review. Given that, Yelp is still a part of this story, whether the company wants to be or not.

This didn’t sit well with Cornish. In a post on the restaurant’s Facebook page, he made clear exactly how he felt about her review:

As someone who regularly gets annoyed at obnoxiously loud groups of people at restaurants (seriously, people, shift your noise level to the general noise level of the restaurant itself, this isn’t difficult),* it should come as no surprise that I’m pretty solidly TeamKC’s here, even if Cornish apparently can’t spell “inconsiderate.” As far as I can see, at no point did Cornish step over any lines. He didn’t devolve into an unhinged, misogynistic rant, he didn’t go pedal-to-the-floor racist—hell, he didn’t even post a picture of the customers. All in all, this is probably the single tamest owner flame response to a bad Yelp review I’ve ever seen.

Also, inviting them to make sure they remember to leave bad TripAdvisor reviews and saying “Thanks again for your feedback. We will let you know if we decide to become a karaoke bar in the future” are some pretty sick burns,** so points there.

* To be fair, it could be worse: they could be one of those groups that stands around by the bar at a sit-down restaurant and completely blocks off the path for servers to get to their tables. There is a special level of hell reserved for these people.

** The latter is pretty much the “cool story, Glenn” of owner responses to bad Yelp reviews.