Restaurant shames no-shows on Twitter
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. (KTLA) — One restaurant in Beverly Hills is calling out customers who flake on their reservations — by name.
Red Medicine and its manager, Noah Ellis, are getting attention after the eatery tweeted the names of guests who no-showed over the weekend.
“Hi Kyle Anderson (323), I hope you enjoyed your gf’s bday and the flowers that you didn’t bring when you no-showed for your 815 res. Thanks,” one such post read.
A subsequent tweet listed the names of six other guests, thanking them for “no-showing btwn 730p-930p.”
A third post said: “All the nice guests who wonder why restaurants overbook and they sometimes have to wait for their res should thank people like those below.”
Ellis told restaurant news site Eater LA that he was frustrated with losing tables during the busiest hours on the busiest night of the week.
“They probably don’t know, and if they know, they probably don’t care (or they would have come or called in the first place), but such is life,” he said of the people he named.
Some commenters online have taken the restaurant’s side, saying the naming and shaming is a way for the business to protect itself.
But there has also been a fair amount of backlash from those who say Red Medicine is ostracizing customers.
Someone claiming to be one of the diners wrote an email to the website Grubstreet LA explaining that a relative had died 20 minutes before the reservation.
The person said that canceling the reservation was “the last thing on my mind,” but that he or she would have explained if the restaurant had called the contact number.