Not your typical TripAdvisor Owner Response, but I am so tired of the crap some people post. I actively encouraged people to stay away from TripAdvisor in the previous menu, which got a few senior reviewers in a huff when I insulted their obsessive need to play wannabe restaurant critics. My ex partner used to handle the negative reviews. He was good at writing a corporate response, which I occasionally thought to be ineffective in expressing my displeasure at having that person as a client in the first place, myself preferring something more...interesting. I think I may have my own account rep who reviews the owner responses before publishing. I want to think that mine are some of the most original they have encountered and have endeared me to one special person who eagerly awaits my response to a one star review. The truth is that TripAdvisor is a joke and the rankings mean nothing. Someone gives me one star and then gives a crappy little not-really-a-taco-by-any-real-Mexican-food-standards taco stand gets a 5 star rating. We have lots of other eateries that are in no way restaurants and/or that you cannot legitimately give five stars for service (I handed you an ice cream cone...give me five stars?) or atmosphere (standing on a street corner with a bunch of drunk and drugged out partiers and a guy who killed a woman and got away with her murder) or food (unpalatable sober). I try to not let to get to me, but every once in a while that Scorpio Moon/Pisces Mercury/Scorpio Mars comes out (prolifically, of course) and I am forced to respond with vigor. .... The sea life in the Pacific is dying en mass. Since 2011, no baby whale has survived over a year. Starfish are now extinct after 450 million years of life on this planet because of Fukushima. Right now a sinkhole has developed under the Boone Dam in Tennessee with seven nuclear power plants downstream. There is a 31-acre sinkhole in Louisiana next to salt caverns storing radioactive waste. Forty-nine percent of children in the Fukushima prefecture have enlarged thyroids and will likely die of thyroid cancer in the next five years, but you have expended your energy to complain about your experience at a coffeehouse/bookstore in Nicaragua. Lets share your angst with the world because there were no salad greens because of the rain (which is printed in the menu, by the way). Yes, alert the world to your great misfortune while vacationing in the second poorest country in the Americas. Such a pity. I do not know which day you had your oh so unfortunate world-stopped-rotating-on-its-axis experience, so I cannot respond as to why we may have been out of something that day. You did arrive at the end of the day, so like many restaurants around the world that prepare things fresh daily, we may have run out of a popular item. We have had weekly power outrages, which precludes us from making things in the food processor or blenders. The rain kills the lettuce starts in September/October and we often go three weeks without lettuce in these months. We use organic baby greens, not the lettuce sold in the mercado, which is often coated with several layers of bug spray and difficult to wash and certainly not organic. Maybe our food distributer had a delay and we were out of something. Maybe you were there on a day when the market had no bananas or pineapples because of the rain. You could have spoken with our manager who would have addressed any issues you might have, but instead you chose to say nothing and use the opportunity to vocalize the intense agony of having shown up at a cafe near closing time in the off season by complaining vociferously on the internet. You are appalled that there is no service outside. As a connoisseur of coffeehouses all over the world, there have been only a handful I have ever been in where I didn’t have to stand in line to oder my food and coffee. This goes for most sandwich shops, delis, and upscale fast food restaurants. We offer table service inside the cafe. If you had sat down at a table, we would have brought you a menu If you had to ask for a menu at the bar, then it is natural to assume you would return to the bar to place your order. At any point you were starting to get impatient, you could have taken the initiative and looked for someone. No, you shouldn’t have to do that, but I have had to do so on many occasions in my 47 years of dining experiences. The staff was in closing procedure and obviously not walking around the patio. When customers come in near closing, we inform them. Maybe someone said that in Spanish and you did not understand it. My staff is not surly and rude - that is only a projection of your inner turmoil from whatever series of events that led up to your need to moan about our cafe. It is not rude and worthy of one star If someone brought you your check before you finished eating because the restaurant is closed. That is pretty much a norm in any restaurant in any country in the world. Please don’t come back because anyone who complains about a ten percent tip that is written into the bill in 99 percent of restaurants in this poor country is someone we don’t want or need as a client. Our hours signs have been stolen enough times that we don’t bother. Almost no business in town has their hours posted. Actually, all over the world, most places do not post their hours, especially in Europe. As for your claims of fraud, I am not sure what you are talking about. Am I a fraud because the kitchen ran out of food items at the close of business? You weren’t specific when throwing around that libelous term. I despise wasting my time dealing with people who think they know how to run a business, let alone one in another country, and feel the need to demonstrate their self-righteousness to the world with some arbitrary rating system that is in no way a reflection of our business. More than 80 percent of humanity lives on $10 a day, including much in Nicaragua, and rather than be grateful one has the opportunity to travel and go on vacation, people complain because their lives are not absolutely perfect. Whine sites are full of “they should have…” and “If I were the owner/manager…” and “How dare the owner have a personality and stick up for what she believes” (which is probably just limited to my cafe!) and yet these people have never owned a business in a foreign country, let alone try to balance the expectations of wealthy North Americans who have never left their home country and expect a gourmet North American experience at a dollar menu price. I have lived in Nicaragua for nine years. I have endured countless break-ins in my home, car, and store. I have to deal with people stealing books, skipping out on food, stealing tips from the tip jar (desperate backpackers do desperate things), shake downs from officials, nightmares with customs authorities, mechanical breakdowns and no available parts in the country and an outrageous cost of goods for imported items like espresso machines. My electronics are fried from power surges and brownouts, if they aren’t stolen first. I have had a gun held to my head twice and was pistol whipped, beaten, dragged around by my hair and strangled three times because someone thought I had money in my home because I have a successful business. Almost any other person would have left, but I employ a lot of people and there are huge residual benefits from my presence in this community. Almost all of my profits go back into the local community. Today it was $40 for the woman with ten kids and a 14 year-old girl with cancer. Last week it was $70 for the pottery vendor’s son with a blood disease. I have worked very hard and endured a great deal to have a business that has lasted longer than 95 percent of business in any country, let alone the restaurant industry and I get angry when someone writes, “Don’t go there” in a review. However, I am not angry to learn that we have lost your business and personal recommendation. Some people aren’t worth the effort as customers. Perhaps you have just done us a service, sending all of the other high-maintenance and bad attitude clients the other way so I don’t have to read about their unfortunate experience of ordering the wrong item with their bad Spanish or how a $1.50 for a cup of organic, fresh-roasted coffee from a high altitude Fair trade farm with free refills is a rip off or how slow the free wifi speed is with 20 heads staring at their phones or how hot it is in a country hovering over the Equator. To those reading this, If you like to complain, I am sure that you will find something to complain about in my bookstore/coffeehouse, so just be forewarned that you will not be happy and stay away. It will be better for both of us. If you are kind and like great coffee, conversations, amazing books, healthy food, superfood smoothies and menu items that do not exist anywhere else on the planet (when we aren’t sold out!) then please arrive by 3 p.m., as our hours are not posted on the door.
Posted on: Fri, 07 Nov 2014 05:19:02 +0000
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