Restaurant gets bad reviews in mix-up
Suzanne Hrach sits in the restaurant she owns
By Amy Wadas
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PITTSBURGH (KDKA) — A Pittsburgh restaurant is caught in the middle of a review mixup involving a restaurant in Arkansas and a big tip.
Suzanne Hrach owns Proper Brick Oven And Tap Room in the Cultural District and she was celebrating her wedding anniversary in Philadelphia last week when she was served a serious surprise.
“We got eight Google reviews, seven of them are one star,” she said. “We’ve been open for eight and a half years and I think in that entire time we got maybe seven one-star google reviews so to get seven in the space of about 12 hours was pretty shocking.”
Shocking and concerning.
Hrach said the people who made the comments were confusing her restaurant with a restaurant in Bentonville, Arkansas, Oven And Tap.
That restaurant is currently embroiled in a tipping scandal.
A customer tipped two servers $4,400 but they were told they couldn’t split the tip and instead had to share it with the entire staff.
When one of the servers who waited on that table spoke up, they were fired.
“Some were very specific like, ‘you owners are terrible you’re stealing money from your staff and you should be ashamed of yourself,’” she explained.
The reviews dropped Hrach’s restaurant from a 4.6 to a 4.5, which isn’t significant, but she says it’s the principle of the matter.
“We get a lot of people from out of town coming to Proper and most of them the reason they came is because they read we had such great online reviews,” Hrach said.
She has contacted Google requesting they take the reviews down but has had no such luck.
She wants anyone who decides to post a review online to understand one simple thing.
“If you’re gonna review a restaurant, make sure you have the right one please,” she said.
Hrach says reviewing the right restaurant makes all the difference.
While she said she doesn’t think the bad reviews will affect Proper Brick Oven and Tap Room long-term, she said it’s been a big distraction during one of the busiest times of year.
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