When you book a reservation for my restaurant through our reservation system you get an email survey about 20 minutes after we mark your table done.

We get a lot of feedback. 95% of our responses are positive. Actually it’s better than that most of the time. And the negative feedback has been used to improve our service, our product, our space.

Some of our responses are just hard to understand. This week we got a survey score of 45%. But not one written comment about what was so horrible about the experience. Just that she hated everything. This doesn’t happen a lot.

My favorite recent comment was:

We will return at some point, but it will only be for special occasions. Lower priced off season specials might entice us to return more frequently.

I understand that we are not an inexpensive restaurant. But our prices are not arbitrary.

Anyone cost out the price of beef lately? Anyone cost out the price of Prime beef? Anyone cost out the cost of cooking oil? Or avacadoes? Or labor? Or candles? Or liquor? Or beer. Or wine? How about kiln dried wood?

We appreciate that you’d like to come more often. We’d like you to come more often. But I’d also like to drive a new car. I don’t complain to Toyota about the cost of Tacomas. I also don’t leave Yelp reviews at 7-11 about the cost of gas.

We as a team spend a lot of time doing analysis of what we should charge, what we can charge, and what we will charge. And those numbers aren’t even close to the same. There are restaurants in Boston charging double what we charge for a steak. There are restaurants by the mall that will charge you 22 dollars for a 6oz filet. That is not nearly the same quality as what we serve. That’s not wood fired.

And let’s not forget, to many the restaurant by the mall is a special event restaurant and not a once a week restaurant.

We know that we are not an everyday restaurant for some people. Not only because of price. You have to drive to us. We are red meat centric. We don’t have water views. We don’t serve lobster.

But to A LOT of people we are. We have many people that have standing reservations. We have many people that eat at our restaurant seven, eight, nine, ten days a month.

So don’t mark our scores lower because we have a higher end concept. Give us higher scores because it is well worth the money. At least we think so.