TripAdvisor reviewer who walked out of restaurant over lack of lemonade receives brutal response from owner

The restaurant owner originally responded 'we just didn't like you'

Owner Gary Usher responded on Twitter (Echo)

A restaurant owner described a TripAdvisor reviewer as a rude c*** on Twitter after they left a lengthy one-star review.

In a complaint titled “No Customer Skills,” 'Helen E' criticised the customer service at Gary Usher's restaurant Hispi in Manchester after restaurant staff did not accommodate her and her fellow diners’ request for a mixer.

According to Helen, her and her friends ordered a £90 bottle of champagne and a bottle of red wine for £120 but were upset to realise that the restaurant only had bottles of cloudy lemonade.

As one of the guests likes regular lemonade with his wine, the group apparently asked restaurant staff if they could go purchase non-cloudy lemonade at the shop “two minutes away.”

To Helen’s dismay, the staff did not leave the restaurant to purchase the lemonade - so she and her friends left.

“There was no movement on this at all so for the sake of a £1 bottle of lemonade and putting yourself out, the restaurant let us walk away,” she wrote. “Mustn’t need our cash or custom. I find it difficult to understand how you wouldn’t stock the basic mixers that are most commonly used for drinking. Obviously I don’t know much."

Gary Usher, who owns several restaurants, including Hispi and StickyWalnut, responded to the review on StickyWalnut’s Twitter.

In his first tweet, which included a photo of the offending review, Usher wrote: “We were happy to go to the shop for your mate’s dreadful red wine spritzer & 20 B&H. We just didn't like you. Keep it up Hispi. Love Gary X."

The restaurateur then followed up in a second tweet, writing: “We often nip out for people’s requests. It’s part of great hospitality. We just don’t do it if you’re a rude c***.”

One chef, Andrew Nutter, responded to Usher’s tweet that he was “actually speechless by this” and he knows “we attract some nutters but this is SERIOUSLY BONKERS!”

And other people on Twitter also felt Usher’s response was justified.

“Brilliant,” responded one person.

There were also those who were simply confused as to why someone would mix lemonade with a £120 bottle of red wine.

“Since when was lemonade a ‘commonly-used mixer’ with red wine?” one person asked.

However, Usher wants to make it clear that he didn't call the guest a c***, but that it was just a "generalisation about hospitality based on that experience," he wrote on Twitter.