Negative Review Crisis Playbook for Restaurants
The hard cases a basic how-to-respond guide skips: foodborne illness claims, foreign object reports, discrimination accusations, viral pile-ons, fake reviews, extortion, and health-code complaints.
What do you do before responding to a serious review?
Before you respond to any serious review, run it through the triage decision tree in order. Those steps keep you from saying something in public that you cannot take back. The order matters more than the wording: establish what actually happened, decide whether the matter belongs in public at all, and only then write.
Which reviews should never be answered in public first?
Foodborne illness claims, foreign object reports, and discrimination accusations carry legal and safety weight. They move offline first. A public reply that admits fault, disputes the guest's account, or shares any detail about them creates a record you cannot delete.
Why does speed matter in a review crisis?
When a crisis review hits, every hour it sits unread makes it worse. Replio flags it as urgent the moment it lands across every platform, so you respond in minutes rather than days and handle it before it spreads. See it on your own reviews.