When the Customer Is Never Right...Part 1: The Case of the Sushi Nazi

Maybe it’s something in the water, but I had two memorable instances in Miami Beach restaurants last week. Here's the first.

You’ve heard of the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld. I met his cousin, the Sushi Nazi, at a small sushi restaurant in South Beach.

Ten of us showed up for sushi dinner on Tuesday evening, which happened to be the restaurant’s All You Can Eat Sushi night. For $37, you could get all the sushi you could eat…provided you wanted to choose from the limited items on the all you can eat menu.

Several members of our party were not big sushi eaters and opted to order off the menu. However, our waiter, the Sushi Nazi, informed us that wasn’t possible. Either the entire table of ten had to order all you can eat, or all of us had to order off the menu.

We offered to put the all you can eaters on one end of the table together. Nope, that was not acceptable. When we opted to all order off the menu, the waiter came back with a compromise. The restaurant would charge half price for those who really didn’t want much sushi, if we all chose the all you can eat option.

We took the compromise, only to find out that all you can eat meant all you could eat from a limited selection of items…which were brought out in a prescribed order. So even though we wanted more of some pieces, we had to cycle through the sushi in the order they chose to bring it out before we could get more of what we really wanted.

Items that were not on the limited all you can eat menu were verboten. Nope, couldn’t help us with that. What we wanted was not relevant, they served us what, when and how they chose.

Somehow by the time they finished, we wound up each paying more than $40 for this “great” deal. How we got there from 1/2 price for the limited eaters was never quite clear.

The food wasn’t bad, but the whole experience was a bit fishy.

Comments

[Roberta Matuson]

Great post Linda. I take it your last evening out in Miami made up for this!

[Customer Service Careers]

Very interesting post. Thanks for this post.