Dear Restaurants: Here's Why We Don't Come Back

Hello, friends, and welcome to your daily Detroit sharing.

What to know and where to go in Southeast Michigan.

It is Tuesday, March 31st, 2026.

I am Jair Stays.

I'm here at our studio at Tech Town and joining me across the table for a very special topic.

You know, we cover a lot of restaurant stuff.

We cover a lot of where to go around town.

We're doing even more of it.

And I want to share why we don't come back.

Why is it that we will leave a place and never return and to help me do that is somebody

who helps me out with the newsletter coverage, engineer of alcohol and audio, Randy Walker.

Good to see you, man.

I am always happy to be on this side of the microphone.

It's always fun to have you across a number of topics.

You know, this is something that's been kind of brewing.

Forgive the pun.

As the industry has changed, as economics have changed, as people's perceptions have changed,

lots of things have changed about all the ways people approach and perceive restaurants

and businesses in general.

Yeah, I think there are a lot of notes for restaurants and bars.

But also, I think this could have applied a retail, a ton of different places.

And this was kind of inspired by a recent episode.

I'm sure you remember it where Devon O'Reilly and Norris Howard and I were talking about

DoorDash and delivery in restaurants.

And we've got hundreds of feedback pieces of people who say we don't go to restaurants

anymore.

It's not worth it.

You guys, we're going to stay away from going to things in person still.

And the three of us, and I think the four of us, you included, are people we enjoy going

out.

We enjoy that whole experience.

But we also don't just like take mess about it, right?

We have standards.

Yeah.

I enjoy going out.

I go out solo for dinner all the time.

I went out last night for dinner by myself and I don't have a problem with that, but I

do have a problem with identifying restaurants I want to go to or finding out about the restaurants

I want to go to.

For sure.

And that's what I want to address here.

All those people who say they don't go out anymore or their complaints, we hear you

loud and clear.

And also, you know, some advice for those businesses out there that I know listen to

this show.

The first thing that pops to mind is, where are you?

How do I find you?

How do I actually get to your business?

Oh my gosh.

On social media, especially.

Yeah.

If you're on Instagram or TikTok or wherever you are, make sure that you actually put at

least the city and state in your social media bio, if not, your full address.

Here's the thing about social media as well.

People often might not realize that the reasons you go viral often out of your control,

and so people will see your restaurant all over the country.

And they won't know if they can go there or not.

I think about recently, some funny thing went viral in Mexican town.

I think it was our bondos or something in their parking lot.

It was just a weird, you know, somebody left their car too long for some reason.

The algorithm gods blessed them with all of these people, right?

But in the comments, people are like, where is this?

What city?

And I think it's so important because a dish can catch fire, stuff can go.

And it's like, not only do you want people to know locally that you're there,

but you want people to know if they do see it on social media or that website,

which I think is still important to have a web presence of some sort,

to know, hey, the next time I come to town, I want to go to that place and put that on my list.

Yeah, you never know what'll cause you to go viral or when you'll go viral or what

make you popular.

So if you do, be prepared for that trend.

Yeah.

I think another thing when it comes to this digital world is some basic updates.

I think you're in order.

Yeah.

I am never going to call your business to find out when you're open.

I will just not go or even worse go to one of your competitors.

That's so true.

And I think that's one of the feedback points that I want to take from some listeners.

I think is really valid.

Yeah.

On your website, ideally you have your own.com, your own domain in with your own website.

You would have your current operating hours, your current address.

And if you're a restaurant, what's your current menu?

So I'm going to ask you, there's a lot of people I know think that websites are passé,

that they're not the jam anymore.

Why would you argue to have a website?

And what should you do if someone says, you know what I really am not going to do a website?

There's not the new shiny thing.

They're not a glorious thing, but they're still a good, solid first point of contact

for people.

Maybe you just have a website, at least your basic information, and then you direct them

off to social media or whatever, but it's kind of like your own spot that you control.

You don't have to worry about the algorithm suggesting you, people can just go to your

website and find out what they need to know about you.

If you want to show off, show off your Instagram or whatever, link to that or link to your

Facebook or whatever.

But I think it's a good idea to have a solid firm base that you control no matter what.

And you know, I'll be honest, I've seen a lot of drama over the years where people have

lost a Facebook page or they've lost an Instagram page or something happened.

Some staff or something, you want to have a place that's kind of ground truth.

Yeah.

And you can lose your domain name, but that's your fault for not renewing it.

It's not taken away from you.

It's inaction on your part.

But Facebook will take your page away, Instagram will take your profile away, a social media

post could be pulled so that virality is lost.

I have a friend right now that's going through losing, I think, 20,000 followers on their

page and they're never getting it back because there's no customer service.

Yeah, you can't reach out to these places reliably like you might be able to submit a support

ticket or help desk or, you know, a friend of a friend of a friend knows somebody who

works at the company and might be able to route it through the appropriate channels.

But you know, that could take months and you're losing revenue, you're losing business,

you're losing customers because they don't know about you anymore because your presence

is gone.

I would say a big thing for me is make a promise and deliver on it.

And I know this might sound a little nerdy for the Star Trek folks out there.

But you know, that whole idea of the engineer in the engine room was, was it Scotty?

Yeah.

And promise over deliver, right?

Absolutely.

And you don't have to do everything everywhere all the time.

Like you don't need TikTok and Instagram and Facebook and Blue Sky and X, pick one and

focus on that.

And do it really well.

And do it well.

Like it says,

Yeah.

Maybe grow a little bit.

Yeah.

But pick something and do it well.

It's not saying don't have those accounts, definitely reserve those accounts for just

so you have the name.

But point them to the active one, like say, hey, I'm not active here.

Go check us on our website for more information or go follow us on this other social media

profile.

And kind of don't really like you directing them elsewhere.

But if you can be subtle about it, you can say find us elsewhere or, you know, look

for us in your other favorite social networks or something like that.

Just so you don't run a follow of any social network rules.

But again, if you just have your website, you can say, you know, at the top, find us

on Facebook and then link to all your other accounts underneath or something like that.

But I also mean things like you're in person physical hours.

One of the things that drives me crazy and I've had to deal with this a lot.

There was a spot near me on the east side that I fell in love with right away.

And the thing was it's never been the same since the hours keep changing.

The dishes keep changing.

It's like I find it and then all of a sudden it's almost unusable except like that one

time once a month.

Maybe they have a special and it wasn't like the thing that used to be on the menu.

It's wild to me and the hours is a huge thing.

There was a retail shop that I went to a couple of weeks ago.

I went up to the door and it's like, oh, well, we're only open for six hours a week.

Okay.

Like I mean, be consistent.

I'd rather you be consistent than not.

But it makes it really.

Yeah.

And that takes me back to the thing I said earlier where I said, I will not call you to find

out if you're open.

I go to your Facebook page and it lists one set of hours.

I go to Apple Maps.

It lists another set of hours and I go to Google Maps and it lists a third set of hours.

I'm not going to call to find out which hours are accurate.

I'm going to go somewhere else that keeps their information up to date.

Doing this kind of work.

We also run into tons of emergency closing, you know.

When something's a closing, my eye is kind of pinned to it because we do cover a lot

of openings and closings on daily Detroit.

But most of the time those are temporary closings and they're all over the map with how

people deliver them.

Yeah.

If you've got a water main break or something or whatever, you're closed for the day or

gas leak or something like that or it's emergency, we don't expect you to update your

website and all your socials for the new hours for that.

Just throw up a social media post if you can on your prominent social media.

Whichever account is your primary, maybe your secondary's if you can handle it.

This is a close for the day, new day emergency, hopefully be back open tomorrow.

Now if it's a closure that goes a long way, you know, say, I don't know, an emergency

happened and the street in front of your business is close for a while and you're not

getting any business, you know, put up some temporary hours, say, for the next three

weeks, these are our new hours, actually change your listings everywhere.

That'll take you 30 minutes if you're slow, but it'll improve your standing with your

guests and your followers immensely if your information is always up to date.

The reality is that diners, most diners are engaging with digital stuff now all the

time and they're making their decisions through it.

One thing I want to say too is about the menu.

You're mentioning that.

I think this is my thought unless you're a Coney Island that's been around for 45 years.

Most likely you should keep your menu as simple as possible, as straightforward as possible

and do it really well so that people know what to come to you for.

If you tried to offer everything, there's no specific reason to go to you over someone

else.

If your menu is more than one page, why?

Why do you need chicken tenders and mozzarella sticks and jalapeno poppers when three other

businesses on your block are serving the exact same thing?

What makes you unique?

You don't have to cater to every type of customer.

You don't need text max and sushi and pasta and steaks and ramen like pick a handful of

dishes and focus on them.

Another thing is the music, the TV's, now not everyone agrees with me on this.

I want to hear what you think unless you are a sports bar, I don't want TV's on.

Absolutely.

If it's ambiance, it's fine.

Like if it's a fireplace or something, but unless it's a sports bar, I don't want TV's

on.

Yeah.

No content.

If it's background is fine, but if it's background, it's probably not going to play sound

either.

It's just the visuals.

One place it does that really well is Tokaroro where we go to because they play those

viral dog clips.

Yeah.

Yep.

And then the other TV behind the bar is Bob Ross paintings all the time.

You don't need the audio.

I mean, Bob Ross audio is soothing, but we don't want to hear that 24-7, you know, when

we're trying to eat or have conversations or whatever.

So just watching up and, you know, distracting you for a minute or if you're dining

solo or whatever, something to engage with when you're not talking to somebody.

I also think about that with the loudness of the music compared to the conversation.

If I have to shout to have a conversation with you, I am not coming back to that restaurant

ever again.

If I have to shout to give my order to the server, if I have to shout to my companions

in order to have a conversation, that music is just too loud.

It doesn't need to be that loud.

I shouldn't have to raise my voice at all to have a conversation at the table with people

I'm with.

So you need to one, turn the music down and two, work on the acoustics of your space so

that the sound isn't bouncing off all of the exposed brick and concrete and metal.

How do you feel about gratuity?

The last thing I want to do after eating a delicious meal is sit down and solve math problems.

So make it easy.

Make it easy.

If you must list it separate, but come on, just praise the prices by what you expect

your gratuity to be and don't make me do math.

So that's interesting to me.

So I know a lot of diners who much rather would rather see the 15, 18, the 20, the 22%

and do the tips themselves.

They want to have that control.

I've just gotten that feedback from a lot of daily to trade listeners that they really

like the control of tipping.

See, but then you have the service fee and the kitchen fee and then you start seeing like

five to seven, two to 15, 20% fees added onto your meal.

So a gratuity if that's your style, but not having a bunch of extra fees.

Yeah, but like I said, I would prefer the gratuity baked in and I can just not do math

and throw in an extra few dollars on top of it if I feel the service is wonderful.

Now for me, I get really confused and it bugs me when there is the auto-grituity and then

there's another gratuity of like 3%, or 1%, or 5%, thrown on top of that.

And I've seen that at a number of chains lately and it's very confusing and it's very

annoying to me.

Yes.

If you're going to include an auto-grituity, don't also suggest extra gratuity.

Just leave a line for extra because then people are confused.

Why is it only 3%?

Oh, because the 18% or the 15% or the 22% are already included.

The other thing I like to see is if you're going to do all that calculations and say,

you know, 15% is $3 and 20% is $4 and 25% is $5 that math is not right.

And if you're going to do that, then give me the total too.

Like you're doing all the math except for the total.

Give me the total on there so I can just copy down the number or even better checkbox

next to the one I want.

Now you and I, we like to go out and we'll get dinner together at times, but we both

will go out and solo-dine.

And one of the things that gets me is that when places treat solo diners as second-class

citizens and when if somebody like, if it's a lunch, there's a chance I'm not ordering

a drink.

And that should be okay.

And I think some places I understand the push.

One of the statistics I did not realize is that previously and I saw this in the New

York Times, I guess in order to make a restaurant function, you want 60% of your sales to be

alcohol, 40% food.

That is flipped in recent years because of the drop in drinking and that's really her

profit margins.

I understand that.

But I also want a welcoming experience.

I do hear from a lot of listeners that feeling of like, if you're going to run a place

that you're welcoming people, you should welcome people.

You shouldn't be bummed out.

You've got customers.

Yeah, for sure, especially like I'll be conscientious and if the dining room is full or looks really

busy, I'll take a seat at the bar.

I won't ask for a table.

But if I'm the only customer in your restaurant and I take a table, I should be treated just

as importantly as a six-top ordering three rounds of cocktails.

You know what?

You and I both have eaten out late a number of times.

This leads me to a thought about closing hours because the other weekend, I was at a

diner and we walked in and it looked like we had like stolen a child or something that

we had shown up at the door a half an hour before closing time.

They hurriedly locked the door behind me and to me, it said 3 PM.

I thought I was being somewhat conscientious because it was just a diner.

Okay, I'm going to try to get in there at 2.30 and leave plenty of time.

Closing hours should be consistent and what does that mean, you know?

This is another piece of information.

I think you should put up with your hours on your website is what time does the kitchen

stop taking orders?

Now, what time the kitchen closes, but when is the cutoff for the last order to go in

the kitchen?

Because kitchen closing almost always means that maybe 10 minutes after that time, the

last countertop is wiped down, the stove is clean, they shut off the gas and walk out

the door.

Whereas last time you take an order is, you know, there's still then time after that

where the dish is finished and then the kitchen crew can clean up.

So just be less ambiguous, be more direct on what you mean by kitchen closes versus last

order taken.

And don't do kitchen closes in my opinion, just say last order taken at 8.45 or last

order taken at 8.30 when you want the kitchen staff to be out the door by 9 or 10 or whatever.

You know, don't leave it up to the guest to figure out when it's okay to order or not.

For me, the age of social media has also given a rise to what I would call the stunt

dish.

Now sometimes I can tolerate it and it's fine.

Other times it's like this over the top performance thing that feels just too much and

it's hard because like I for one have had the table side guacamole service at Al

Alcador and it's amazing.

And I know that Devon O'Reilly has had the canole service, you know, with the little table

and they bring in, they fill the canole right in front of you.

I feel like that's cute.

I know it's a hard line to walk, but I also feel like sometimes we don't need a volcano

explosion.

Yeah.

And I table side service is fine.

If it makes sense, you know, there's a flambé or it's perceived fresher like guacamole

made fresh table side or whatever, freshly filled canole shell.

Saganaki.

Saganaki.

That's a Greek town staple, but stunt dishes where it's like a milkshake where the garnishes

are taller than the glass and there's sauce dripping all down the edges where you can't

even hold the cup.

Like nobody wants to eat that, put in a bigger glass, tone down the garnishes, make it

a reasonable dish.

And you can make it very attractive and very visual for Instagram.

I know so much of this is about the gram.

There's a number of restaurants where honestly, and I'm not going to name names, but the food

is very mid, but the vibes and the visuals are so big that people just keep flocking to

them.

Yes, people eat with their eyes first, but they also eat with their mouths after that.

And if it looks good, but tastes awful, they're not going to come back to order just to

say they can, you know, take more pictures there.

They want to go and have the food as well.

Before we wrap up here, I want to talk about something that is a huge feedback point.

And that is parking.

And that can be very tricky, especially depending where you are in the region.

I think we need to have a discussion about parking and best practices.

Yes.

Pro tip.

If you want to make your customers super happy or your potential customer super happy list

on your website or your social right next to your address, what the parking situation

is, you know, one, two, three main street.

We've got three street parking spots out front of our business.

If you can't find a spot there, the garage is at five six seven main street.

It costs $5 an hour and it's a three minute walk from the parking garage to our business.

I went to a restaurant recently that had validation by bedrock.

I didn't know I had validation until I was walking out the door and I happened to see

the sign and I scanned the code and it saved me 25 bucks, but it's a really good thing

to know.

Clearly stating that stuff, I think is really important.

I have had so many bad valet experiences over the year.

I avoid valet with like the plague.

I don't know about you.

It depends, but generally I avoid valet.

Yeah.

And I find that the costs end up being like higher than others.

Now, there's some that have a really good valet program and it works really well.

I had a pretty good experience at the Suprem in downtown Detroit.

Caucus Club has a pretty good valet system.

So there's some ways to do it, but for me personally, I like to know the parking

of the situation at a time.

Like here's the other thing.

I don't like being forced in the valet.

Yes.

Absolutely.

Provided as an option, but tell me also where I can park nearby.

If you have a lot in its valet, only tell me that.

Tell me the next public lot or tell me where it's street parking is.

How what's the rate of street parking in front of you, et cetera?

Especially if you're in an urban city area, if you're thinking, I'm thinking Detroit.

I'm thinking parts across point.

I'm thinking Royal Oak, West Deer, more than that kind of stuff, it'd be really helpful

to have a map.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

I don't know if it's actually extra time, but these are the kind of details that would

pay off like time and time again, because it's you make it once and then you can forget

about it.

One last point I want to circle back to.

We were talking about the menu earlier.

People want to see your menu before they go in.

They want it to be up to date and accurate, but they also do not want to have to create

an account or sign up or pretend they're doing an online order for DoorDash or GrubHub

or something like that in order to see your menu.

Oh my gosh, especially those websites that are super jank where you're going through

and scrolling through in, for instance, there have been places where I want to go get

the food later, but on their website, it says orders closed and I cannot access their

menu to make a decision for what I'm going to order tomorrow for lunch for everybody.

Yes, exactly.

Yes.

So at the bare minimum, I would say put a PDF of your current menu up, but ideally you

would have just a scrollable webpage version of your menu that is not an ordering system.

And that's good for search engines and more and more.

I'll be honest with you, a lot of more traffic's coming to our website from it from AI engines

as well.

Oh yeah, absolutely.

AI is reading your menu, reading your hours, reading everything about you.

And so you have to optimize for that as well.

Fun fact, I learned that AI is reading every single episode of our podcast, indexing it

and then using it for results for businesses around town.

Oh wow.

Yeah.

So anyway, I would love to know your feedback, your pet peeves.

Do you run a restaurant or bar?

Do you have things that you want to share with the public daily Detroit edgmail.com?

Or on the other side, is there a consumer pet peeve?

We didn't hit.

Is there something that you want to share in the spirit of festivists?

I know it's not the holiday season, but those of us have a certain vintage or a member

of the holiday of festivists on the TV show, Seinfeld.

And if you're not of that vintage, look it up.

My grievances are not limited to once a month or once a year.

Has anyone who knows you, Randy Walker?

I will make my opinions known.

That's right.

If you do too, dailydetroitedgmail.com or 313-789-3211, Randy Walker, so good to talk to

you, man.

Great to talk with you.

Absolutely.

All right.

Thank you so much for listening to your daily Detroit tomorrow, a special edition talking

about Detroit State of the City and more with Norris Howard.

It's going to be a great time.

If you're listening to this and there's enough time, make sure to check out our live stream.

They'll be happening about 630 or so on our YouTube channel, Daily Detroit.

And of course, thank you so much to our members on patreon patreon.com slash daily Detroit

because local media needs local support to survive and drive.

With that, I'm Jair Stays.

I'm Randy Walker.

Thank you so much for listening.

Remember that you are somebody and we'll see you around Detroit.