Takeaway Reviews

jodyg

i'd cut and paste this whole page and send it to their head office, along with the plastic food place in question!

hungryhouse_company_representative

Hi David,

I'm Graeme, I work at hungryhouse.

Firstly, let me say how sorry I was to hear that you had a serious issue with the meal that you were delivered. This is clearly a big problem that needs to be addressed.

I was the person who put our "no reviews about legally dangerous problems" rule in place, so i thought it was worth getting in touch about the review not being published because that's ultimately my fault.

The reason that we've got this rule in place is partly legal. We have to protect ourselves from publishing information that is materially damaging to another business (the restaurant), and that we can't prove in court.

If we post information of such a serious nature like your review, the British law says that the responsibility is for *us* to be able to prove it in a court. Unfortunately, customers leaving reviews don't provide us with any evidence - and we can't be sure that our customers would be willing to go to court and provide evidence themselves, getting dragged into a libel/defamation case - so we have to block the review. This is a policy that i'm pretty sure that all sites with reviews like ours would have - but if you can show me that this is a mistake please please do drop me an email to help@hungryhouse.co.uk.

I dont want you to be left with the impression that this is the end of the matter if someone complains about a serious issue though....

Firstly, we do keep track of serious complaints, and look for trends where more than 1 customer complains about the same restaurant. I must stress that it is really very very rare for a single restaurant to have more than 1 person make a serious complaint, but over the last 5 years of doing business, several restaurants *have* been identified and removed from our website for this reason.

As soon as your review was received, we will have phoned the restaurant owner to let them know about the problem you experienced, and inform them that it's a very serious issue is likely to be investigated, and something that we operate a policy of giving just 1 warning about.

Also, in the email that you received from us, there should have been a message encouraging you to contact food standards or your local authority, provide your evidence to them and let us know the outcome. If they investigate and you show us that they're taking further action against the restaurant, then they would certainly be removed from our website on that basis.

Something else that we're just putting into place to help out customers is an integration with the 'scores on the doors' inspections ratings that you may have seen? We're working with the providers of this information at present, and hope to integrate the restaurant ratings given by food standards onto our website soon, giving visitors to hungryhouse more transparency into who they are ordering from and what their food safety standards and processes are like.

I hope that now i've explained all this your mind has been put at rest, and you can see that we are doing everything in our power to protect our customers and provide a service that they can trust. If you or anyone else reading this has any feedback or ideas on how we could further improve our processes from where we are now, please do get in touch using the contact us form on hungryhouse.co.uk, and mark it FAO Graeme.

Thanks for reading such a long message! I hope this shows we are doing our absolute best here.

Regards,

Graeme
hungryhouse.co.uk

davidhwdn wrote: »

I ordered an Indian takeaway through Hungryhouse on Saturday night,i ended up chewing on a piece of plastic and mentioned this when reviewing my order.If your review is chosen as the winning one you receive £25 to use on future orders(I have won 3 times).
Because my review mentioned the foreign object in my food they sent me an e-mail saying they couldn't publish it as it questions if the food was fit for human consumption.My question is what is the point of reviews if you cannot be honest,does it mean all reviews have to be good ones.