Richard Ekkebus leads the kitchen at Amber at The Landmark Mandarin Oriental in Hong Kong. I interviewed him for The Luxury of Attention.
In our conversation, Ekkebus spoke about the spoken complaint as something his kitchen depends on rather than something it tolerates. He told me his team will do everything it can to please each guest, because that is the business they are in, and that constructive comments are taken to heart and always considered. The kitchen, in his framing, is in a continuous dialogue with the people it serves. A diner who voices a disappointment is participating in the kitchen’s evolution, and the team wants to hear it.
“After all, we are in the hospitality business. We take constructive comments at heart and will always consider what people offer us as feedback.” Richard Ekkebus, Amber at The Landmark Mandarin Oriental
I keep returning to his position because it answers the question the chapter on recovery turns on. Most guests who are unhappy say nothing in the room. They leave, and they write about it later, where the property cannot fix anything. The discipline that prevents this is to make the complaint easy to voice, and that discipline is built from signals the team sends throughout the meal: the questions it asks, its lack of defensiveness, the captain’s unhurried check at the third course. A team that signals it wants feedback hears the complaint while there is still time to act. A team that signals otherwise reads about it online.
In the book, Richard Ekkebus appears in Chapter 10, The Recovery, where his account of the kitchen’s dependence on guest feedback supports the chapter’s central instruction to make every complaint easy to voice, and where his framing of the diner as a participant in the kitchen’s development gives the chapter its model of what a healthy relationship between a restaurant and its guests looks like in practice.