On Tuesday night (June 6) Celeste and I drove over to Greensboro for an evening out. We started with dinner at Bistro Sofia, a restaurant that I found thanks to writing this blog. The restaurant had a run-in of sorts with someone who wrote about it and then I picked it up and wrote about it a couple of times. Well, the general manager of the restaurant found my first post and emailed me directly to discuss some of the issues and in the process did exactly what I think any small business should do when confronted with a negative PR situation. That led to a follow up post that kind of laid out the restaurant's side of the story, but really focused more on how I felt they had done a great job of dealing with a bad situation.
Celeste and I had somewhere to be at 6:30 so we got to the restaurant right when it opened at 5:00. We were greeted by Kerrie, the GM, and seated in the dining room. Since we were so early we had the room to ourselves until the end of the meal. I'm no food critic but I can tell you without hesitation that:
- Celeste and I agreed this was the best restaurant we've eaten in since we moved to North Carolina.
- We'd put the food, service and ambience up there with any restaurant in D.C.
- We'd have paid a LOT more in D.C. for a comparable eating experience.
To top it all off the owner of the restaurant and one of the bartenders (Beth and John respectively) stopped by our table to check on us and to talk about the whole "blogging" thing. Very nice people and again they set a fine example of how to deal with negative PR. Without going into details I'd say they have a firm grasp on what happened, the mistakes made on their end and also some strong feelings that the other side of the story was skewed. Fair enough and totally understandable. I hope that the two sides can get together and come to an understanding.
Suffice it to say that I give the Bistro Sofia a very strong "5" on a five star scale.
After dinner we headed over to the News & Record for a meeting with Lex Alexander and a bunch of bloggers from Greensboro. It was nice meeting some people whose writings I've been reading for years, and there was some interesting conversation about how the newspaper can work with the community in the future. You can read about it here.
We didn't hang around after the meeting since we needed to get home to make sure the kids were in bed and ready for their third-to-last-day of school. But we enjoyed the drive through downtown, which was a Greensboro first for the two of us. Celeste very much liked the neighborhood around Greensboro College and mentioned how much fun it would be to own a house there and rent it to students.
That, my friends, is a sign of how much we enjoyed dinner and the meeting; it made my wife delusional.
