along with a 0/5 rating, and when Paul wrote a fake review for a kebab shop in Stratford-Upon-Avon saying the spitroast Pikachu was delicious.
“There could be a geezer in Islamabad writing a review of Salt at the moment; there’s nothing that can stop that from happening," Calum said.
But the real problem, he said, is that TripAdvisor is "the first thing people will look at, because of the Google algorithm.”
“That’s the danger, because if people are writing trash on there all the time, that’s the first thing people see. Not everyone sees our side of it, where you’re in the business.”
And we know by now that Paul never ignores a bad review, but Calum agreed on how difficult it is.
"Today I was sat there having a little manager’s talk about the business and someone said we got a rough one the other day, and I was saying to myself: 'just don’t look at it, because all that’s going to happen is that it’s going to make you furious. And I looked at it. And I was furious.”
Finally, the chefs spoke about stress in the kitchen, and how to address this.
Calum said he had been so stressed that he once bent down to pick something up on the floor, only to sit up and see a chef staring at him as clumps of his hair fell out onto the floor.
Months later, after ignoring symptoms he had put down to tiredness, Calum collapsed on the street and was hospitalised for five months.
“That’s another great thing about being a chef, you generally don’t take care of your health properly," he joked.
“I was out of the business for five weeks at a time when I genuinely thought I was so important to the business I could not be away from it. And you know what happened in five weeks? Nothing. The restaurant was perfect. We had a review out which was amazing while I was in hospital, and it taught me so much.”
“Chefs can be thick skulled. I wouldn’t take an afternoon off to go to a GP and I ended up being five weeks out of the restaurant.”
Following episodes in The Nightcap series will feature Brad Carter, Frances Atkins, Simon Hulstone, Pete Sanchez, Paul Welburn, Tim Allen and Aaron Mulliss and, as this episode, will be available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
