Quote Originally Posted by Dan Druff View Post
So I looked at the reviews for hut's place.

4 stars on Yelp
4 stars on Google
4 stars on Tripadvisor

Talk about consistency.

Too bad the dough doesn't share the same consistency. Some people seem to love the place, but the negative reviews all say pretty much the same thing (over a period of years), mostly focused upon soggy dough, undercooked pizza, and not enough sauce.

While the pizza couldn't be that bad if there are so many positive reviews, clearly this also isn't a grand conspiracy over 4 years time to falsely accuse the place of having soggy dough.

hut, I have seen your analysis of restaurants, food service, and customer service in the past, and it's usually very good. So how come you haven't addressed these repeated complaints? Clearly they're onto something. Obviously it's your business, and it's totally up to you, but if I ran the place, I would be working hard to figure out how to immediately address these seemingly legitimate complaints.

I have a friend who co-owns a restaurant, and I read his place's Yelp reviews. Half the 1-star reviews are complaining that the hostess is rude. I asked him, "Why not give her an ultimatum or fire her?", and he just makes excuses for her. I don't believe he's fucking her, nor do I think he's trying to get in her pants. I just think he's refusing to accept the obvious, and it's dragged his overall Yelp rating down to 3.5 stars. I finally gave up trying to convince him.
We have addressed issues regarding the dough especially with regards to being undercooked. We use a conveyor belt oven which is pretty industry standard now and almost mandatory if you do any significant volume. I spent a lot of time figuring out the proper temperature and time to produce a properly cooked product. There is no real universal temperature and belt speed, it depends on the make and model of each oven. For example, I have a double stack Middleby Marshall PS360 oven....when I competed in Vegas they bring in 5 different ovens of various types so you can cook on something comparable. They have a conveyor oven, a deck oven, a wood fired oven, etc.... They had the newest Middleby on the market, I set it to the same time and temp as I usually cook at and my test pizzas came out literally looking like charcoal. I had to lower the temp by 85 degrees and lower the time by 90 seconds. Luckily at the competition there was a true oven expert who was able to help me quickly. We offer 3 dough types with pan being the most popular. Some people just don't like pan pizza, its vastly different than say a traditional New York pizza. While it may seem to you looking at the reviews that there is a consistent problem, those reviews represent such a small percentage of the overall customer experience. I'm not suggesting that they should be completely discounted by any means but we have addressed these issues.