A guest note is written in ninety seconds by a host at the end of a long shift, and then read by a dozen people over the following four years, at least one of whom will be a lawyer.
That asymmetry is the whole problem. The note costs nothing to write, is very difficult to delete, and the person writing it is not imagining any of the rooms it will later be read in.
What follows is a short set of rules for notes that stay useful and do not become a liability. None of it is complicated; the difficulty is entirely in getting everybody to do it the same way.
Notes outlive the person who wrote them
The host who wrote "difficult, sends everything back" left in 2024. The note is still there. It is now the first thing a new server reads about a guest who has since been in eleven times without incident, and it will shape how that guest is treated tonight by someone who has never met her.
Guest records are also, in many places, disclosable to the guest. Depending on where you operate, a person may be entitled to ask what you hold about them — and a note written for an audience of one colleague gets read by an audience of one very specific person.
Neither of those is an argument for writing fewer notes. They are an argument for writing a different kind of note.
The one rule: wants, not personality
Almost every bad note is a character judgement. Almost every good note is an instruction.
"Fussy about wine" tells a server to brace. "Drinks Loire reds, will not be sold anything oaked" tells a server what to pour. The second is more useful, more durable, and — not incidentally — kinder.
The rewrite is nearly mechanical once you see it. Ask what the note is asking somebody to do, and write that instead.
BAD Difficult. Sends things back. GOOD Steak medium-rare and means it. Check it at the pass yourself if it looks over. BAD Cheap. GOOD Drinks by the glass. Do not pitch the tasting menu. BAD Nightmare on the phone. GOOD Prefers to book by email. BAD VIP — look after. GOOD Twelfth visit. Banquette if it is free, and Andrés knows what she drinks. BAD Weird about the anniversary. GOOD Anniversary in October. Does not want it announced at the table. BAD Rude to Sam in March. GOOD Had a bad night in March, handled by Elena. Ask Elena before assuming anything.
What makes a note usable at the podium
A host has roughly the length of a walk from the door to the stand. A note that cannot be absorbed in that time is decoration, however well written it is.
- One fact per note. Not a paragraph. Five short notes beat one good sentence with five clauses in it.
- Written as an instruction. "Sit her away from the kitchen door," not "guest has expressed a preference regarding seating."
- Dated. A note with no date cannot be aged out, and a seating preference from three refurbishments ago is a guess wearing a uniform.
- Attributed. Not to assign blame — so the next person knows who to ask.
- Specific enough to be wrong. "Likes wine" cannot be wrong and cannot be used. "The Chinon, always the Chinon" can be both, which is what makes it worth having.
Allergies are not preferences and do not share a field
This is the one place to be inflexible. An allergy is a safety fact and belongs in whatever field your systems treat as a safety fact: flagged, visible in the list view, impossible to miss.
Freehand notes get truncated in list views, dropped in migrations, and skimmed at speed. A shellfish allergy typed into a general note between a seating preference and a remark about the dog is a shellfish allergy that nobody sees on the night the usual host is off.
Write the allergy, not the accommodation. "No shellfish" is a rule that holds forever. "Had the chicken last time" is a coincidence that somebody will eventually read as a rule.
Pruning, because notes rot
Preferences change, jobs change, partners change. The note reading "always books for two, husband hates the bar" is a hazard the moment the husband is no longer in the picture, and nobody is going to tell you when that happens.
A workable cadence: once a year, per site, a manager reads the notes on every guest who has visited in the last twelve months and deletes anything that has not been true recently. It takes an afternoon and it is comfortably the least popular afternoon of the year.
- Delete anything about a companion who has not appeared in a year.
- Delete every note about behaviour. All of them, without reading them too carefully or you will talk yourself into keeping one.
- Delete seating preferences older than the last time you moved the furniture.
- Keep allergies. Keep them forever, and keep them flagged.
Making a note travel
The last problem is distribution. A note written at one site, inside one platform, is invisible at the site the guest visits next. That is how a guest who carefully explained a nut allergy in March gets asked about it again in July at your other restaurant, and reasonably concludes that nobody wrote it down.
Getting a note written well is a training problem and it belongs to you. Getting it in front of the right person at the right door is a systems problem, and that half is what we work on.