San Francisco Chinese Restaurant Temporarily Closes Because Pleasing Everyone Is A Waste Of Time

By Ashlee Kieler September 23, 2014

A San Francisco restaurant temporarily closed leaving customers with these signs.

You just can’t please everyone. And if you try, you’re likely to get frustrated and maybe even lash out at others. That sounds like a situation that unfolded in a San Francisco restaurant recently when the chef-owner abruptly closed the place down.

A series of customer complaints angered the chef-owner of the small Chinese restaurant so much that he chose to shut the doors, albeit, temporarily, SF Eater reports.

Sure, it’s an owner’s prerogative to close their restaurant for a period of time, but the maybe problematic part with this situation lies in the way the chef relayed the closure to prospective patrons.

“We are closed because of you (customers),” one sign read.

“So…yes we use MSG, we don’t believe in organic food, and we don’t give a shit about gluten free,” a sign directly below the first proclaims.

The chef tells KGO-TV that he made the signs because he was tired of catering too hard to satisfy patrons.

To illustrate his frustration, he explained one of the incidents that led to the closure:

“The second guy came up to me and said, ‘The rule is, if we don’t like it we don’t have to pay.’ And as he walked out he started cursing at me and that’s when I went ‘poof’,” the chef says.

An employee with the restaurant told the SF Eater that another incident occurred just prior. In that case, the party refused to pay for their meals after saying the food was “too spicy.”

“He needed to cool off,” says the employee. “he was frustrated and stressed out, he’s the cook, so we can’t run the restaurant without him.”

The restaurant reopened the following day with a new sign: “We work hard to please everyone, but we know we can’t. So if you’re a hard to please [sic], please just turn around and go somewhere else.”