We got our first negative review today, on Yelp. It was tough to read, mostly because you put your heart and soul into your establishment, you tweak and finetune and sweat and get it just so and you hope that hoardes of people will flock to tell the world how awesome it all is.
And, realistically, that’s what’s been happening at Fray thus far. We’ve had scores of people enthusiastically tell us how great they found the food and the beer options and the wine list and the staff. That’s been terrific.
But there’ll always be one person who just doesn’t dig it. Sometimes more than one.
And so it went that a reviewer named Katy took to Yelp to complain about our small portions, high prices, mediocre soup and, oddly, that the bowl of potato chips her friend ordered came to the table as actual potato chips and not fries.
We’ll scrub the potato chip thing as an issue because, seriously, have you tried the things? They’re magnificent – house-made, rosemary-infused, sea salt and pepper spiced fried potato chips that disappear as soon as they hit the table.
And we’ll also ignore the dig at the pumpkin creme fraiche soup, being as we sell a ton of it and have comment cards left and right telling us how great it is.
But the price and portion size thing… is that a fair point?
Kinda.
Look, we know that there are places on Main Street where you can get a barrel of spag-bols for $2.50. We’ve all enjoyed visits to restaurants where the portions are so big you can’t figure out where the place could make a profit. And we’ve also all been to places where the huge portions and low prices give away the fact that you’re eating non-fresh, frozen, processed, possibly cooked the day before ingredients that were perhaps shipped in from Chile.
But our ingredients are not. They’re from Cambie Street and Granville Island and farms in Abbotsford and vegetable farms in Richmond and breweries in Surrey and meat producers in Pemberton. Our vegetables come to us with soil still on them. Our meat comes so fresh we don’t have to cook it to a medium well done state to ensure nobody gets sick, unlike most restaurants in town. Our chicken is valley chicken, our pork is Abbotsford-bred, our beef is from interior B.C., our cheese is from Benton Brothers, and our purple yam bread, ketchup, BBQ sauce and mayo – that’s made in-house. No bottles, no jars.
That takes time and labour. It also takes commitment, and sometimes it costs money to get food delivered three or four times a week (to maintain freshness) instead of once (where a truck is backed up to the door and boxes of frozen food are unloaded into a coolroom).
Yes, it’s true, our mac and cheese costs more than $5. But it’s also true that its made with fresh radiatore that comes from a pasta artisan in Port Moody, and has three cheeses that are aged and of premium quality, and the dish is made that day, not reheated from earlier in the week.
Our food is good. It’s the way food should be – fresher, healthier and of a higher quality than most are used to.
So we’ll probably get another few low rating reviews on Yelp, Urbanspoon, OpenTable and DineHere before all is said and done. But, at the same time, we’ll hope that people who enjoy fresh ingredients and attention to detail will feel that what we’re producing is worth a positive review, and repeat custom, and the sharing of our existence with friends.
After all, the more people who come eat at Fray, the better deal we can get from bulk buying, and the lower prices will go.
It all starts with you. Click the table reservation link on the right hand side of the page, and come see what you think.