Dear Mr. Roehl,

We want to sincerely apologize for the unpleasant incident you had at Zen Box on July 3rd 2008.

Your comments were most troubling but we want to unequivocally thank you for bringing this to our attention.

Without your comments on your blog, we might never have known of it.

Our restaurant prides itself on providing our guests with the highest level of friendly, responsive service and in this instance we certainly failed to do this. Making our guests feel welcome and well cared for is our highest priority and we are very sorry that you did not experience the level of service and attention that our guests have come to expect.

What you experienced is totally unacceptable and we have already taken steps to ensure that this does not happen in our restaurant again.

By taking the time to write this blog-entry, we know that it is important for you to share this experience with your readers. Any form of free positive publicity is most appreciated, especially to local small independent businesses. However, because of this unfortunate event, our reputation is at stake. We sincerely ask to resolve this issue into a positive one.

In order to protect our own interest, it is only fair for us, as a small business owner who is struggling to survive in the competitive skyway, to ask any individual who wishes to take photographs in our premises, to notify us of their intent. He/She will always be welcomed to do so. We will take this incident as a useful tool/lesson to train our employees on customer service.

To complete your review of our Soba Salad, please see below for the full description of the ingredients in our Spring/Summer Special:

Buckwheat Soba Noodles served with Edamame (soybeans), julienne carrots, shredded romaine lettuce, sprinkled with toasted sesame seeds and served with our homemade miso-sesame dressing.

While we cannot change the past, we would like to invite you back as our personal guest so that we can show you that we really can do a much better job than what you experienced. Please come back to enjoy a complimentary meal for two, all food and beverages included.

Please provide us with your postal address so that we can mail a gift certificate to you.

Once again, please accept our sincere apology for this unfortunate incident and thank you for letting us know about it.

Sincerely,

Co-Owners
Zen Box Japanese Eatery
601 Marquette Ave, Ste#204
Minneapolis, MN 55402
Tel: (612) 341-3313

I followed up with this e-mail:

While I cannot accept gift certificates on principle, I will happily
return to your restaurant at a future date to retry another offering.
If you have any specific recommendations, I would be thrilled to hear
it. I appreciate your communication and I ask your permission to
repost the contents of your e-mail (minus any personally identifiable
information — unless you would prefer it remain) as a followup to the
review. In addition, I will be amending the content already posted to
include the ingredients as you have listed them.

Thank you,
Bill

And then they responded with this:

Dear Bill,

Thank you so much for your prompt response. We really appreciated it.

Upon your visit at our restaurant, please do not hesitate to introduce yourself (ask for Lina or John), we would love to meet you in person.

May we suggest the following items for you to try:
1) Chicken Teriyaki (our most popular item) - Flamed-grilled premium hand-trimmed Chicken Thigh (the traditional cut of meat that is served in Japan) served with our home-made Teriyaki Sauce. We understand that you prefer to avoid fried food, but our personal favorite is Chicken Kara-age, it is skinless and boneless crispy chicken pieces, served with our home-made Kamikaze Sauce (with Ginger & Garlic & mildly spicy)

2) Zen Box Salad consist of ‘angel-hair’ cabbage served with home-made Dressing made from Fresh Apple & Ginger.

3) Snowy Salmon Onigiri - Triangular hand-tossed Rice-ball mixed with Smoked Salmon, Cream-cheese, Cilantro & Green onion.

4) Beef Ribs - our marinated beef short-ribs are flamed-grilled to perfection and the sauce is awesome over steamed rice.

We are more than happy to share our email with your blog and Thank you for giving us a chance to improve.

…the writing is terrible. Very poor penmanship and in Japanese, you wouldn’t ever see “禅箱.” It would be more like 禅のベント or ベントの禅 would also be a possibility. It’s like a bad tattoo.

I guess it’d be like an American visiting Japan and eating at an “American” restaurant with a logo that looks like it was drawn by a four-year old. A demonstration of its authenticity, I guess.