Dear honorable guest of (fill in name of restaurant here),

I hope this letter finds you well. During your last visit, I know there may have been some things that you left unhappy. Your food didn't come out as fast as you wanted, you wanted a booth instead of the table, or you were unable to get the complimentary after-dinner mints that are promised after every meal. I understand your concern and your frustration, and on behalf of the staff of my establishment, I want to offer you our deepest apologies.

Though, I feel that a tad bit of honesty may be in order as well. In our restaurant we have only a limited number of booths, so one will not be always readily available. I am sorry that the tables are not as comfortable as you would have liked but understand that I am trying my best to accommodate and meet your needs, but I do not control how fast the other guests eat and stay at that particular table. I am also not always able to sit you in the room that you want without sacrificing the quality of service that you may receive. You have to understand, your server is one person who is now performing a delicate balancing act with you and about eleven other people at a given time. Moving them out of section to give you the table that you desire, may make them become unbalanced and their whole system to fall. Please keep this in mind next time that you are being sat.

Also, I understand that your family may want some peace and quiet, and that you may want to steer clear of other people or children when coming in to see us. But remember, the restaurant that you choose will have people in it because it is a public restaurant. We will always have our doors open to all kinds of people and we cannot show your party any special favors because you feel that you should be able to sit in a room by yourself. Restaurants do not work that way, unless you are able to let us know ahead of time that your party is coming, and then we will be able to make sure that your needs are met.

When we are busy, I am sorry that your quality of service may go down. Remember that balancing act that I mentioned earlier? Well, adding a wait time on that, and servers being forced to go above their normal table load by taking on four or five tables only adds to the number of people they have to balance. Remember, each one of these people have their own needs, their own wants, and their own expectations. The server has to know and remember all of these and act accordingly. Though the server can be on top of their game and are expected to be that way a hundred percent of the time, this is just not realistic. They are, despite their supernatural abilities to remember a hundred orders at one time, are human. Mistakes will happen. Please do not throw a fit because your bread was forgotten or it is taking longer than normal for your food to come out, or they forgot that you ordered no cheese on your salad. They are trying their hardest and will continue to do so. But fussing and yelling at them will not help them any, and if anything, it just makes their day more miserable. This is not to say we want you to turn a blind eye to expectations not being met but this is more to say that we want you to communicate with us in a respectful way. There is always a right and a wrong way of explaining your unhappiness, and I promise that being nice about it will get you much better results then making a horse's butt out of yourself.

Though my words may seem a bit harsh, I promise you that you are valued at our establishment. We love seeing you come in, and we hope that you and your party continue to come and see us. I just wanted to let you know, despite all the mistakes that may happen within these walls, we hope that you will understand that we are trying, and that your happiness is our number one concern. If we are not meeting your expectations, you can be rest assured, we will do whatever we can to fix the issue and accommodate you for the inconvenience.

Thank you for reading this letter, and we look forward to seeing you soon!