The Restaurants That Thrive on Insulting Their Diners!

A Chinese eatery dubbed "London's rudest restaurant" has promised to reopen with better-mannered service. Can insulting your customers ever be a successful business strategy? Cash only! No, you can't sit together. Eat faster! Ha ha, you want a knife and fork? Wong Kei in London's Chinatown defied received gastronomic wisdom that the customer was always right. Its patrons were cajoled, bullied, insulted and mocked by waiting staff. Perversely, many diners loved it. Each night scores would queue up at the 500-cover restaurant to be verbally abused over the chicken satay and pork fried noodles. To its fans, it was a refreshingly abrasive anomaly in an increasingly sanitised service industry. But this notoriety has been consigned to the past. Wong Kei's operators have pledged to adopt a new, politer waiting style after a revamp of the premises. Co-manager Maylee McDowell admits that her staff could be "quite nasty" in the past. "But we're trying to change the image to be better - good food, good service," she says. This is contingent on customers falling into line. "Hopefully they won't mess us up and then we won't mess them up." Some old regulars who revelled in the old regime's carnivalesque atmosphere have reacted with dismay. "Here, bad service is 'de rigueur'," says one fan on the restaurant's TripAdvisor page. "When we get a friendly waiter, it's disappointing." For some, there is a masochistic pleasure in allowing serving staff full licence to order them about. And while Basil Fawlty at his most splenetic may appear an odd role model, a select band of hospitality entrepreneurs have built successful careers on a reputation for being cantankerous and abrasive to their clientele. Celebrity chef Marco Pierre White once boasted of throwing out 54 customers in a single night and ejecting diners who asked for salt and pepper. The reputation of Michelin-starred Dublin chef Kevin Thornton was burnished after reports he verbally abused a man who asked for chips with his meal. Bookings at the Adelphi in Liverpool rose by 20% after a BBC reality series was screened featuring rather forthright staff. The owner of a Cumbria tearoom which attracted online criticism for its grumpy service won praise after hitting back that the north of England was "a place that still maintains a healthy respect for a good old fashioned surly disposition". "I saw a lot of newspapers, they were saying: 'Keep the rudeness.' Others were saying: 'Don't keep the rudeness, we want polite service' - it all depends how it goes from here."