Mind your manners, diners, restaurants are turning the tables on grumpy reviewers

The post-dinner rant is of a piece with our fetish for feedback, but isn't it all a bit morally cheap?

- Kate Maltby

My new duvet cover is upset with me. This is not, I stress, due to offensive activities in the bedroom. My sin is that two months after purchasing this admirably functional, mid-market item of bed linen, I have yet to leave a review on the company website.

Ever since my initial purchase - online, of course - I have been haunted by an increasingly plaintive sequence of requests, demands and, eventually, cajoling whimpers. Recently, these pleas moved firmly into the territory of emotional blackmail. As an "independent, family business", my bed linen providers rely on positive reviews to keep a roof over their heads, I was told. I'm aware that the duvet cover itself isn't sentient but, with this level of pressure leveraged in its name, it's hard to catch sight of it in the laundry and not attribute to it a smidge of cotton-fibred resentment.

Incessant demands for consumer feedback are the newest plague on our inboxes. It's not just the duvet cover: Tripadvisor is still badgering me to review a restaurant I didn't actually attend, after looking it up last month; my new exercise mat came with a questionnaire; and when I bought a splurge item through a luxury fashion marketplace, I was invited separately to review the web portal, the individual brand, and the delivery company, each in turn. It's enough to drive one back to shopping in person, with cash - anything that doesn't require an email address.

So I was initially enthused to hear about Dorian, the Notting Hill restaurant that is tearing up the rulebook on customer feedback. Gone is the review-driven service and the abject apologies issued online to any grumpy sot who issues calumnies from behind a pseudonym. Any complaints left on Google or Tripadvisor will be roundly ignored; any customer who even mutters about leaving a review will be ejected on the spot. They certainly won't be emailing you to ask if there's room for improvement.