I went to Wagamama in London after hearing enthusiastic recommendations and came away underwhelmed. To my taste, the meal did not justify what I had expected or what I paid. That is my experience of that visit, rather than a verdict on every restaurant or everyone who enjoys it.
What interested me afterwards was the strength of the expectation. When friends love a place, their enthusiasm travels with you. You arrive carrying an experience that has already happened in your imagination. The actual meal then has to compete with it.
In our case, an unavailable dish and food arriving at different times added to the frustration. The practical issue was not only the food itself. We had pictured a shared meal, and the sequence did not match that picture.
That made me think about the service promise. If a restaurant has a particular way of serving dishes, explaining it clearly can help customers decide whether it suits the occasion. The same arrangement may feel relaxed to one group and awkward to another.
Familiarity also deserves consideration. Someone may return because a place is convenient, associated with good memories or reliably meets their own expectations. Those reasons can be real even when another customer does not share them. Perhaps I was simply looking for a different experience.
For a service brand, recommendations create an opportunity and a responsibility. Listen to what people believe they are being promised, explain the experience honestly and pay attention when the gap becomes visible. Hype can bring someone through the door. What happens at the table determines the story they tell afterwards.