Mouse in the Salad=PR Disaster. Or does it?

A diner’s horror story is a company’s PR crucible:

“…a woman on New York’s Upper West Side walks into Le Pain Quotidien, a high-end café chain. She sits down, orders a salad. The salad arrives. The contents: leafy greens and an entire dead mouse. Two nearby customers, one of whom happened to be Stephen Dubner, saw the scene unfold.

It got us thinking: in restaurants and in life, bad things happen. But what happens next is perhaps more important. So what does a restaurant do to recover from an incident like that?”

via What to Do After a Dining Disaster? | Freakonomics Radio.

Click on the link above and have a listen to this episode of Freakonomics Radio if you want a mixed-bag perspective on what to do–and what not to do–after a PR nightmare.

After that, come back and see if you agree with our take:

• The “run and hide” attitude of the Le Pain Quotidien PR team is reprehensible. A company this large should have better PR talent. We don’t mean spinmeisters who will make it all go away, but competent professionals who by their actions will not raise more questions than answers during a time of crisis.
• Was the company so paralyzed by fear of bad press–or their own lawyers–that they took weeks to respond to a national radio show?
• When the CEO finally deigns to appear on the show, he luckily gets a pass from the interviewer. This is rare.
• The CEO nearly breaks his arm patting himself on the back for being “brutally honest.” Yes, he was honest…and only weeks after being asked to be honest and sit for an interview.
• The CEO claims he doesn’t know if the victimized diner received any sort of remuneration for her pain and suffering. Really? Really?
• This seems to have blown over in the company’s favor, though from where we sit it seems they got lucky. Very lucky.
  

What’s your take on the mouse in the salad and the company’s initial PR failure?