Blog
66 Restaurant Survey Questions to Help You Collect Valuable Feedback
Sevenrooms
5 min read
May 22, 2025
Sevenrooms
5 min read
May 22, 2025
Ever wonder what your guests really think after dining with you?
Exchanging pleasantries at the table only scratches the surface, and online review sites tend to only attract highly satisfied (or highly dissatisfied) guests.
When you ask the right questions and let guests respond privately, you uncover a deeper understanding of their experience, identifying crucial areas for improvement with feedback you can actually use.
Proactive, post-meal feedback questionnaires are your key to elevating your restaurant reputation. Time them appropriately, and you’ll gain actionable insights into your menu, service and ambiance, directly impacting guest satisfaction.
Ready to move beyond assumptions and truly understand your diner's journey? We’ve compiled 66 restaurant survey questions to help you get the most out of your restaurant questionnaire.
Guest feedback is important to the restaurant business because it helps you understand what your guests are thinking so you can improve your service, menu and overall dining experience.
Restaurateurs who only scour third-party review sites for customer insights are leaving valuable feedback on the table because it can be skewed or fake. To truly understand your guests, you need a more thorough review collection and management process.
SevenRooms’ 2025 U.S. Restaurant Industry Trends report found that while 59% of operators rely on third-party reviews to gauge guest perception, operators are increasingly turning to feedback surveys (56%) and guest sales data (53%) for a more accurate view of brand sentiment.
There are a few ways to collect guest feedback — QR codes on tables or receipts, printed comment cards or post-dining conversations with staff — but email is by far, the most effective.
Email surveys create a seamless guest experience by removing friction — no logins, QR scans or awkward face-to-face exchanges. Guests can respond on their own time, leading to higher participation and more thoughtful feedback.
Automated surveys sent via email help you gather insights, reward loyalty and resolve issues quickly. They’re also easy to scale and standardize across locations or service periods.
There are two main approaches to restaurant surveys: Standardized feedback surveys using star or scale ratings with the option of leaving a comment, and customizable formats with varied, open-ended questions.
Standardized surveys are great for collecting consistent, scalable insights. They often use rating scales such as “on a scale of 1 to 5…” or “How would you rate…” to help measure performance and identify trends over time.
For those looking to dig deeper on certain areas, use a mix of multiple-choice and open-ended formats to encourage detailed feedback on everything from food and drinks to service quality and ambiance.
If you’re opting for a more tailored, open-ended approach, below are 66 restaurant survey questions to inspire you. To make things easy, we’ve organized them into key categories: overall customer experience, food, service, ambiance, reservations and online orders.
These questions pertain to your guests’ overall restaurant experience. If you don’t pose any other questions, make sure you ask these.
Food is the primary reason why people dine out. Make sure your menu is the best it can be by soliciting customer feedback about your drink and food quality with these questions.
Service can make or break a dining experience. Ask these questions in your restaurant surveys to understand how your front-of-house team is doing and how their performance can be improved.
When you’re close to the business, it’s easy to take your ambiance for granted — or let the little things go unnoticed. Ask these questions to understand what your guests think of your restaurant’s atmosphere.
Making reservations and collecting booking details is an important part of the overall dining experience, especially since diners who prebook tend to be repeat visitors or part of your loyalty program. Here are a few questions to ask guests who book a reservation in advance.
It’s important to gauge the impact of your off-premises dining experiences by asking the following questions.
For a more standardized approach to surveys, SevenRooms’ AI-powered review management and guest feedback software, enables you to proactively ask diners for restaurant feedback using automated emails. With templates and scheduling tools, you can gather feedback immediately following on- or off-premise experiences, when guests are most likely to respond. Feedback is then aggregated into a reputation management dashboard so you can easily spot and identify trends.
What’s more, SevenRooms’ customer relationship management (CRM) system will link feedback to each guest’s profile, helping your entire team influence service during every visit.
Using guest tags, you can label diners based on their review history and dining preferences to further personalize your interactions. For example, you could treat guests who raved about your chocolate cake to a slice on the house, or ensure that a guest who thought your chicken was too spicy receives a milder version on their next visit.
Learn how Gosford RSL uses SevenRooms’ AI and automation to send survey emails and stop bad reviews before they happen.
“With automated emails, we started proactively asking diners for feedback. Whenever we received a negative response, we addressed it immediately to try and transform that feedback into a positive outcome. This feedback was crucial in helping us correct our mistakes. It’s a safety net where if a guest goes home unhappy, they let us know before posting on Google. It’s helped us improve our score.” - Andrew Strickland, the F&B Manager at Gosford RSL
SevenRooms provides you with all the tools to make every guest experience worth five stars. Request a demo today.
Once you have a list of questions to ask your guests, you can create digital surveys using QR codes on table cards, digital surveys via email and even social media polls. Track your feedback in a Google Sheet or Excel document. For a more proactive approach, leverage automated feedback surveys, like the ones SevenRooms offers, so you can automatically schedule feedback requests and track them using daily guest feedback summary emails.
The best way to get customers to leave reviews is by making reviews part of your in-person engagement strategy, especially with regulars. Send post-meal feedback surveys using templates via SevenRooms to find out what guests are really thinking. Social media and online reviews are other excellent ways to engage customers. It is essential to reply to online reviews to satisfy customers and make them feel connected to your restaurant.
