Privacy policy

KM Gastro GmbH, which runs Restaurant Quellenhof, decides what happens to the personal data described on this page, and is the controller for it under the Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection. Where a guest reaches us from the European Union, the General Data Protection Regulation applies as well.

Controller

KM Gastro GmbH

House

Restaurant Quellenhof

UID

CHE-348.677.384

Address

Bahnhofplatz 1, 9200 Gossau SG, Switzerland

Telephone

+41 71 380 08 88

Email

info@restaurantquellenhof.ch

This site has no guest accounts, no basket, no advertising and no tracking pixel. Nobody is profiled here, nothing about you is decided automatically, nothing is sold on, and no third party is watching over our shoulder while you read.

There is one place on this site where you tell us something about yourself, and that is the form on the contact page where you ask for a table. Everything else the house knows about you is something you chose to say to a person on the telephone or in an email.

The server that hands you these pages keeps a short log of each one it serves: the address your device asked from, the moment it asked, which page, and the browser and system it reported. Every web server does this, and it is how one is kept running and defended.

The ground for it is our own interest in a site that stays up and is not abused. Nothing in the log is used to build a picture of a visitor, and the logs are deleted on a rolling basis a few weeks after they are written.

This site runs on rented servers. The provider holds the pages and those logs on our instructions and on our behalf, under a written agreement, and may do nothing else with them. Ask us and we will tell you who they are and where the servers stand.

There are no advertising cookies on this site and no analytics cookies either. Nothing here follows you to another site, so there is no consent banner: there is nothing to consent to.

One thing is written to your browser as a guest, in what is called session storage: a single entry recording that you have already watched the short film the home page opens with, so that it plays once when you arrive and not again every time you come back to the front page. It never leaves your device, it says nothing about you, and your browser throws it away when you close the tab.

There is a part of this site that only the house can reach, where the card, the hours and the team are kept up to date. Signing in there sets a cookie that holds the session and remembers the language, and the browser keeps a few display preferences such as the width of a column. Those belong to the people who work here and are set only once somebody signs in. No guest ever meets them.

The two typefaces this site is set in are served from our own domain. Opening a page here sends no request to Google and no address of yours reaches them.

The film on the home page is a file on our own server. There is no video platform involved and nothing is embedded from one.

Open in maps is an ordinary link. No map is drawn on our pages and nothing of Google is loaded into them. Follow the link and you are on Google, under their terms, and what happens there is between you and them. The same goes for our Instagram and our Facebook: those are links out, and a channel we keep on a platform we do not own is governed by that platform.

A request for a table reaches us in one of three ways: the form on the contact page, the telephone, or an email. Whichever way you choose, the same few things get written down.

Evening

The day and the hour you have in mind

Guests

How many of you are coming

Name

The name the table is held in

Telephone

So we can reach you on the day

Email

Where the receipt and our answer go

Notes

Anything you choose to add, and nothing you do not

The form keeps no record of its own. There is no reservation book in this website to write into: when you send the form, it sends two emails, one to the house and one back to you as a receipt, and then it is finished with what you typed. Nothing is saved to a database here, and no copy of your request sits on this server.

Those emails then live where email lives: in the inbox the house reads, in your own inbox, and with the company that carried them, which is named in the next section. The house keeps its book on paper and in its own hands.

All of it is used to hold the table and to reach you if something changes, and for nothing else. The ground for it is the agreement between us, which is that a table is held in your name, and the steps taken before it at your request. There is also one hidden field on the form that no person can see or reach, which exists to catch machines posting to it; a request that arrives with it filled in is quietly dropped.

The notes field is the one place where you might tell us something about your health: an allergy, a wheelchair, something you cannot eat. You are never obliged to. If you do, the ground for our handling it is your own consent, given in the telling, and you can take it back at any time, and you can always raise it on the telephone or at the table instead. A name, a number and how many of you there are holds a table perfectly well.

We do not send marketing email. If we ever do, it will be because you asked for it, and every message will carry a way out of it.

Our email runs through Resend, Inc. (United States), which carries and delivers messages on our instructions and on our behalf. A request for a table therefore travels as an email through their systems, and that includes whatever you wrote in the notes field. Our accountant sees what an accountant has to see. Beyond those two, nobody.

We do not sell personal data, we do not trade it, and we hand it to an authority only where Swiss law requires it of us.

Resend, Inc. sits outside Switzerland (United States), so a request for a table does cross a border on its way to us. That transfer rests on the safeguards Swiss and European law recognise, which here means the standard contractual clauses agreed with them. The same holds for any other provider we use from outside Switzerland.

• Server logs: a few weeks, then they are gone.
• A request sent through the form: nothing at all on this website, which keeps no copy of it. What remains is the two emails it sent.
• A reservation, however it reached us: through the season it belongs to, and then removed.
• Anything that carries a bill: ten years, because Swiss bookkeeping law says so and gives us no choice.
• Letters and email: while the conversation is live, and a reasonable while after, in case it starts again.

When a period runs out the record is deleted rather than archived.

The part of this site the house uses to keep the card and the hours up to date has accounts in it: a name, an email address, and a password stored in a form nobody can read back, ourselves included. An invitation to open one is an email with a link that stops working if it goes unused.

That is a matter between the house and the people who work in it rather than something this page decides, and everything else about working here is kept in the house. Anybody who works here can ask us exactly what a guest can ask us, below.

You can ask what we hold about you and have a copy of it. You can have it corrected where it is wrong, and deleted where we have no reason left to keep it. You can withdraw a consent you gave, and object to a use that rests on our own interest rather than on our agreement. Where the law gives you the right to be handed your data in a form you can take elsewhere, you have that too.

None of it costs anything and asking is never held against you. It has no bearing on your table.

Call or write, and give us enough to find you in what we hold: the name a booking was made in, and roughly when. We answer within thirty days, and sooner if we can.

If you think we have handled this badly you are free to take it to the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner in Bern, or to the supervisory authority where you live. We would rather you came to us first.

This page changes when what we do changes, and the date at the top is the day it last did. There is no archive of earlier versions: the page as it stands is the one that applies.