Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Good advice / Restaurants The New Restaurant Rules: Make Good Food, Price It Fairly, Sell it Like Crazy
Posted by Carrington Fox on Wed, Feb 4, 2009 at 6:16 AM
A Washington, D.C.-based public relations shop with my name mysteriously in its Rolodex recently distributed a helpful list of recession-busting tips for restaurateurs. The advice could be summarized thusly: Make better food, charge competitively for it, up-sell your ass off, and (duh) hire a PR firm.
It seems to me that a lot of local restaurants got the memo--or at least intuited the fairly obvious advice on their own--because there's a lot of creativity swirling right now from happy hours to small plates to prix-fixe menus.
As far as the up-selling goes, diners, are you noticing any aggressive sales pitches? And servers, are your employers raising your incentives to sell food? In the new world of restaurant business, what's good? What's bad? What's working? What's not?
Comments (4)
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If you ask me, great food is all the PR a restaurant needs. There are restaurants in town that are hurt not helped by their abrasive flacks. Prince's has been written about in the New York Times, and it wasn't because they hired the Ingram Group.
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"great food is all the PR a restaurant needs."
Sorry, I disagree. Having worked in the restaurant industry—it takes a LOT more than having something tasty on your menu to get people to come in the door more than once (especially if everything else in the restaurant sucks).
Word of mouth works well when you're the big fish in the small pond. But when there's 15-20 others just like you, then you better have some regular advertising somewhere.
Even places like Prince's benefit from (or are punished by) the PR cycle, though. I have a friend who's a restaurant PR person in a bigger city and once asked him how Prince's got so much press WITHOUT a PR person. He told me that food writers who travel a lot - especially magazine writers - are really hell-bent on out-obscuring one another. So Prince's rose to the top of whispered-about places among food writers, which is about as PR-connected as you can get.
He told me that even if he tried he couldn't sell Prince's as a subject now, though, because it'd been done to death, like the Loveless before it.
I don't think there's any one answer and honestly, I don't think the quality of the food is even in the top three or four when it comes to determining success or failure - look how many crappy restaurants thrive in this town when every single thing they serve is straight off the Sysco truck. Hi, Amerigo! Hi, almost every meat and three in town!
"So Prince's rose to the top of whispered-about places among food writers, which is about as PR-connected as you can get."
No, that's about as far from PR-connected as you can get. That's word of mouth. If a flack had called those same writers giving Prince's the hard sell, those writers probably wouldn't have tried it.
