CHAPTER
18

Beginning Your Marketing Blitz

In This Chapter

• How to throw a great opening party
• Why your party rockets your restaurant to success
• Inviting the right people to your opening
• How to start the buzz about your restaurant
• Getting people to call for reservations for opening weekend

In this chapter, we’ll discuss how to throw an opening party that will be the first stage in your marketing blitz. You’ll learn everything Jody has figured out from years of hosting opening parties. You’ll learn exactly how to invite the right people, who will spread the word so quickly your phone will be ringing for reservations your first weekend.

We’ll also discuss dealing with the press and online reviews. The field has shifted dramatically with the decline of newspapers. Online reviews by uncredentialed, anonymous people can be devastating. We’ll teach you ways to deal with negative reviews.

The Opening Party

The opening party is vital to launching your restaurant. It’s not just a party—it’s a party with a message about your new restaurant and its concept. Your party should relate to your core concept and send a message to your target audience. You’re letting them know they’ve got a great new place to go to eat.

Invitations

Your grand opening party begins with an invitation, and it must be thoughtful. It’s the first real branded piece of information you’re sending out. This party is the first time your target audience is coming into contact with your restaurant. Think about the story you want to tell. Remember, sometimes it’s not so much what you say as how you say it. This relates to your concept. You can be playful, racy, elegant, organic, and imaginative. Don’t be flat and functional.

Send real invitations. In this day and age, email invitations, eblasts, and evites just seem lazy. Not to mention they simply clutter inboxes. An actual physical invitation, designed especially in keeping with your restaurant’s brand, excites people about the restaurant and makes them want to come.

Establish a tone, a style, and a point of view with your invitation. Make it consistent with your identity. If you’re a homespun organic Berkeley bistro, for example, you’ll want to use recycled paper and make sure your messaging isn’t too slick or cryptic.

Your invitation should tell the guests something about the style of the event, such as it’s a cocktail party. Noting the style of the event lets guests decide if they need to go home first and put on a jacket or change into a cocktail dress. Few restaurant openings are black tie; but it does make people feel more special when they must dress up for an occasion.

What words should you use to tell them what to wear? You see a lot of people trying to be creative, but a lot of times these descriptions—“Black tie fun” and “Creative casual”—raise more questions than they answer. And answering questions about what your guests should wear is the last thing on your list.

SMART MOVE

If your invitation specifies “cocktails” at your opening party, it lets your guests assume a certain level of spiffing themselves up is needed, while letting them interpret that in whatever elegant, artsy, or understated manner they choose.

For Jody’s opening party for Bleu in Greenwich, his team hand-delivered invitations with blue bottles of champagne. It let people know, “You are special. And we are creative and fun.” Driving around hand-delivering those bottles was a lot of work, but it was an effective tool for getting buzz started.

Asking people to RSVP is important, too. It lets guests know that this is not an anonymous event. It tells them they were specially chosen to come to this event.

Picking the Grand Opening Date

Stick with your opening date. As the opening date approaches, many owners panic and chicken out, thinking they need another week. But it’s like having a baby—it’s coming, and you can’t put it off.

The truth is, you’ll never be ready. At your opening party, something inevitably will go wrong. There may be a little piece of cardboard floating in someone’s glass of red wine. There’s wet paint somewhere, it’s just a matter of whether somebody touches it or not. You might run out of a favorite dish.

We almost always pick Thursday for the grand opening party. People love the notion of going out on a Thursday. It spices up their life, and it’s close enough to the weekend to garner you more attention. It starts the buzz that’s going to make your first weekend hot.

Check the local social calendar. You’ll want to make sure that your opening party will not be colliding with any major social or weekend events. You want the opening of your new restaurant to be the major social event of the weekend!

What Time?

Parties should be from 7 to 10 P.M. or 6 to 9 P.M., depending on the kind of place it is. If it’s a clubby place or a cool experience-driven place, hold the party from 7 to 10 P.M. It’s likely that the people who stop by for the later party will already have eaten something and taken the edge off their appetite. With a 6 to 9 P.M. party, people will arrive hungry. You’re not doing a sit-down dinner, but you’ll have to serve enough food to satisfy people. For many guests, this will be dinner.

POTENTIAL PITFALL

There’s no reason to send out a save the date notice for your opening party 30 days in advance. It’s not a trip to China. It’s a party, and you don’t want to raise expectations so high that people are disappointed. You can send out the invitations two weeks before the party.

Guest List

The opening party isn’t a party for your old friends or your investor’s old friends. The most important people you invite to this party are people who will spread the word about your restaurant. They’re ambassadors who meet and come into contact with people every day. They can be the guy who does hair color at the hottest salon in town. Or car dealers, real estate agents, health coaches, Pilates teachers, masseuses, and people who work in busy retail shops. They’re people who will tell others about this hot new place.

You also want to invite popular people to your party. Invite people everyone wants to see, talk to, and hang out with where they hang out. Do some research and find out who your local celebrities are, and invite them.

Jody once saw his opening of a restaurant in a chic hotel derail before his eyes. As the party began, a family wandered in, exhausted from a day of sightseeing. There they were—a middle-aged couple with three kids off the leash, and the detached parents collapsed onto the couch in the restaurant’s lounge. They were the first thing people entering the restaurant saw—and it confused them. Was this an upscale restaurant, a place for business people of the city? Or was this a family restaurant?

SMART MOVE

To help set the tone of the opening party, invite friends who you think represent the spirit of the restaurant and who will dress the way your ideal guests will dress. Have them stand near the entrance to provide newcomers with the right message.

It’s important to show who you built this restaurant for, and that it speaks to this particular audience. If you don’t give them any clues, they won’t know.

Party Rules

The party’s schedule must be tight. It needs a beginning, a middle, and an end. It needs a climax. Live entertainment is a great way to control the rhythm. The band then can give a gentle notice that it’s over.

The party must end for many important reasons. First, the party is meant to be a teaser. It’s meant to show your ambassadors your concept and get them excited enough to talk to others about it.

Instead of waiting for the party to take a turn for the worse, end the evening nicely and professionally, shaking hands and wrapping it up. Thank your guests for coming. Help them into their coats and hand them a gift bag on their way to the door. The ones still wanting a nightcap will exit onto the street, all dressed up. People will ask, “Where were you?” and they’ll be happy to tell them. This starts the buzz about your restaurant.

On Friday morning, when all your guests are back at work, they’ll love telling their office mates about being at your grand opening, how wonderful the appetizers were and the special cocktail they had. They’ll fuel interest in your restaurant, and people will start calling to make reservations that weekend.

Your guests become advocates for your restaurant. People love to share their discoveries, turning a friend on to a great new place to dine. This word-of-mouth approach keeps an insider buzz going around your restaurant.

This insider buzz is the best form of advertising today. Ads in newspapers aren’t very effective anymore. You can get some more buzz by inviting local luminaries and the press. But keep the mayor and his giant scissors away from your restaurant. That’s been done a million times. At the opening of Jody’s Red Lulu, the mayor posed with the go-go dancers. That’s a picture people notice and won’t forget.

Preparing for the Opening

Never decorate your restaurant for the party. That’s like saying, “I’m going to introduce you to someone, but she’ll be wearing a mask.” You want people to experience your restaurant’s concept and décor.

To prepare for the party, move some of the tables and chairs out of the way. You want people to understand that, for the most part, this is a cocktail party where people will stand, rather than a sit-down dinner.

This is the one night of your restaurant’s existence when you really get to control everything about what is served. This is your night to show off your food exactly the way you want it. The food and service will reflect that. In addition, passed appetizers keep some control on food consumption and behavior.

One thing you really don’t want to do is solicit opinions about the food. You already know it’s great. Sure, you might notice a tweak is needed here or there, and your well-trained team is on it with a word from you. However, you don’t want to show any sign of weakness to your guests.

Don’t give guests too much food—leave them wanting more. You want people making reservations for the weekend right then and there. Have your hostess ready to take those reservations. This party needs to build into the weekend, the following week, and beyond.

The “Dusty Shoe”

In the week between the friends and family dinner and the grand opening, we suggest you hold a “dusty shoe,” which is a dinner where you invite 8 to 12 influential food people. They can range from the local media, to representatives from influential publications, to the most-followed bloggers.

The purpose of this dinner is to give your invitees from the media a behind-the-scenes look at the restaurant and a chance to talk to the chef. It’s a way to open the minds of those who pride themselves on their opinions. Giving them a preview is a great way to show them respect. Have the chef visit the table and talk about how he or she has been trying to cook the dish a couple different ways. You and your chef should prepare yourself to be charming and humble to your guests.

The media and bloggers will want to impart their opinions and feel important. Just listen to them and smile. The point of this evening is to put your restaurant on their radar. They’ll do previews and profiles, and they’ll return to do reviews. The bloggers will post pictures and live tweets.

The Soft Opening

At the end of the grand opening party, you and your staff will feel a sense of euphoria. Everyone will be buzzed and excited. However, that all changes the following day. The party guests have made the restaurant come to life, and now they’re gone.

By now, you’ve been working on this restaurant for six months or more. When you open, open with confidence. Don’t open your restaurant with the mindset that it’s a work in progress.

We recommend opening with dinner service only. When your restaurant is new, there are still too many possible variables that could make your opening weeks rocky. If your FOH staff quits or your chef disappears, at least you have all day to regroup and create solutions.

If you start serving lunch, you’ll have to have your staff back in the restaurant prepping at 9 A.M., and they may not have finished cleaning up from the night before.

Go into lunch service with open eyes. Realize that for many restaurants, it’s not a moneymaker. Lunch is based on traffic. Serve lunch if you’re located downtown where there’s lots of business, shopping, and pedestrian traffic. Unless you’re doing serious volume at lunch, the only reason for opening for lunch is to drive awareness of your restaurant.

POTENTIAL PITFALL

Serving lunch is good for the customer but not so good for the restaurateur. It requires the same effort and expense as dinner but is sold at a much lower rate, sometimes half the price. Furthermore, wine and cocktails—both high-profit items—are rarely ordered at lunch. Customers come in and order a chicken Caesar salad and an iced tea. They want to eat in an hour because they have to get back to work.

It can be difficult to get people to walk a block off the main avenue during the week. People have to leave work, get in their car, and drive to have this lunch experience. Your restaurant has to really have a draw. However, you can sometimes secure a lunch crowd on a specific afternoon. For example, Jody worked with an upscale steakhouse that, after much debate, instituted a special Friday lunch—the day the hedge fund guys cut out early and went to spend their money on expensive wines, raw oysters, and dry-aged porterhouse steaks.

The restaurant became a destination, like a club. It even had brown leather chairs around a big stone fireplace and a great copper-topped bar.

Saturday lunch and brunches, which are now popping up, sound better than they are. On Saturdays, people have busy schedules with their kids. If they do go out, it’s going to be to a family-friendly place that likely serves pizza or burgers.

Next, you’ll add Sunday brunch. Brunch can be a moneymaker. The biggest mistake restaurants make with brunch is they schedule the Saturday night staff on it. This crew is dragging, tired, and resentful, and that affects the energy of the restaurant. Always try to put a fresh crew on your Sunday brunch.

Depending on your restaurant concept and the market, you’ll need to evaluate whether or not to open for lunch.

Service and Marketing

The early days of a restaurant can be bumpy in terms of the staff. They haven’t had enough time to find the rhythm and routine to give guests a smooth experience. It’s like learning to dance. It takes a little time and practice to stop counting and looking down at your feet.

Since staffing is integral to hospitality, we suggest you hire six shifts, so the same people work the same times on the same days. They’ll know the restaurant’s rhythm, tricks, and saves—how to rescue a moment from disaster. You want that, because one morning soon, you’re going to wake up and find yourself short-staffed.

Say you trained eight solid servers and four fringe servers, who are less experienced and will gain experience working for you. Your opening was delayed, the restaurant has gotten a slow start, and your manager turned out to be toxic. You’ve lost four of your best servers.

Now you have only four good servers and four fringe servers. In this situation, switch to zone serving (one waiter per 3 to 4 tables) rather than man-on-man. Split the dining room in half and have your best waiters as the only point of contact with the tables. Even though you’ve lost four of your best people, your guests haven’t been thrown into the abyss. Instead, each table is getting professional tableside service, and the four fringe servers are the runners.

You must have a back-up game plan to handle the unexpected situations that occur. Jody once had an entire kitchen crew, driving from Queens to Connecticut, have their van break down on the interstate. Luckily, he had other restaurants he could pull people from. That was the only reason he’d hired an entire kitchen of nonlocals. You should never hire a staff of people who live an hour away.

The point is that even when you have a brand-new staff and high hopes, you’ve got to be prepared for some not to show up. Restaurant people can be unreliable, so you need to have on-call staff who commit to being available if needed on a given day. They have to be available until 4:30 or 5 P.M., until you know everyone has shown up. They don’t get paid for being on call. It’s simply part of the job, but it always evens out. Someone will be on call for that staff member next time, and if he or she can’t make their shift, they’ll be covered.

Getting the Word Out

Should you hire a marketing firm to help you get the word out, and will a local or more prominent firm be more useful? Restaurant marketers are connected with and keep media lists of writers and bloggers who cover food and entertainment. When you hire a marketing company, think about what market you’re trying to reach. Really put some thought into who you hire.

Don’t hire a fancy big-name New York City marketing firm, hoping your little restaurant can compete with a big account such as an international hotel chain. They’ll put a young new hire on the job with little to no experience, who’ll end up targeting a wider market instead of your local one.

We suggest that new restaurateurs work with local marketing firms who’ll know all the players—the writers, editors, bloggers, and other restaurateurs. Local press drives your sales, while national press simply brings awareness.

When you hire your local restaurant marketer, you’re trading on her relationships. She arranges complimentary dinners at your restaurant, invites the press and bloggers, and acts as a liaison for you.

Handling Reviews

Don’t pay attention to reviews. Jody doesn’t read them; he has his staff read them and tell him if there’s something that really needs to be brought to his attention. Otherwise, he doesn’t want to hear about it.

Reviews can be painful. It’s like someone’s criticizing your kid. New restaurateurs can be victimized by bloggers and online sites like Yelp. It’s not just your customers who are leaving comments. Every restaurant owner knows if you fire a server, her boyfriend will launch a toxic internet campaign. Commenters don’t realize that people’s livelihoods are at stake.

Seasoned professional reviewers bring experience and knowledge to their role. Reviewers typically are educated and objective; however, they can get too hung up on the nuance of the food.

A new restaurateur needs conviction. Don’t respond to your online critics. Online comments have become a detriment to the industry. The reviewers have no credentials and their comments are anonymous. Everyone’s a critic. It often gets too personal, and the restaurant loses when it attempts to defend itself.

Understanding Online Reviews

Linguistics professor Dan Jurafsky and colleagues conducted a revealing study of online restaurant reviews. They studied 900,000 Yelp reviews and discovered that people who write negative reviews often tell a story of trauma, one of being victimized at the hands of the restaurant and its employees.

When people write reviews of expensive places, they tend to use big words to show how well educated they are. People writing positive reviews about expensive restaurants tend to describe the sensory pleasures of dining, using words like “lust” and “orgasmic.” They found that desserts are especially sexy, and that women wrote more positive remarks about desserts.

When people write reviews of less-expensive places, they’re more likely to use vague language. Positive reviews are often framed as cravings or addictions, with drug references. Reviews of less-expensive places tended to mention cravings for fat, carbs, and chocolate rather than Brussels sprouts.

The study also found that online reviews are a vehicle for self-expression, whether as a victim, a sexy gourmand, or a chocolate addict.

Managing Online Reviews

You should coach your staff to be cognizant of the fact it’s just dinner, and to keep things in perspective. You aren’t changing your guests’ lives; you’re simply adding a moment to their lives. Ask your staff to consider this: did you really cause that much grief to this person’s life that they rushed home and instead of walking the dog, they’re banging out their negative emotions in an Urban Spoon review? What went so wrong as to bring this wrath? Usually, it’s a pretty small thing such as the candle being unlit at their table or the owner said hello to the people at the next table but not to them.

If something goes wrong during an evening, your staff should be trained to correct it before the guest hits the parking lot—even if that means walking them to a taxi.

There are hundreds of things that can go wrong in a single night from the car valet being slow to the restroom paper towels running low. Now add whatever personal social dynamic exists among the diners, plus 8 ounces of alcohol, and shake.

There are so many moving parts in an organic experience. It leaves many opportunities for disappointment. But as long as your staff are genuine, honest, and make an effort to correct an issue then and there, there shouldn’t be a toxic review. However, today anything goes.

Here’s how your staff should deal with difficult customers:

• Most people want to be heard, so be patient, listen, and empathize with them.
• Permit guests to express themselves.
• Don’t challenge guests or defend yourself to them.
• Recognize and give acknowledgment to their grievances.
• Explain to the guests that you understand their issue.
• Tell them how you will correct this issue.

Repeating the complainers’ words back to them can help make them feel listened to: “I understand the foie gras was frozen in the center.”

Offer to fix it: “May I bring you another?” It’s understandable that after a taste of raw foie gras, the guest might not want another. Offer another appetizer in lieu at no charge.

Notice what’s not on that list: apologizing. Apologizing weakens the restaurant, and it empowers the poison pen.

Sometimes your restaurant’s concept won’t set well with patrons because it’s outside the box. Here are a couple of examples of how to handle such a complaint:

Scenario One:

Customer: “The music’s too loud.”

Manager: “Yes, it’s—”

Customer: “What?”

Manager: (leans in, smiles, and speaks clearly) “Yes, this table is near a speaker. Let me see if I can relocate you to a quieter spot …”

or

Manager: “Yes, the place gets jumping about this hour … I know it can be a bit much, but permit me to give you my card. Next time, call me first and I’ll arrange a table out of the fray. The dining room stays rather quiet until around 9:00 each night, so if you’re looking for a great spot before the movie, you’ll find it less noisy.”

Scenario Two:

Guest: “It’s too dark.”

Server (smiling): “Ah yes, sometimes I go to dinner with my husband and we can’t read the menu because the mood lighting can be too low. I’ll be right back.”

(Server returns with several candles on a tray and places them on the table in front of the customer.)

Server: “That should work better, or perhaps if you prefer, I can move you to a brighter spot, although you’re sitting in our most requested cozy booth.”

Remember, don’t apologize and don’t relent. If you lower the music or raise the lights at the request of a single guest, you’ve weakened your position and credibility. You think you’ve given the guest what they wanted, but you really just showed them how weak you are.

Online Presence

Your webpage, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest are all good mediums for getting out the news about your restaurant. Remember to make use of visuals. A picture of a luscious-looking dish will be more enticing than a thousand descriptive words. But posting to these sites in a consistent and meaningful manner is often more than one restaurant owner can fit into a day, along with everything else. You must remember that social media contributes to word of mouth about your restaurant, so it’s worth investing the time.

Adding to your operating costs by hiring someone to update these regularly isn’t in the budget for many beginners. Your youthful staff, however, is a great resource for utilizing the latest technology and posting luscious promotional food pictures on social media.

The Least You Need to Know

• Your opening party is very important—it’s the beginning of your marketing blitz.
• The opening party should send a message about your concept and your target audience.
• Invite some press and bloggers to a dinner to get some positive buzz out about your restaurant.
• Be prepared for glitches in the opening days so unexpected incidents don’t affect your hospitality and service.