Ah, yes, the capricious foodie: that enigmatic character who can turn 100 people into loyal patrons with a glowing mention of your restaurant at every dinner party – or become the bane of your existence with nasty reviews on sites like Yelp or a sarcastic blog post. Especially in competitive …
Read More »A Review Of Klick Kitchen By Chef Forfeng
The following is a great review of Klick Kitchen by an industry insider with a lot more personal experience in the food service industry than I have. I came across Klick Kitchen last year and while the concept was intriguing, the price at the time was not. Since then they …
Read More »How To Rock Your Restaurant Marketing Efforts
A common misconception in the food service business is that booking live music takes more time and effort than it’s worth. The process of finding bands, paying them, and providing enough space for them to perform can be a distraction at best and a downright money loser at worst, or …
Read More »Instructables: The World’s First Open Source Restaurant
Instructables.com is an “open source” website that allows people to post and view instructional videos on just about any topic you can think of. The website is completely free and part of a larger phenomenon on the internet based around Creative Commons licensing – the liberalization of copyrights in order …
Read More »Need To Reach Your Customers? How About Communal Delivery?
If you’re a regular reader of The Back Burner, then you know how I feel about diversifying your revenue stream so that when diner’s spending habits change, you have multiple sources of income for your business. As dining room visits declined last year, more and more restaurants started looking for …
Read More »A.I.S.: The Ultimate Social Media ROI tool for Independent Restaurants
Here we are once again, the cacophony roared up after the SuperBowl over the legitimacy of ROI in social media whether it’s measurable, valid, does anything or whether it’s just a bunch of numbers the next “expert” throws up to validate his job/salary/cost. The roar seems to be mainly coming …
Read More »Community Based Restaurant Marketing: Get Some Real Bang For Your Buck
Fine dining restaurants in Denver, CO are pooling their resources this weekend to kick off Denver Restaurant Week, an annual event that allows diners to sample the city’s fine cuisine over the course of a week for an incredible price: $52.80 for two. Tons of restaurants are participating in the …
Read More »Restaurant Marketing: The Future Is Now
Foursquare is a location-based application for mobile devices that allows users to discover and rate local businesses and then share those discoveries with their social network. Since I wrote about Foursquare last year, the company has really started to take off, landing promotional deals with Bravo, Warner Bros., and HBO. …
Read More »Text Message Ordering: Why Your Customers Already Love It
One of the biggest shifts in customer behavior over the past few years has been the preference for take-out food. All the major national chains (Applebee’s, Chili’s, etc. etc.) have added drive-up service for their customers. And I’ve written on this blog about taking your restaurant’s food out, whether it …
Read More »How To Take Restaurant Marketing Underground
Since last August, when I first posted about the blossoming underground fine dining scene in San Francisco, the phenomenon has grown exponentially and started spreading up and down the west coast. From Vancouver to L.A., chefs are ditching the kitchens of established restaurants and setting off on their own, and …
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