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Restaurant PR Press Releases
| For Immediate Release: 2/10/2004 |
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| The Front Burner |
| Food Arts |
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New York, NY -
January/February 2004
Do-it-yourself PR-New York City- The restaurant- call it Giovanni’s-is in Bayside, or Buffalo, or Baton Rouge. When it opened, it got 3 stars in the local paper, but that was five years ago. The owner-call him John- is busy, maybe more so in December and less in January but he makes a living. Recently he thought of hiring a public relations firm to bring in new customers but found that local marketing people didn’t know the hospitality business and big-city firms charged big-city prices
Now he has another choice. It’s called Restaurant PR (with the motto “Get Busy”), and it teaches people in the foodservice industry how to manage their own public relations.
“There are 900,00 independent restaurants in this country,” says founder Stephanie Crane of SCO Communications. “Did you even wonder why you read about only 200 of them? It is because they are the ones that can afford to hire publicists. We want to change that.”
Crane is a public relations pro who has working in New York City since 1983, with clients such as La Caravelle, Picholine, Oceana, Molyvos, The Plaza Hotel, Gourmet magazine, and Julia Child. Her partner in the new venture is Stephanie Lasure, who ran a catering company and marketing business in Washington D.C. Together, they know the business. What’s more, they promise they can teach it to you, me, and John.
They do it with a three-part program. The first, and more important, is a 200 page workbook that shows how to define a mission statement, design a public relations plan, construct a media kit, write a press release, and develop relationships with local and national media.
The second part is the “virtual publicist,” a service offering professional online and toll-free phone support 24-hours a day. And the third is a media list that is customized for individual customers, a constantly updated roster of local and national media contacts in food, beverage, travel and lifestyle publications. John in Buffalo will get a different list than his brother in Bayside.
But public relations is much more than putting together a press kit, says Crane. Restaurant PR can help you deal with a crisis: what will you say when a waiter spills red wine on a client’s dress or, worse, when a customer gets sick after eating your mussels? It can suggest new areas of exposure: do you have something worth saying on the Op Ed page of your local paper? Could a TV news segment be shot at your place? It tells how to make your recipes media-friendly but writing them in tablespoons and cups, rather than ounces and pounds, and in servings for six, not 200. And it tells how to create and take part in food-based community events, like the Taste of Bayside, or Buffalo, or Baton Rouge.
The workbook costs $495 and includes 30 free minutes with the Virtual Publicist (after that, the charge is $1 a minute). The media lists costs $75 to set up with a small additional charge for each contact. Not cheap, but nowhere near the cost of a private publicists. To learn more, call (888) 888-9609 or visit www.restaurantpr.com.
-Irene Sax
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