David Katz is an amazingly outspoken chef in Philadelphia. His Twitter feed is prodigious and showcases his quick, sharp wit and hits the bullseye of the chef’s workaday reality. (He also makes a mean fried chicken.)

As usual, David nailed it in an answer to a question we recently asked our Spoonfeed members about what makes a city a great culinary destination. Here, in his own words:

“I actually think what plays a huge role in what constitutes a great restaurant city are the writers. In cities where the writers are weak and highlight the restaurants based on popularity and go with the trends, that’s not good. What people in cities know about restaurants in other cities is what they read. So, if the writers aren’t really good that city won’t shine as bright. The writers set the tone. I wish that weren’t the way, but it is.

Some (maybe all, who knows?) cities are run by 1 maybe 2 big PR firms as well and that also has a huge amount to do with what cities are considered great, good, or bad. Again sad, but true. It’s all a big popularity contest…sad, BUT true. We in Philly have 2 guys that get crazy amounts of press and there are some great restaurants here that are way too far under the radar. Philly should be considered stronger if a bunch of the nationally unknowns would break out and get seen/appreciated.”

Wow. If he doesn’t nail what most chefs think but few are willing to say.

So, I ask you — what would happen if the chefs were the writers? What would happen if chefs, mixologists and sommeliers had a platform to share what they think on a given topic?

You’d have to reach out to the working chefs — the ones who make up the backbone of a city’s culinary scene. Not just the window dressing ones. You’d have to include the mixologists who hoist a French shaker as often as they tip back a tumbler at a friend’s bar. You’d want to include the legions of sommeliers who taste in study groups more than they fly around to luxury wine regions to schmooze with rich collectors.

But really, what would happen if those all chefs, mixologists and sommeliers — both marquee names and unknown talents — had an equal voice? An equal chance to be heard.  What if the chefs joined the journalists in the culinary discourse and started writing their own stories? What if they, too, had a platform to share their views, their opinions and their ideas?

Well, we’re about to find out.

Today, Restaurant Intelligence Agency moves out of BETA, and while I am going to cover a lot of the changes on this blog in coming weeks, it seems fitting to start with the relaunch of Soapbox — our online magazine shouting out chefs, mixologists and sommeliers in their own words. Our members provide the puzzle pieces, and Soapbox connects them.

With the relaunch, Soapbox now features daily stories curated from our members’ content.  Every day, we’ll cover a new topic of interest to chefs — and hopefully to diners as well. Today, we’re writing about the weather and how it’s impacting menus across the country. So, we’re taking a lineup of chef answers to a question about the weather and weaving them into a story.

Tomorrow, we’re investigating restaurant reconcepting, through the eyes of those in the throes of overhauling their baby. Then, we celebrate maple season and a burgeoning culinary destination. And that’s just this week.

And this is the kicker — seriously, you might want to sit down right about now —  anyone working at a chef-driven restaurant anywhere in the country can be a part of those stories each day — for free.

Chefs, sous chefs, bread bakers, pastry chefs, mixologists, sommeliers, beer dudes and gals, and even those behind-the-scenes owners who never seem to get enough kudos for all their hard work — everyone can be included in any story, every day.

To be a part of Soapbox, all you have to do is work in a chef-driven restaurant, sign up and answer a question or two each day.

You don’t have to be trendy to be included — but you do have to be thoughtful when you answer.

You don’t have to be new — but your ideas should be fresh.

And you’ll no longer be that guy no one is writing about — as long as you have something to say.

Because in our minds, David’s right. Until now, it has been a bit of a popularity contest when it comes to who gets written about and who gets left out. And we know there are a lot more chefs, mixologists and sommeliers out there that deserve to be included in an exciting national outlet — and companion national newsletter.

So, David, we’re glad to see you as our lead in today’s story. Now, gather up your chef friends, the mixologists who shake your martinis, and the sommeliers you respect most, and …

Let’s get busy making our own reality.

Join here. (Join now.)

Yesterday, resident Grub Streeter and Sky Full of Baconer Mike Gebert contributed a guest post on how to get PR (media coverage). Since he was writing that post for publicists and I write for chefs, I thought I would translate it a bit for you and add in a few new points as well.

1) Be an interesting chef and do something interesting.
The killer line in this point is the following. And dammit, read it slowly and let it sink in:

But I guarantee you there are chefs out there doing interesting things who arenʼt telling me or anybody about it.

I want to point this out particularly because, and I mean this, not a day goes by that a chef doesn’t tell me they’re “gonna just take the opportunities that come their way,” they “don’t have time for marketing cause they’re all busy cooking,” or “so what, there are people who get a lot of press and don’t spend time on it.”

To the first, I think: Why don’t you admit you are lazy and/or scared?
To the second, I hint: How are you gonna feel in a year when you didn’t reach your goals?
To the third, I ask: How the hell is that line of thinking helping you?

Because at the end of the day, you need to tell the press what is going on for them to know what is going on. And if you want press — if that is your goal — then actually doing the work of telling them about your interesting stuff is as important as whatever interesting stuff you are doing.

(Note to the chef who insists he is a cook and not a marketer: If you get enough press to stay happy and keep your restaurant busy, hats off. If you don’t, well, I am writing this post for you.)

There are “free” ways of doing it. Hint: I don’t mean Facebook, yo, just posting something doesn’t mean it is reaching people. You have to put it in their hands, not just toss it in the air like confetti and hope it lands on the right person.

There are cheap ways of doing it. Yes, that’s a plug for Spoonfeed. If you are a chef and you haven’t checked it out, shame on you, because it is free to join and cheap to upgrade. And it works.

And there are spendy ways of doing it. Break out the checkbook if you need to hire someone, be it in-house, social media or publicist.

But if press is your goal, you can’t just sit around and assume people are gonna discover what you are doing.

2) Actually tell me about it.
I thought it was interesting that Mike reiterated his first point in his second point. In his post, the two points had different angles but to me, they are saying the same thing. And he was right to post it twice because it is the single most reliable indicator of marketing success.

You need to get the word out, on more than just Twitter and Facebook, to reach the people you need to reach to get discovered/be busy. Most of you aren’t telling the media — or really anyone of consequence — what you are doing.

And that includes chefs with publicists. Because precious few publicists are actually actively sharing what their clients are doing. Remember, Mike wrote his post for publicists — and he felt it necessary to basically say the same thing two times. Wow.

Here’s what you need to know: What you are doing starts with your menu — and how and why you put together your dishes. A list of ingredients and a photo amounts to food p0rn. It is fun to look at but isn’t going to do much in terms of press or diner activity. You need to tell the story behind the dish to get results.

There are precious few chefs who are successfully telling people about their food. No surprise, Matthias Merges of Yusho-Chicago is blazing that trail. (He taught legions of chefs how to cook at Charlie Trotter’s, no surprise he’ll be teaching legions of chefs/owners how to own a restaurant properly now that he has Yusho.)

3) Think hard about that exclusive.
I pretty much gave up on exclusives years ago. They make one person happy, sure, but they make everyone else scramble frantically to catch up. And well, those people don’t end up liking you so much. It is human nature. You like the people who help you out. And you do favors for them later.

But I would make one add-on thought to Mike’s suggestion: Make sure you have your own outlet for telling your news. Since I wrote about that here, I won’t go over it again. But do take a few moments to read that post if you are opening, reconcepting or you’ve been in business a while and are starting to realize that you need to connect with customers yourself and not just rely on the press to tell your story.

4) Reinvent the press release.
What Mike is pointing out here is something you, the chef, should find comforting — journalists don’t want fancy writing from you, they want facts. So, even if English is a second language, you can communicate to media what they need. So, there should be no reason for you to feel like you can’t send out a press release, say for your Easter Brunch. (In fact, you should be doing that, sending out Easter brunch info now if you are offering it.)

This is the thing, though: Most of you don’t seem to want to add in all the facts. There’s always “reasons” for this. None of them actually matter to anyone but you. The media need all the facts to write about you.

So, once more, with feeling:

• Name of event space/restaurant, address, phone, email, website
• Media contact name, phone, email
• Name of event/promotion/etc.
• Date, time of event (check it three times)
• MENU, WITH PRICES (if you don’t have the menu and price yet, that’s fine, that’s your choice, but the media likely won’t cover you — that’s their choice)
• Cost/what’s included/how to make reservations, if needed
• Any restrictions

Every time you send out a release without this information, you are begging the media to mark your email as spam and never see it again. It won’t even get to their inbox, no matter how much you do better next time.

And here I’ll add:

5) Send material in a timely manner.
I can’t even begin to imagine what you would do if your fish purveyor walked in just as service was starting with the evening’s orders. I mean, did he really think you were standing around ready to drop everything when he finally got around to getting you what you needed to do your job? You’d fire his ass.

That’s what it feels like when chefs send stuff at the last possible minute to journalists. And guess what, they have their own way of firing your ass — they ignore your news. So, here’s a guideline for you:

• Glossy national magazines work 6-12 months ahead
• Glossy local monthly magazines work 4-6 months ahead, minimum
• Weekly print magazines work 4-6 weeks ahead, minimum
• Daily newspapers work 3-4 weeks ahead, minimum
• Hourly blogs work 3-4 days ahead, minimum

Sure, anyone can dump something on their blog day-of. But are you really going for your stuff getting “dumped?” Or ignored?

I know, I know, you can’t possibly create a menu for your Easter brunch service three weeks ahead. Fine, it’s your choice. Because by not creating your menu in a timely manner you are simply exercising your right to not get included in the Easter roundup article. Bully for you.

By the way, you are writing your Easter menu now, right?

6) Steve Dolinsky commented on the post with a great point: Be familiar with the work of the person to whom you are pitching a story.

In case you didn’t see that comment, I am excerpting it here:

I concur with Mike on all of the above, and would add one more: if you’re going to pitch an idea for coverage be sure to have at least taken a cursory look at the person’s blog, TV segment, previous articles, etc., so you’re at least vaguely familiar with the format. Had the publicist even taken two seconds to look at my previous “Beer of the Week” feature, she would have seen that it’s actually Michael Roper from The Hopleaf – not me – in the video, and therefore, it probably would have made more sense to pitch him, rather than me. It happens about once a week, where someone will pitch me a “Hungry Hound” segment, and yet they clearly haven’t taken the time to look at the last two or three pieces I’ve done. I think the more people can familiarize themselves with the publication/author’s work, the better chance they’ll have of crafting an interesting pitch.

Now, obviously, he was writing that for the publicists out there. The ones who don’t know how to pitch the media — and yet are getting paid thousands of dollars a month to pitch the media on a restaurant’s behalf.

I just thought, well, you might want to think about that.

Because while I am not suggesting this is all publicists — many are awesome — I just have to wonder if the publicist he is talking about is yours.

Right? Scary. Wow.

7) Theresa Carter, The Local Tourist, also added a point about pictures.

These are spot-on, and work for every industry. I’m one of those publications that requires a photo with each post. If I have to reply to an email and then wait for an image I’m more likely to say “next” than post it when it does arrive. Frankly, with the number that come in by the time I get that photo I’ve either a) forgotten about it or b) chosen another story to write! My favorite PR firms, and therefore the ones whose clients get more press from me, make my job easier. Of course, that’s all filtered by what my audience wants to know, but if you send me the info in a format I can scan quickly and with visuals to enhance that info it’s much more likely to be included.

Note here that Theresa has flat-out stated that if she doesn’t get a picture with the original email, she is likely to just move on. She doesn’t say anything about how tasty your food looks or how creative she knows you are. No pic, likely no dice.

That means that if you want coverage from certain outlets and don’t send a picture, likely you will not get coverage. Harsh? Maybe. Honest? Yes.

And don’t think this is just Theresa. And don’t think it is just about pictures.

I’ve seen journalists who toss out anything and everything that doesn’t have the relevant information in the original email because they are writing the story at 11 p.m. at night and know they can’t get anyone on the phone and their goal is to get the story done, not worry about you getting coverage.

This is the reality. So if you are going to spend time on “marketing” and “PR,” you should at least make sure it is time that is going to net some results other than being tossed in the garbage.

If you aren’t going to attend to the details, the marketing version of salting your food, then don’t even spend the time doing it. Just get back in the kitchen and cook. You can do that, you know. It is your choice.

That’s right, getting press, really, is all about the choices you make each day. It is as simple as that.

 Mike Gebert, resident Grub Streeter and Sky Full of Baconeer, wrote up a guest post for today. Since taking over Grub Street Chicago, he has been letting PR people know how to get him to cover their clients. He decided it was time to tell everybody.

A few weeks ago, we brought back automatic distribution of press releases through RIA. We call it Newsfeed, since, technically, they aren’t always “official press releases” crafted by publicists. In fact, often, our newsfeed items are written up and posted by restaurants themselves. Although it’s a great boon to publicists who want more reach for their releases as well as a place to host them online.

This is a more sophisticated and far-reaching system than our old RIA website — and the biggest difference between then and now is that now — the restaurants are creating their own news.

We just make sure it’s tickety-boo with all the right info and the proper supporting material and then — boom — blast it out to our media list as a “standalone press release from the restaurant.”

It’s pretty exciting because the distribution is part of a restaurant’s membership, making it the cheapest way to get press information into the hands of food journalists.

But giving this powerful tool to our members also means we have to help them learn what is appropriate to send and what isn’t, so they aren’t blasting out stuff that, for all intents and purposes, is thrilling to the member but garbage to the journalist.

What’s news, or more importantly, what’s newsworthy enough to interest the media enough to write about you? I could go on for days, but we’ve written up a brief synopsis to get you started. If you need us to flesh this out, let me know and we will. And if you are a member of Spoonfeed, remember you can send the news item to me ahead of time for review, which one fine chef did this morning and got some nice tips for crafting her message a bit more (she’ll be posting later today so I’ll link to it when she does.)

What Makes News

First off, news is about the new. To the luxury publication, it is new expensive, rare, and fashionable things. To the mommy blogger, news is about new tools that allow for shortcuts in the kitchen. To the restaurant critic, it is about new restaurants opening, major (and we mean major, not just new chairs and sconces) overhauls, and new chefs in the kitchen.

That said, news is sometimes not about the new, but about the seasonal/annual. To the weekly newspaper, that can be a round-up of Valentine’s Day offerings. To the TV producer, that can mean tips and hints for Thanksgiving turkey. To the foodie blogger, that can mean writing about a meal that featured the first soft-shells of the season.

More often than not these days, news is about the unusual or extraordinary. So, the most expensive cocktail ever sold is gonna get covered, probably a lot. A great example of that was the first chef to cook with Asian carp when they were threatening to infest. In newspaper terms, it is referred to as a “man bites dog” story, instead of the un-newsworthy “dog bites man” story.

Understanding Audience

One thing to understand is the media’s audience. Aside from keeping in mind that the audience for a financial publication is likely more interested in a business story than a recipe, audience size has a lot to do with what qualifies as newsworthy enough to write about.

Larger audiences mean broader appeal, and thus the threshold for what constitutes news is greater. Think about it; what may interest the readers of a small-town newspaper — things like wine dinners and new brunch service — may not necessarily grab the attention of a national one that is more interested in overall trends and big-time chefs. Aside from providing you a cue to what you should be sending journalists, it also tells you what you should be investing in, PR-wise.

By that I mean that paying a PR firm to try and get you national stories about menu changes and your new brunch is likely not going to pay off in the end. Which is why so many chefs get frustrated with their publicists. It isn’t about the publicist’s work; most of the time, it is about the chef’s expectations.

Newsworthiness is also affected by redundancy. A subject may be significant, unusual, and extraordinary to you, but the audience may only be marginally — if at all — interested because they’ve read about it before. At RIA, the go-to subject to explain this is sake cocktails. They’ve been around, been written about, we’ve all had them at one time or another, but every year or so, a restaurant calls us and wonders if they should send a release to the media because they just invented sake cocktails — because, well, from their perspective, they did invent their own version.

This is important, that is why it is in bold: If it is new to the restaurant, but the topic has already been covered before in the media, the media is unlikely to cover it again.

That is, unless there is something extraordinarily new to report, like, in the case of sake cocktails, they are set on fire or delivered to the customer via sumo wrestler or something equally whack.

(This is an unfortunate but true fact of media: They like that which is out there, whether you think it has integrity or not. And while we may not agree with it, understanding that fact has value so you can either work it to your advantage or stop spending time or money trying to get coverage for something that won’t get journalists’ attention.)

What Makes News

Your Menu Makes News

It will come as no surprise to anyone that I believe the first step in getting your news out there is figuring out what is going on in the restaurant already that you can talk about. To me, that begins with the menus.

Any chef who changes his menu regularly should be sending out an updated menu with a few words of background for each new dish whenever the menu changes significantly. Because guess what: you are a restaurant and the media need to know what you are cooking, what drinks you’re offering and what’s on your wine list.

Sending out your new menu, with solid, clear but not flowery descriptions of new menu items, on the day that new menu launches, is a baseline you need to establish first and foremost. (Note bold type and italics! That must be important, too!)

If you aren’t changing your menu enough to distribute it to the media as “significantly new,” you might want to rethink your desire to drive marketing with media relations because it means the food you are making isn’t cutting edge. It may be delicious, but no one is going to write about it in great detail. So rather than paying someone to try and get someone to write about it, invest your money elsewhere.

Your Events Make News

The next place to look for news is in your events. Be they holiday specials, wine dinners or cooking classes, these activities are things the media want to know about. I’ve written a few times about what goes in those event releases, but suffice it to say that you should include all the information the media needs to write about the event in the release.

And you should send it to them in advance of the event, since they aren’t sitting around waiting for your release so they can drop everything and get it out there at a moment’s notice. Two weeks is a minimum. Four or six is more like it if you want to get on TV.

And if that is too far in advance for you to get a menu, pricing, hours and the like together, then know that means you are making the decision to forgo press coverage. It doesn’t mean the journalist should feel sorry for you and write about your event anyway, even though the information isn’t complete. It means you are making a decision that impacts the amount of coverage you will get. If you are OK with that, great. If you aren’t, do something about it.

ProTip: When sending out your press information Do. Not. Just. Send. An. Attachment.

Restaurants often want to do it because it is easy and they’re busy. But guess what, it’s sorta the equivalent of you walking over to McDonald’s and picking up a Happy Meal, then plating it, tossing on a garnish, and serving it to a customer. I’m not kidding, it feels that way to the journalist. Take a few minutes and transcribe the information from your PDF to the news releases. It is an exercise that will pay off.

I should add here that publicists who simply send attachments with an email that says “here” should be shot at dawn. And publicists who send a link to some other publication’s write-up of the story instead of writing their own release should be publicly humiliated before being shot at dawn. By me.

ProTip: Find out how your PR firm is distributing your information to media.

Other News

There are lots of other bits of information that can be news: celebrity sigtings, a new kids’ program, significant staff changes, changes in your hours, etc.  And learning which are significant and which are not can be hard for even publicists to suss out.

On RIA, we help our members understand what makes for good news to share by jurying their press releases before they are sent out to the media. If you have a publicist, you should be looking to them for counsel and guidance instead of fighting with them to do things your way and on your schedule.

But if you started by just getting your menu out and getting your event information out in a timely manner, you would likely, if you are one of the 99.999% of restaurants out there that don’t do those things, end up kickstarting your media coverage by a factor of a lot. So, start there, see how it goes, and keep following this blog for more tips on how to take the next step.

Resources

• When you send stuff to media, they pay attention to typos. I actually have one journalist friend who nearly flies into a rage every time she sees someone using an apostrophe wrong. Whether you think it is irrational or not, it’s the way it is and you need to heed the warning. Here is a blog post on how to be your own editor.
• You may not be able to write but I do know you can cook. Maybe you should consider announcing your new menu items in a video press release. The possibilities here are kinda awesome, if you don’t have a big ego that would get in the way. Remember: this announcement needs actual information so don’t go thinking this is carte blanche to set moody pictures of your food to music and call it a day. Think to yourself: is what I am going to do actually useful to a journalist? If it is, great; if it is just cool, junk it, it is crap.

Couple things you should know this week:

Facebook Timelineageddon

Facebook Timeline is coming for your business and you won’t be able to just ignore it, no matter how much you try.  I’ve posted about it before and will be posting an update as it rolls out, but in the meantime thought you might like to read this rundown.

Whitney Houston’s Cautionary Tale

You know, when you work in the restaurant industry, you can’t follow the meteoric rise and long slow decline of a superstar talent and not worry. It touches us all.

And we can all — sober or not — learn from Whitney Houston’s life and untimely death.

A Tale of Two Restaurants 

Or real-life proof that an old French proverb is true! “Good advice is often annoying, bad advice never.”

My week began with a restaurant I’ve been bugging for some time to start participating in their own success. They got frustrated (insert above proverb here) and decided that they are going to leave their marketing success to chance.

My week ended with a restaurant who has been leaving their marketing success to chance. Although they are newish, they are noticeably unbusy and have seen the error of their ways. I met with them to help them start participating in their own success.

I thought that was really interesting and possibly something you could learn from, dear reader.

It’s odd to think that my family’s somewhat offbeat job histories gives me a leg up on figuring out the Next reservation policy. But it does.

My brother, before he retired, was CLO of a gaming company (casinos, not computers) and I, for a time, worked in opera. And if you are wont to speculate on the strategy Nick Kokonas is alluding to in his declaration that, at the nexis of the Tulip Mania that is Next ticketing, there is a strategy — those two seemingly incongruous professions provide some fascinating clues.

First, gaming — because the Next ticketing system begins with casino theory.

The key to running a profitable casino is understanding Pavlovian conditioning. In a casino situation, you need to balance sustained hope with retained earnings, all the while training people to overcome their better judgment and believe in the impossible.

This is accomplished at the slots.

Set your slots too loose, you give too much cash away. Set them too tight, people give up hope. It is a numbers game — an algorithm — that casinos tweak endlessly to make sure they remain profitable enough for their CLO to retire at 40.

Because casinos understand that if they can condition gamblers properly at the slots, they’ll be driving more business into the casino for more high-stakes games.

Which is important to understand if you want to understand why Facebook factors so heavily into the Next ticketing phenomenon.

The Next Facebook Page is like the slot machines in a casino — front and center, loud and public, punctuated by excited shrieks of people winning out of the blue. The whole thing, whether Kokonas intended it or not, is set up to ensure people don’t give up hope. He is balancing sustained hope with retained mystique, and training people to quickly and decidedly change their fundamental understanding of restaurant reservations and get swooped up in the hysteria.

Now, it is hard for some — let’s call them Next Ticketing System (NTS) haters — to embrace the subscription ticketing sales at all, let alone to fathom that embedded into the curiously vexing Next reservation system isn’t democracy or chance, but favoritism.

Because, really, they’re picking people who get tickets! How unAmerican!

But these NTS haters got it all wrong. We should all be embracing this experiment because it is one of the reasons Next, probably even more than Alinea, will be such an industry-impacting restaurant.

Which is where the opera comes in.

OK, ready?

Back in the day, I worked as Sales Manager at Lyric Opera of Chicago. And it just so happened that when I worked there, I worked in the same department as the guy who literally invented subscription ticket sales.

Danny invented subscription sales because he recognized that art needs to be pre-purchased to thrive, evolve and grow. That’s because if given the chance, the public would prefer to just wait and buy tickets to the blockbusters after the reviews hit.

Now, a lot of people are stopping here. They’re thinking that because restaurants are so impacted by blockbusteriness and can be essentially killed if the reviews are horrid (cue: ticking clock), maybe all of them should give up reservations and adopt ticket sales to ensure more success even if the reviews are pretty bad. (Side note: why does every NYC restaurant fail in Chicago?)

But those people are forgetting one key point of differentiation between a regular old restaurant and Next: fixed length of run.

Next is not building a restaurant once, opening the doors and then developing a business that grows incrementally over time, adjusting to customers and seasons and demand.  They don’t have an unlimited run, one where diners can choose to dine there any old time they feel like it. Who’d buy tickets ahead of time when you can just walk in anytime?

They are, in essence, mounting productions. One after another, each theme independent from the last and none running long enough to boomerang off good reviews or build incremental business over time from word-of-mouth.

(Which is why I find it so curious when people decry that Next is Not Art! It may not be performance art as you know it, but neither is anything Karen Finley did when you first hear of her. That shit’s gotta sink in. Literally.)

Let me break it down:

Each one of Next’s themes is a production for which they have to sell every seat — from beginning to end, curtain up to curtain down — in order to maximize the fixed profit potential of the run.

Because, just like in the theater world, Next has a fixed inventory of seats for “run of show.” And that fixed seat inventory represents the total potential revenue for the show.

That’s it. All the money you can possibly make on that production before the fat lady sings.

So, each empty seat is, basically, an unrecoverable sunk cost. Its loss is a direct hit to the the total profit potential of the production.

Which completely obliterates the idea that the Next Ticketing System is going to impact restaurants as a methodology for connecting patrons and restaurants. The theories don’t translate.

But it’s also the foundation for understanding just how the Next Ticketing System is going to change restaurants forever.

Because Next is selling subscriptions.

With subscriptions, they will be able to innovate more — like the most successful progressively aggressive arts organizations do. Like Lyric did back when Ardis Krainik was helming.

With a subscription you are able to build in one blockbuster show that can pull the whole season along for the ride. Subscriptions, in essence, are the bedrock for artistic innovation. Because the stuff people don’t care so much about seeing is supported by the stuff people would do anything to see.

Kyoto — um, okay, if you got tickets for this weekend, I’m free, I guess.

El Bulli — I’ll trade you my baby for a seat!

Next, with its subscriptions, is going to fund the kind of innovation that can change the restaurant world.

Think of it. With subscriptions, anchored by a blockbuster, they can be so creative that Childhood would end up seeming like some boring old memory. That was Achatz’ third idea. You don’t think for a second it was the horizon of his creativity. He’s just getting started.

And, I should add, all creativity is being done at a breakneck pace that requires a Herculean amount of discipline. Discipline hitting the industry at the very moment when it seemed every young culinarian thought working in a kitchen looked like some TV show.

In time, we can only hope that young cooks think kitchen godism is reached by pulling a shift after actually running a marathon instead of making chili at a rodeo.

I’m sorry, I think that’s a good thing.

And so, all you Next Ticketing haters, you got it all wrong.

You need to embrace the insanity.

Go push refresh furiously (or don’t actually, Kokonas said that’ll get you banished like Felendren). Go shout out on Facebook and Twitter. Sign up to be number fifty trillion in line. Support their last-minute sales, knowing each sold seat is going to support more creative derring-do.

Because art isn’t about itself, really, it is about how it changes its environment. And I’d lay money that what’s going on at Next is going to change restaurants forever.

Getting media can be as much about answering a question properly as it can be about having awesome food. So, I wanted to revisit a blog post I wrote a while back, as a reminder for all on how to answer a media question — or really any question you get whereby the answer could greatly impact your career or business.

We call our approach The Dorothy Principle. Here’s a repost of the material:

It goes like this: while answering any question, if you can add the word “because” at the end of your answer, you should add it and then keep writing. As long as you can add “because” and it makes sense, keep going. You can keep adding “because” up to five times, and if you do, you’ll end up with a better answer. An answer that does something for you and isn’t just a waste of five minutes of your life you can’t get back.

We even give you an easy way to remember it: when she is singing about the Wizard, Dorothy says “because” five times.

The Dorothy Principle was inspired by a journalist who wanted to help us figure out how to train chefs to answer media questions that will actually net them some media coverage (after all, that’s the point of answering a media question, to get media coverage).

Her example went like this:

Question: What ingredient has a prominent place in your kitchen?

Typical Chef Answer: Bacon.

Answer, using the Dorothy Principle:

Bacon (because) it’s incredibly versatile (because) you can put it in or on top of a dish. But the best place to
put bacon is under a dish, to render and then cook in its flavorful fat (because) you can change the balance in a dish just by changing the bacon you use (because) the flavor of the bacon depends upon the breed and feed of the animal as well as its geography (because) a bacon’s cure and smoking agent varies from locale to locale (because) a smokehouse uses whatever is economical, what comes from its own backyard, and that makes bacon one of the country’s last truly regional foods.

The point of answering a media question isn’t actually to just answer the question. It is to give the journalist the thoughts, ideas and philosophies behind the answer. Here, the hackneyed answer of bacon ends up being the starting point for not only being included in the current story but also the seed of a host of other stories:

1. Prominent dish story – “So and so chef said bacon is the most versatile ingredient in their kitchen …”
2. Uses for bacon story – “Bacon isn’t just a Sunday morning treat anymore as chefs turned this iconic breakfast favorite into a kitchen staple. So and so chef said they use it on dishes and under dishes …”
3. Bacon Breeding – “Bacon breed, it’s the newest celebration of the pig to hit the culinary world. Off-the-shelf bacon doesn’t cut it for chefs who have taken to experimenting with breed-specific bacon in their kitchen. According to so and so chef, the flavor of the bacon depends upon the breed and feed of the animal as well as its geography …”
4. Regional bacon story – “So and so chef proclaimed bacon as the last truly regional food in America…”

Quick Reminders

1. If you can’t help a journalist, let ‘em know up front so they can move on. Trying to change their story or lead them on is just as frustrating for them as it is for you when a supplier responds to your request for a specific product by selling you hard on something different that you don’t need.
2. Timing is as important in journalism as it is in cheffing. Or maybe more. Just as you have to be ready when the doors open, a journalist has to have a story done by deadline. Here’s the difference: you can continue to prep and make adjustments to your mise-en-place after the doors are open, but a journalist writes, hands in the work and is done. No going back, no adding on. Respect that and you’ll be respecting the difficulties of their job as much as they respect the difficulties of yours.
3. Reporters tend to remember if they have a hard time doing follow up. So, if you respond to a journalist request, make sure you are there for the follow up. They’ll either find someone else or they’ll remember you left them in a lurch next time they are thinking of using you. And to put that in perspective, what did you do the last time a supplier left you in a lurch?

Morning. Welcome to a new week.

Last week, RIA hit an awesome milestone when the story of 101 of America’s Most Crazy Awesome New Desserts hit the internets. Most of the Chicago entrants were the result of chefs and publicists using RIA to connect to the journalist involved — for free. The couple of dozen initial responses our chef and publicist members posted were narrowed down to seven final choices, photo shoots were arranged by email and cellphone and, bingo, national press from a few clicks.

For someone whose goal is to help more chefs get more press and publicists get press more efficiently, there is nothing more satisfying than seeing a story like this come together behind the scenes. Because for those using our system, all it took was the few minutes needed to respond to a story by sharing one of their crazy awesome desserts. For those who made the story, the payoff was huge and the cost was zero.

It is hard to believe it can be that easy. But at the end of the day, if you have a crazy awesome dessert, it is.

So, what’s it take?

Seriously, all it takes is the belief that, in fact, it can be that simple to get some press.

Because if you believed that, you’d stop spending all your time trying to figure out what the magic formula was and set about getting your crazy awesome in front of the media.

Just a little, every day.

I equate it to dieting.

Everyone — and I mean EVERYONE — knows in their heart that the way to lose weight is to just exercise a little every day, eat healthy foods, and watch their calories. It is that simple.

Not only that, slow and steady work, just a little every day, ends up in sustainable weight loss. The kind that has lasting impact.

And yet an entire dieting industry seems to thrive on the fact that no one wants to believe that. Everyone would prefer to believe they need to do crazy things like eat nothing but cabbage and clams every day to lose weight.

Presumably because they know of someone who knows of someone who did just that and lost a ton of weight as a result.

In the process they ignore reams of scientific evidence that has proven extreme diets not only don’t work, the people who do lose weight generally gain back the original tonnage — and more.

It’s maddening, really. No one wants to believe that it could be as easy as just cutting calories and moving.

~ Maybe because it is kinda boring.

~ Maybe because it requires daily maintenance for a lifetime.

~ Maybe because it takes more effort to commit to changing fundamental habits than it does to choke down a spirulina smoothie.

~ Maybe because admitting that all it takes is a little effort is just too hard on the ego of a person who wants to lose weight. I mean, what does it mean if someone admits to themselves that it just takes a little effort? It means they have previously failed at “just a little.”

That’s tough to swallow.

But the fact of the matter is, most of the most awesome things in life are simple — and every day, you are simply choosing to acknowledge that or not.

Well, today is Monday — a whole new chance to choose.

Reminders

1. This post isn’t to say that anyone who answers an RIA media request is going to get covered. For this story, frankly, it was the crazy awesome pastries that were selected for inclusion by the writer. So, you need to make sure you are crazy awesome. But if you are crazy awesome, all you need to do is share.
2. Timing is important because if you miss the deadline, you miss the story. There’s no getting around that no matter how crazy awesome your dessert is. We built Spoonfeed so that media requests go to multiple people so that no single one person at a restaurant needs to be responsible for being available 24/7. I recommend that no matter what “tool” you use for managing the media, you make it a group effort of committed individuals so that your bases are always covered.
3. I need to lose weight myself, so don’t you go thinking I am not aware that I suffer from the same failings in life as the next guy. That said, after writing this post I grabbed the cabbage in my fridge and fed it to the chickens and then went out and walked the dogs for an hour. This stuff is hard. But it is important to at least face facts and try.