Early last week, I spent the day at Friends in Food, an annual conference for hospitality leaders. The first panel focused on opening a new restaurant, with speakers from Somssi, Ambassadors Clubhouse, Bridges, and the hospitality platform Loyalist.
As the group discussed strategies for opening restaurants in New York’s extremely saturated dining scene, I was taken by one detail from Leah Merriam, who used to work at Catch Hospitality (the group behind Taylor Swift’s go-to Corner Store and Eighty Six), and is now the head of restaurants at Loyalist. When it came to having people in during the soft opening, Catch would invite friends and family, press, and regulars from their other restaurants, but also a group she called (lovingly) the “loudmouths” — people who are going to tell other people about your restaurant. She asks herself: “Who will be offended if they’re not the first ones in the door?” These aren’t just loyal regulars, they’re the type of people who, when they love a restaurant, will share it with the rest of their network, in turn driving more people to it.
I love the idea of being a restaurant loudmouth. It has nothing to do with the number of followers you have or your comfort level with eating on camera. It’s about how much others respect your discerning opinion about where to eat, and if, as a result, they make their own reservations when they hear about it. I had the privilege of listening in on a restaurant pre-shift meeting recently, where the team went through the guest list and explicitly discussed which of the evening’s diners had been referred by other diners, so everyone knew who to look out for. Those referrers are the loudmouths.
As the panel continued, the group discussed how to know your audience — Ambassadors Clubhouse, for instance, is in a corporate building, so its weeknight clientele diner profile differs from its weekend crowd. Before the conversation closed, Bradley Knebel, the restaurant’s general manager, nodded to the important relationships it has with yet another powerful group: hotel concierges and executive assistants. They might not be high-profile, but they, too, have their own connections with those who are always looking for places to dine, often with big groups.
So if you aren’t a hotel concierge or executive assistant, but want to get into the hottest restaurants in town before anyone else? Be a restaurant loudmouth. If you consider yourself in this group, tell me about a new restaurant you went to recently, and why you loved it. Some recommendations just might find their way into a future newsletter.
Below, you’ll find some of my favorite reads from the past two weeks. If you liked this email, please be a newsletter loudmouth and forward it to a friend or encourage them to sign up here.
