Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: I'm recording this episode in early September 2025. Just about a week ago, I returned home from a trip to Greece. So I was there with my wife and my son. And I'm not here to tell you all about how great Greece was, although we had a great time in Greece. I want to use this to talk about how we market our restaurants. Because every time I travel, whether it's for a vacation, a client visit, a conference, a convention, a trade show, every time I travel, meaning when I go to somewhere new, somewhere that I'm unfamiliar with, I special attention to the decisions I make. Where do I decide to eat and why do I decide to eat there? Why that place over any of the other options? And this trip that I took to Greece pointed out five important things I want to make five points that will help you market your restaurant better. All of that on today's episode of Restaurant Strategy.
There's an old saying that goes something like this. You'll only find three kinds of people in the world. Those who see, those who will never see, and those who can see when shown.
This is Restaurant Strategy, a podcast with answers for anyone who's looking.
Hey everyone, thanks for tuning in. My name is Chip Close. This is the Restaurant Strategy podcast. We do two episodes every single week. You know by now I travel the world giving keynotes and and talks to rooms filled with restaurant owners. I wrote a book, it's called the Restaurant Marketing Mindset. I run a mastermind program, it's called the P3 mastermind group coaching, where I help independent restaurant owners increase profitability of their restaurants. And I want to use this opportunity to remind you about my Restaurant Foundations program. It's a membership site, a ton of online content resources, Playbooks, spreadsheets, ebooks, tons of content there that you get to access for free for 30 days. You cancel whenever you want. At the end of the 30 days, it charges the regular price of $97. I hope obviously, that you'll stick around for a long time. Why? Because we do quarterly masterclasses. We do monthly ask me anything sessions, which means I log on to zoom for two hours every single month to answer whatever questions you have. And then, of course, the online content, we add new videos, new content every single month. That link is in the show notes. If you want to go check out Restaurant Foundations, it's absolutely free for days. Even if you go in and get all the swipe files and then cancel your membership right away, you can do that free for 30 days, $97 thereafter. Restaurant foundations, hundreds of members already And I'm using this platform as a way of growing that. I hope you go check that out. That link is in the show notes.
Avi, you love to go out to eat. So as a guest, what's your biggest pet peeve when you're trying to choose a place to eat?
[00:03:01] Speaker B: Yeah, as the father of two children, I can't leave the house for less than $30 an hour. My wife has celiac. So when we're going to make a dining decision, I live and die by that menu. I'm in there researching what's available, what can my wife eat, what can we share, what do I get to eat off of her plate?
And so that menu is just a crucial part of all decision making for me as a consumer. It's why at Marquee, we focus so much on our menus, our menu integration, so that as operators, your menu that lives in your point of sale, that you want customers to see is available and up to date everywhere.
[00:03:34] Speaker A: To learn more about Marquee, go to marquee.com, m A R Q I-I.com to learn more about this and all of the incredible features they have.
Okay, so in today's episode, I want to talk about my trip to Greece, and I want to share five important takeaways. And again, this is Thursday. So this is the marketing episode, right? We do two episodes every week. Monday, I try to focus the conversation on operations. On Thursday, I try to focus the conversations on marketing. So what does my trip to Greece have to do with you marketing your restaurant? That's the case I want to make over the course of the next, I don't know, 10 or 15 minutes. So every time I travel, and I said this at the beginning, every time I travel to go visit a client, every time I go for a trade show or a conference or go on vacation, every time I go somewhere unfamiliar, I pay very careful attention to the decisions I make and the process by which I go to make make those decisions. Meaning where do I eat breakfast? Where do I eat lunch? Where do I eat dinner? Where do I go get a drink? Where do I do I go out of my way? Do I just stay at the places that are convenient? Do I stay in the tourist areas? Do I get off the beaten path? Now, everybody, when they travel is after something different. Certainly I travel differently than the next person might travel. But understanding how I make my decisions will help me with my clients, will help you. So you paying very careful attention to how you make your decisions will help you be more attuned to your customers, your diners, your guests and how they make their decisions. So this is one of the things, right? How did I decide where to eat? And I gotta tell you, more often than not, we used Google Maps. We looked closely at the Google reviews and I ended up using Instagram quite a bit.
So now do other people use Yelp? Do other people use TripAdvisor? Yeah, of course. But when we went to Greece, just so you know, we spent four days in Athens and then we spent a week on the island of Naxos. So very, very different markets. Athens is obviously a huge European city. And then Naxos is this little vacation town. It's the largest of the Cycladic islands, but for all intents and purposes, it's a little port town. It's an island in the middle of the Aegean Sea, right? So the way we made decisions in Athens was different than the way we made decisions on Naxos. The things that we were looking for in Athens were, as it turned out, different than the things we were looking for on Naxos. And that becomes really important. When we were in Athens, we were in a again major metropolitan market and we wanted to do a couple of nice meals, partially because we like doing that, we like going out of our way and treating ourselves to a couple nice meals, but also because we knew we weren't going to find that on the island of Naxos. That proved very much to be true.
So we didn't realize this was going to be the case. But all three of our nights in Athens, we ended up going to a different nice restaurant. Now here's the thing. We didn't book any reservations before we got on the plane. And that's rare. Usually if we're going to do a couple of nice restaurants, we will book those out weeks or months in advance because oftentimes you have to. So in Athens, we were in Athens in August. Athens in August is pretty quiet because everyone is away on vacation. So we, we were able to book some last minute res reservations, but we ended up going to nice restaurants. Now how did we make the determination as to where to go? And I thought that was really interesting. Some of them we were just looking on Google Maps. Some of them we were looking up on Instagram. Some of them we started looking up like best of lists. Then we got a couple of recommendations. When friends said, oh, you're in Athens, you should try this place or that place, right? Word of mouth absolutely factored in to at least one of the three nice restaurants that we went to and that becomes really important, right? So I don't know, 33% of the me of the dinners out came from word of mouth. We know the importance of word of mouth, but there it is, like front and center. That's why we ended up going to one of the places. But mostly, I gotta tell you, especially as we were just wandering around trying to find somewhere for lunch or when we were trying to figure out where to do dinner, we ended up, you know, looking at Google Maps and seeing, well, where is it in proximity to where we are? Where is it in proximity to our hotel? Are there other things around there? Is it gonna be easy enough to get there and to back home? All of that Google Maps really factored in prominently because again, we didn't understand the geography of the area. And so we use that Now, I bring this up because we know, for example, like reservation platforms, like in this country, OpenTable or Resy or Tock or 7 rooms, any of these platforms, right, they, they act often as a marketplace. Certainly OpenTable is a marketplace. Resi is a marketplace where you can go and say, hey, I'm here in this city. Tell me what tables are for tonight or for tomorrow night. They act as, they act as a marketplace where you can find products, in this case a dinner out that is becoming less and less the case. More and more people are using Google and Google Maps by extension to find where they want to eat because it's being able to show you tables that, that are available. So we're seeing this in real time. If you are an open table, for example, you are seeing the number of reservations coming in through goog. Google is going up and up and up, and the ones that are coming in through your website or that are coming in through the open table platform are going down. We've watched that trend over the last, I'll say four or five years. And I'm telling you there's a, there's a reason, there's a reason why I can look. And especially now when not every restaurant is on OpenTable, when restaurants are on OpenTable and Talk and Seven Rooms and Resy and Yelp for restaurants and you name whatever else there is. And of course in Europe, there's a whole other set of things that we found that going to Google sort of aggregated all of them. So now Google really is acting as that aggregator. And that was important.
We did look at the Google reviews. Usually my wife does this where she just looks at all the one stars and she said, I want to know the worst things that People have to say about this. And I thought that was really interesting. And that did factor into our decisions. I don't need to look at all these people raving, but I need to see, okay, the people that didn't like it, why didn't they like it? I don't care that they didn't like it. I want to know why they didn't like it. Because if they didn't like it for reasons that I don't really care about, then it's fine. I dismiss all of those one star reviews. But if they are complaining about things that I would complain about, then that becomes important to know. And the other thing was Instagram. We really did almost all of them, especially the three nice meals. We went and checked them out on Instagram to be able to get a sense of the vibe, the feel.
What did the food look like, what did the room look like?
As it turns out, that became really important because we were being tourists. We were wandering a lot. It was very hot, August and Athena, I think you can sort of extrapolate there. We were touring the ruins, we were touring museums.
We were exhausted. And when it came time for dinner, what we wanted was to sit down and really be taken care of. We wanted a comfortable space. I didn't want anything too noisy. I didn't want anything too packed or jammed in. I really wanted to be able to relax. That's what I wanted. And I couldn't quite tell that from the Google reviews, couldn't quite tell that from the Google Photos or for the Google listing that oftentimes I would then go to Instagram to get a sense of what that place is all about. And that becomes really, really important, right? One of the things I wanted to talk about was one of the restaurants in Athens, right? And again, this major metropolitan city, major European city. And there were a bunch of nice restaurants. And we went to again, three of them. But the last one we went to did have a Michelin star. It was the only one of the three that did have a Michelin star. But what they did, a lot of points throughout the meal, they went over the top. Now you could say it's a Michelin star restaurant. That's what it's all about. It's about being remarkable, going over the top. But there were a couple of reasons. There's a couple of reasons that I want to point out. This meal, when we sat down, they asked, would you prefer tap water or bottled water? And we said, bottled, sparkling water. And they said, absolutely, let me bring the list. We were like oh, they brought us a list of eight sparkling water options. Now, it cost them very little in inventory to keep those bottles on hand, but what it communicates to a diner is this is the kind of place you're in. Now, if you're listening to this and you're going, I would never eat at a place like that. That's fine. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that this place wanted to be memorable and want it to be over the top and want it to take care of you. Wanted you to know you were in somewhere special.
And rather than telling somebody you are somewhere special, what they did is they brought you the water options. I'm sorry, the sparkling water options. And you were like, oh, got it. That's the kind of place we're in. And they had a special card, all presented, and then you selected your water, and they say, okay. And they went and got your water. The same thing happened later when they brought this, like, freshly baked bowl of sourdough. It was amazing. It was a beautiful presentation. And they say, what butters would you like? And they presented us six butter options, and we got to choose two.
Now, we asked, what should we do? What are the differences? And they point us out. But again, they used that opportunity, and that came much later in the meal because bread service at that particular restaurant happened, I don't know, the fifth of eight courses. It was like, oh, it was pretty far along.
And they showed us the six butter options. Again, it was a chance for them to remind you, just remember, this is the kind of place you're at. You're like, oh, got it. And finally, for the steak course, right, they brought us our steak. Before the steak course, they brought this box of knives. Now, all of the knives were different. They were all steak knives, but they had a different hilt. So they all came from this olive wood that was, you know, polished and refined and sanded down. But they all looked a little different. And they brought the box around, and first to my son and then to my wife and then to me, and they said, would you like to pick a knife for your course? Now, could they have gone and just gotten steak knives, right? And, you know, just like, all the forks match and all the spoons match. Could they have found steak knives that match? Of course they could have, but they chose not to. They went and found uniquely handcrafted ones. Again, not because they had to, but because they could. And it was a way of communicating to the diner. Again, just remember, this is the kind of place you're at. And I thought that was really interesting because they were telling their story not by actually verbally telling you, but by showing it, by letting you feel it at multiple points across the meal. And there were other moments that were, that were very memorable and all of that, but this, and it was open air, it was up on the roof, beautiful view of the Acropolis. It was otherwise not stuffy, not like it wasn't pretentious in any way. It was sort of relaxed. But it was upscale fine dining for sure. One Michelin star. And one of the things they wanted to make sure you knew is that they were over the top. This is the kind of place it was. And they went out of their way to tell you in very specific ways. And I took note of that. The takeaway there for you is what are you all about? And are you telling that story consistently over the course of your meal? I've talked about this before, talk about this with my clients all the time.
But this was something and it just, it struck me as such a clear articulation of who they were. I got three other points I want to make after a word from another one of our sponsors.
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So on today's episode, I'm sharing five key takeaways from my trip to Greece. I went to Athens for four days, spent a week then on the island of Naxos. And I'm not here to tell you all about Greece. You go to Greece. I'm here because it reminded me of how we market restaurants. And as a restaurant marketer, I'm always trying to think about how our diners make decisions because I want to make it easier for them to make the decision to come join me. So like I said, spent four days in Athens, spent and then another week on the island of Naxos. These were very different experiences. One is a major metropolitan city, the other one is a beach town, vacation town, you know, a little. Little port.
So what we wanted out of those two places was very different. But there were things over the course of our, you know, 10, 12 days there in Greece that just kept striking me over and over. So we talked about, you know, how did I make, you know, how do you make decisions on where to eat? And, you know, that for that, I started with me, like, how did we make decisions on where to eat as we were wandering around hot after tours, like, where do we go to lunch? What made our decision one way or another? How do we choose our places for dinner? Cause those were nice dinners in Athens, right? And it was different when we went to the island of Naxos. And then I shared my story about when we were at the last meal we had in Athens about this restaurant that went, like, over the top. Still, like relaxed, fine dining, but over the top. And all the things they did over the course of their meal to remind you what kind of place you were in. One of the things now. So now we go from Athens down to Naxos. Naxos is the largest of the Cycladic islands. So Santorini, Mykonos, Paros, those are all islands in the middle of the Aegean Sea. They're all Cycladic islands. Naxos is the biggest one. And if you know it, it's got this little port town, like this little harbor and everything, where the ferries come in and out, all the fishing boats and you can charter boats and all of that. And then there's this whole line. It's almost like a boardwalk. All of these restaurants and shops and bars and all of that all along the harbor. And so every night when you walk down that street, there are people out front of every restaurant, and they're trying to get you to come in there. Every single night, they're right there, and there's somebody there holding menus or, you know, trying to get you to come in and sit. And here's the thing. Every single time, they're just trying to get people to come eat now. And never not one of them. And there may be, I don't know, 30 restaurants, maybe more, all the way down this row, you know, all along the harbor.
And there are all these, like, mostly seafood restaurants. There were a couple Italian restaurants and other things, but mostly this fresh seafood, because you're right by the water. The, you know, the fishermen bring this stuff in. And so they've. They've got the octopus and the, you know, the sea bream and all of that stuff. And they're trying to get you to come in. But guess what? No one ever gave us a card or a takeaway menu or a voucher or any sort of, like, coupon or promotion to get us to come back later. It was, you come eat here now or forget it. You're dead to me. And I thought that was curious, that, number one, there are plenty of times that we walked down and we just weren't hungry quite yet, or we'd already eaten that night, but we still had the next three nights and we didn't know where to go. That maybe if somebody had said, oh, come in. And we said, oh, we just ate. They said, oh, oh. Then here, this gives you €10 off your meal. Come back tomorrow night and join us. That nobody did that. Now, did they need to do that? No. Is there a reason why they didn't do that? Maybe. Maybe they literally are just momentary. Maybe they've learned over years of doing this that trying to think about tomorrow and the next day just doesn't work. It needs to be momentary. Maybe. But my gut tells me.
My gut tells me that they probably would have captured more of our business if they gave us a reason to remember them and a reason to come back. And I think that was really, really striking. That there are plenty of times when people just aren't ready to receive that marketing message, meaning the person out front of the restaurant trying to get you to come in for dinner. We'll call that a marketing channel. We'll call that a marketing message. And there are plenty of times when the customers walking by just aren't in a position to receive that. But it's not to say that they wouldn't be in a position an hour later or two later or the next day to receive that message. And I thought it was a huge, huge missed opportunity.
The other piece is every single time we sat down to eat, when we chose, you know, a restaurant and we sat down, nobody ever focused on customer attention. Nobody ever tried to get our. Our data, our information, our email, our phone number. Now, I get it. Maybe they assume that 90% of the people are here for a Greek vacation and most are never going to return.
Right? I don't know that when we'll ever return to that island. As great a time as we had, there are other places we want to see. So I get that.
But even if they just played the short game, if they said, well, my job is not necessarily get them onto our email list or to communicate with them in the future, which I think there's value there. But set that aside, Even if they say, well, there's no real value in doing that. But my goal should be to get them to come back sometime in the next three days.
Then what would have happened if they had left us something at the table? This is a simple bounce back card, but with the check they come over and say is there anything else we can get for you? No, we'll take the check. They bring over the little card reader and you settle up or you go up to the register because a lot of those places you go up to the register to pay.
What if there they said how was your meal? And I said it was great. And they said perfect. Have you figured out where you're going to eat tomorrow or the next night? Or they said how long are you in town?
And if I said oh, we leave tomorrow, they say okay, they don't have to worry about a bounce back. But if I said oh, we don't leave until Saturday, they said oh, so you have three more nights, you should come back here gives you a free bottle of wine, or this gives you €20 off, or this gives you something tangible to put in my hand that I could come back and redeem for actual value.
Would that have made. Now if you hand 100 of them out in a given night, maybe you only get 15 of them back, but it's 15 people back that you might not have been able to get back.
And what if, here's the perfect example because for the most part in Greece people dying late, right? So it's 8:30, right? 8, 8:30, 9:00 is when people go to get dinner. But I was vacationing with a 10 year old, so we're not going to eat at 9 o' clock if we can help it. We're going to eat at seven. So my table flipped before the majority of the people came in. In fact, most nights when we sat in a restaurant we had half the place emp.
So I'm sort of a perfect candidate. I am free extra money. I am money that will come in at 6, 6:30, 7 o' clock before the rush comes.
Those tables are mostly going to sit empty. That wouldn't you go out of your way.
Anybody dining at 5, 5:30, 6, 6:37, chances are they're American tourists and they're used to eating earlier.
I would even if you just specifically targeted them and said, hey, how long are you in town for? And I said I'm here another three nights. They said perfect. If you wanted to dine early again like tonight, use this, it gives you a free Bottle of wine when you come back, as long as you dine, anytime you sit down, anytime before 7:30, because I'm going to eat in an hour, hour and a half. And they're going to get the table back by 8, 8:30, 9 o', clock, so they can turn it again for their main dinner rush. Like, nobody did that.
And I think it's an incredible opportunity. And again, this is a lesson for all the restaurateurs over there in Greece, on these Greek islands. But there's a lesson to be learned.
Even in your market where you're at, there's an opportunity to get people back and to get people back at a specific time that would help you.
Last point I want to make here, last point is that when we were in Athens, we stayed in a hotel and we asked our concierge the first night, where should we go out for dinner? And they gave us two options. And as we were looking into the options, it was like, these don't look like very good meals to us. This is not what we want.
What we ended up doing was trusting our friends and the recommendations that were made to us. But over the course of our, you know, week and a half on our Greek trip, we had trusted guides.
So we chartered a boat one day, the captain of the boat gave us recommendations. We hired a photographer when we were on Naxos to take family portraits. So we got recommendations from him.
When we were on the island of Naxos, we ran in an Airbnb, a villa way up in the. Way up in the mountains there. We got recommendations from her, the waiters at various restaurants, we took their recommendations. All of these people knew the area certainly better than we did. And we didn't necessarily use all of their recommendations, but they gave us a short list to use.
Yeah, there's always the concierge or the front desk person or your taxi driver or whatever. But over the course of your trip, anywhere you go, there are trusted guides. Now flip that around to what you do as a merchant in your market. You have trusted guides. There are people who don't know your area and are asking others where they should go.
I would think really deeply about who those trusted guides are.
So the concierge as the front desk people, right? The photographers, the tour guides. There are people within your town, even in a small market. There's the, you know, the coaches of the football team. Perfect example. I did this with a client once. They said, you know, we were in a town. Said, there's nothing in our town. Our town explodes on Friday Nights, Fridays and Saturdays, because football is really big in our town. So the visiting team brings a bus in and they bring all this traffic with them because the parents and the friends and Everybody travels the 50 miles, 80 miles to come to this town. And they all land on Friday. They go see the game, they stay overnight, right? They eat at restaurants, they stay overnight, they get up and have breakfast or lunch, and then all drive back to their town on Saturday afternoon, noon. So you've got a captured audience that one of the recommendations I made is that they should put together like a one pager, a sheet, right? And give it to the boosters or the coaching staff or the athletic director at the high school and say, every visiting team, could you give them this list? Here are three recommendations for restaurants near the stadium. Here are the best ice cream places. Here's really good breakfast place places as a restaurant. If you put that thing together and gave it to the athletic department and said, can you pass this along? And they would, they would email out the listserv, they would email out all the boosters, the parents, the supporters, the friends, the school, and say, if you're traveling to this particular town, here's the list that you should do. Like, what a no brainer. Because there were like a thousand or two thousand people that would literally descend upon that town just to go see this high school football team. Like, that's a really big deal. So whatever, wherever you're at, whoever your trusted guides are, you have trusted guides, people who love making recommendations, people that other people trust. And I think you need to figure those people out again. For us, it was the captain of the boat, it was the photographer, it was the Airbnb host, it was the waiters that we connected with, it was the manager, the, you know, the wine director that we ended up striking up a conversation and those people made recommendations and that, that gave us the structure of where we were going to eat, what we were going to do for the rest of our vacation.
Every time you travel, certainly every time I travel, I take away these ideas. I think about how I make decisions, I think about how my experience was, and I can't extrapolate that out. Certainly not everyone is going to live the same way I am, but I know there's a meaningful amount of people that go through things like that, that go through life like that. The same reason we put so much weight in word of mouth, because everybody gets recommendations from their friends, their family, their colleagues at work, right? The same reason we do that, it's the same thing here. When People travel to a new market, a new town, a new neighborhood, a new city, a new country.
They are looking for recommendations. Where do they get those recommendations?
So my trip to Greece is one little is the, you know, is the tip of the spear. And I think the conversation it brings up is much, much bigger about how and where we should be marketing our restaurants. That's it, guys. One final reminder. I want to make sure, you know, I've got a membership site now. It's called the Restaurant Foundations program. Restaurant Foundations. You can get it for free.
I've got the link in the show notes free for 30 days. You can go in and just steal all the stuff and then cancel. I really don't care. What I hope you'll do is stick around. It charges $97 a month, every month after. And I hope you see the imme value of less than $100 every month because you've got tons of online content. New content's being added every month. We do master classes from time to time. We do monthly ask me anything sessions. Literally two hours of me on a zoom call, and you get to ask me whatever you want. I just sit there and answer all your questions. You want to look at P and ls, we'll do it. You want to look at your Facebook ads, We'll do it. You want to look at your direct mailers, you want to look at your email strategy, we will do whatever you want to do.
You utilize that right, and you'll show up with a whole bunch of other restaurant owners. You will learn by hearing their questions. You'll learn from hearing the questions they ask and the problems they're facing. Again, Restaurant Foundations is a membership site. It's 97amonth. You can try it out absolutely for free by clicking the link in the show Notes. Appreciate you guys being here. I know there are a lot of great resources. You've got books, shows, videos, YouTube channels, and other podcasts. I appreciate you making this podcast part of your week. Thank you very much. I'll see you next time.
Sam Sa.
