Give Restaurant Owners a Break

Full disclosure: I am the Co-Founder of the global restaurant showcase platform onehundredtables.com

The main problem I have with how restaurants are covered in the food media is to a large extent restaurants are at the mercy of “other people” who somehow have the power to make or break the restaurant with the power of the pen.

It’s kind of like the music critic who couldn’t write a song or play an instrument to save their life but somehow wants to tell Santana his jam was a little off at the show last night.

I meet restaurant owners all the time. For most restaurant owners they’ve sunk all their time, sweat, and in some cases life savings into making a go at it. The restaurant business is a grueling business. I once heard a restaurant owner say “Basically I have to throw a party every night”.

So last week when last week I read an article written by Chris Schonberger called “The Problems with Food Media That Nobody Wants to Talk About” on First We Feast, I couldn’t help but think that finally someday had nailed what everyone in this space senses.

Chris boils it all down to this: the whole food/restaurant media scene is basically a game with gatekeepers, food authorities (in some cases where nobody can figure out where this authority comes from), the push/pull of PR influencing what gets covered, restaurant lists that nobody can trust, how we use “Heat Maps” and “Power Rankings” to gauge not which restaurants are currently the best, but which ones are the most talked about, and all in a dance to build up hype to only then turnaround and also review the hype.

Chris sums it all up also by saying that “food media has felt, for lack of a better word, soft”.

I think he is right. So much of the restaurant coverage world is the same with one outlet or another simply trying to grab a bigger megaphone to shout at you with.

Let’s get back to the reality of the life as a restaurant owner.

My contention is that the “Top 10” restaurants in almost every review outlet are pretty much the same Top 10 give almost all the time. Sure there is some variation, but every foodie knows who the generally accepted top 10 restaurants are in any major city.

What about the next 90 great restaurants in these cities?

Here’s how we threw the rules out when we built onehundredtables.com and re-framed the whole restaurant “ranking” scene thing.

We don’t rank restaurants, we showcase them.

Ranking restaurants is like saying who is the best guitar player Eddie Van Halen, Alex Lifeson, or Pat Metheny — they’re all great, they’re just different. For us, it’s the same with restaurants. There is not really “a best” but there are certainly many top restaurants.

And so instead of restaurants being at the mercy of “others” who get to determine some phantom power ranking, we built our platform to to showcase 100 great restaurants in 100 cities around the world and leave the choice 100% up to the restaurant owner to join if they see value in being part of the platform.

Unlike sites that charge thousands of dollars to get better placement or get your rankings up, we charge a flat $100/year (27 cents a day) to make the financial side of being on board a no brainer.

People ask us all the time how we can do this?

It’s simple. Unlike sites like Yelp, we don’t have a salesforce, zero, nada.

One Hundred Tables runs 24 hours a day in 100 cities around the world, and on near autopilot. It just works. We run it on the background serving the restaurants onboard by driving new customer awareness (and ideally new customer visits, which is really all any restaurant wants anyway).

Just as you directly sign up for a Facebook, so can restaurants join One Hundred Tables directly — and their restaurant profile goes live immediately.

Our focus is providing the restaurant owner a solid, gorgeous, and powerful online profile where there are no more than 99 other participants in their city — for less than a good table for two in a year’s time. It’s about a 1 hour ROI.

This in turn provides the foodies of the world not the same old Top 10, but rather a super unique, city per city collection of 100 sure-fire restaurants to go try.

Some businesses want to be the biggest while other’s want to be the best and coolest. We’re the latter — and we’re in it to support the restaurants that genuinely earn the buzz they get.

Again t0 kudos to Chris Schonberger over at First We Feast for writing a good article on the overall restaurant scene.

Are you owner/manager of a great restaurant? Here’s the 2016 deck.

You can also download the 100Tables App from the iTunes store for free.