RESTAURANT PROMOTION

How the woman with a restaurant promotion strategy came to work in the flagging restaurant of a small rural town is still unclear. Some say the owner contracted her right from the big city, but others say her car simply broke down at the door. One story claims that the owner didn't even want to hire her at first, that she volunteered to do restaurant promotion if he did, that it had nothing to do with business sense.

As a former army cook, he was used to insults. Provide the juiciest burgers and the coldest beer and they'll come in droves. At first they did, probably for its novelty, but then they came less and less and about the time she showed up, they were hardly coming at all.

She changed all that.

The locals like to tell how it was when she got there. The metal-roofed building faced south, had high ceilings and a couple of fans. Summer tourists couldn't tolerate the heat. The locals knew better than to come. The menu was disorganized and tacky, with little variety. Food was served on shallow plastic baskets with plastic utensils and paper napkins. The floor was a dingy blue linoleum, darkened and coarse from waxing over dirty floors.

The restaurant handyman will tell you she had the ideas, but he did all the work. He stripped and waxed the floor, he built a lattice-frame drop ceiling covered with plexiglass. Yeah, she hung plants to give a friendlier atmosphere. She also placed a few large planters strategically to give some privacy and coziness between the tables that he polished. She thought to hang a levelor on the large south-facing window so that it would deflect the summer heat, but he did the hanging. He's willing to credit her for Bistro-style curtains that impart a softer look to the open dining room. Cloth napkins, ceramic plates, and silverware was her doing too.

None deny that she put the cafe on the web replete with photos of local historic sites and the surrounding mountains and trees. And all agree her re-designed menu is an artistic achievement. She too expanded the mostly burger and taco menu to include appetizers, salads, fruit smoothies, cheesecake and espresso drinks.

The owner says the restaurant promotion began with the flyers. Flyers in the community newspaper, menus placed in the tourist-heavy campground down the road, and coupons for $5.00 off any meal, with a two-week expiration was all it took.

Everyone knows it was her idea to have local artists show their paintings for a percent of the sale. Even now, the changing gallery attracts attention, reviews in the local paper bringing yet more customers.

Most important, within a year his profits quadrupled.

One day the restaurant promotion lady left as mysteriously as she came. The locals sip espresso and speculate and the owner now concedes, every restaurant needs not only good food and cold beer, but restaurant promotion too.