Food

You Had Me at Pizza: How Omnichannel Marketing Matters

What’s omnichannel mean, exactly? And what does it have to do with the best pizza outside of Naples? And where does lively writing fit into all this? Andris Lagsdin has a small company outside of Boston called Baking Steel that manufacturers and sells ultra-conductive metal baking sheets. Its flagship product is its namesake Baking Steel, a heavy, quarter-inch honed hunk of steel. It doesn’t look like much—it looks like an ordinary piece of metal. But it gives you the best pizza crust outside of Naples. (Ze. Best.) Last spring, Andris ran a contest promoting a new, lighter product called the Mini Griddle. He invited subscribers to comment on his blog post with a recipe idea: What would you make with a Mini Griddle? The best entry would be the winner. I entered the contest on a total whim. My recipe—invented as I sat at my desk one wintry morning in […]

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What Marketing Can Learn from the Most Outstanding Meal I’ve Ever Had

What if we thought about Marketing the way this restaurant thinks about dinner? One of the best things about being a marketer is that your work intersects almost everything. (It’s not like being a professional shepherd, say. The disjoint is greater between the work of sheep-herding and the rest of the world.) One of the worst things about being a marketer is that your work intersects almost everything. We’ll be standing in line at the post office, and a woman behind me, whom I know vaguely from somewhere (maybe our kids played soccer together?), is telling me about renovating her house. She’s figured out who has the best take-out. She knows all the best laundromats. She wonders whether she might launch a crowd-sourced online resource for locals who might value such information… The next thing I know, I start verbally mapping out a whole website and marketing plan for her.

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Content Marketing In 15 Minutes a Day: 3 Content Hacks

Part of me is allergic to the headline I just wrote—or, at least, the “15 minutes a day” part. Because starting out with a stingy marketing mindset runs counter to the spirit of the rich content marketing opportunity. It reminds of me of punching a clock at a job you hate: How little do I have to work? How much responsibility can I shirk? But, still, businesses—especially very small ones—have certain constraints and often-ungenerous realities. What if you really have only mere minutes a day to focus specifically on marketing? What if you run, say, a restaurant or a pizza shop—and you’re squeezing out a Facebook post in between the lunch and dinner rush? Can it be done? Yes. But only with a solid plan and strategy in place. At least, that’s the message Shelly Kramer and I gave a few weeks ago at the International Pizza Expo in Las

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How to Feed a Fussy Little Dog: Chile’s List of Requirements

1. Preference to remain someplace safe — lurking in the shadows, under a bed — while the other dogs (“idiots”) chaotically dance around and drool at the ping of kibble hitting the bowl. Rationale: You can get stepped on, drooled on, or accidentally eaten when Maisy mistakes you for a bit of sausage (it could happen). 2. Include something special in the bowl — preferably on top of, not UNDERNEATH (!!) — the kibble. Sausage will do (see sausage comment, above), as will turkey, cheese, chicken, ham, or almost any kind of food preferred by the French. Foods to avoid: Eggs (blech!), lamb (not sure why, I just don’t like the idea of it, I guess), and any kind of vegetable, although clearly this should go without saying. Also, bear in mind that not all dogs like liver and other organ meats, and this includes me. I’d rather have a

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Lucky

The Boston outlet of Morton’s, a Chicago-based steakhouse chain, sits across the street from Boston Harbor in a newly developed part of town called the Seaport. Inside, Morton’s has a clubby feel—all hushed tones and white linen and dark paneling. The bad lighting makes it hard to read the prices, which are high, so perhaps that’s the point. I guess it’s a very nice restaurant, but it reminds me more of the kind of place my parents might think of as a very nice restaurant: When a group of us walked in one recent night, it was a little like entering a private inner chamber. We weren’t exactly rowdy—but, still, it felt like the Laugh-In party of seven had just crashed Masterpiece Theatre. Morton’s is known for its beef. Right away, after you’re seated, a waiter trots over, parading raw steaks on a wheeled display cart. He takes a lot

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Is 18 the New 8?

In her book released last fall, Deceptively Delicious, Jessica Seinfeld slips chickpeas into her chocolate chip cookies and purees butternut squash into her mac and cheese. The general premise is that kid food is fried and white. But if you can slip in something on the sly—say, cauliflower into mashed potatoes, or sweet potato into pancakes—then you can trick your kids into eating the stuff you want them to, minus the tantrums and tears. Jessica, who is married to the comic Jerry Seinfeld, has been in the news of late because Missy Chase Lapine, who authored a similar book, called The Sneaky Chef, insists that Deceptively Delicious is nothing but a riff on her ideas. The Seinfelds contest that. But whatever. The problem isn’t whether Jessica was the first mother to hide flaxseed in chicken nuggets and then write about it. The problem is, as Wall Street Journal‘s Raymond Sokolov

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Alpha Females

Two or three years ago, I found myself on a list of people who take turns cooking in a soup kitchen. And so, every few months, I do. I can’t say I particularly look forward to it. But to beg off the list at this point would require a phone call to the organizer. I imagine the hypothetical exit interview: “So in what other ways do you help the homeless?” And then I imagine my lame stammer—so, when my number comes up, I again show up at the shelter. As much as my turn behind the stove never seems to come at a good time, once I’m there, with my hands as two of the several helping to knead 30 pounds of ground beef into 10 meatloaves, it’s not so bad. Actually, it’s pretty gratifying, and it makes me appreciate the basic necessities that I and those around me take

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