Restaurant PR Evolution With Michael Tulipan on PR Patter!

Good morning, everyone. I’m Julie Livingston, president of Want Leverage Communications, a public relations and LinkedIn consultancy based here in New York City. It’s great to be with you here today for another edition of PR Patter. If you like what you see, please go to my website at WantLeverage.com and download my free tip sheet, Make Your C Suite Stand Out on LinkedIn. You’ll find lots of great tips there that are easily actionable and can increase your visibility on the LinkedIn platform. Today, I’m delighted to welcome my guest for a discussion on restaurant PR. His name is Michael Tulipan. He’s a hospitality and media veteran with a diverse skillset, including writing, photography, and web development.

He founded M.S.T. Creative PR with his wife over 20 years ago, and the company works with restaurants, bars, food and wine events, culinary products, and more. He’s also an accomplished writer, having published articles in The New York Times, Wine Spectator, and Wine Enthusiast. And he’s a photographer with photos published in the Times, Time at New York, Gourmet, and Gotham. The Wall Street Journal and more. So welcome, Michael. It’s great to see you here today.

Michael:
Thank you for having me on.

Michael’s Background

Julie:
So tell us a little bit more. I know that was some of your background, but tell us a little bit more about your backstory and how you got to the restaurant space.

Michael:
The medium long version is, I’m a kid from the New York suburbs, grew up on Long Island. Never really had any true food experience. I didn’t grow up with like grandma cooking anything like that. It was very suburban. And I’m like, okay, I need to go to New York City. So I went to NYU film school. I graduated, and I wanted to be a screenwriter. Along the way, I worked in hotels. I worked in a variety of other businesses. I met my wife who is from Poland, and she said, Hey, I need to finish my education in Poland. Will you come with me? I said, Okay, sure. I’m 23. So we, we went to Poland for a year and a half, and that was, early 1990s, and that’s when I started like understanding the value of traveling and other cultures.

And it was quite a culture shock. They didn’t even have McDonald’s. McDonald’s opened in her city when I was there, and it was like a giant line of people, and I’m like, for McDonald’s? So it was a very interesting experience. We came back to New York, and I worked in some video production. It was before they started doing all the tax incentives that brought back all the TV shows and movies. So there wasn’t a lot going on.

Back in the day when you could get jobs by answering an ad in the New York Times, my wife got a job working in Phyllidia restaurant with Lydia Bastianich, who was just becoming a known chef. She had her first PBS show, cookbooks, etcetera. My wife worked for her for a couple of years, another couple of restaurant groups, circumstances became what they were: 9/11, recession. I didn’t have a job, and she was looking to do her own thing. So I started temporarily helping her out in PR, and that was 22 years ago.

Julie:
Got it. Wow. That’s great. And you have such an interesting background in video production and, film production too. I’m sure that adds to it.

Michael:
It’s very interesting how things developed, especially social media and the way the media has evolved. When we started, I had no idea. I didn’t know what PR was, I had produced things. I had managed people and I built a TV studio, so my background was very. creative and also very pragmatic. Like, what do we need to get done? And so that later came into effect when we started doing culinary events, because I could get into the nitty gritty and treat it as a producer.

Whether it’s getting chefs or ordering tables and linens and all that fun stuff, the writing portion of it evolved because we were traveling a lot and I’m like, Oh, I should try and write about travel because I wasn’t getting anywhere writing screenplays. And so I pitched somebody something, and that led to the next thing.

And kind of the way you would build a freelance career, right? That you do a couple of things. And then I ran into an editor at one of the spectators at the event. I’m like, Hey, do you know about this winemaker who’s making wine in Vermont? And he’s what are you talking about, wine in Vermont? What is that? And then, I talked to him and pitched a story. So my PR side came into my ability to sell freelance writing as well.

So we were going along together. And, we started building a company. It’s not a large company. We have at any given time up to 6 employees right now. We’re at 3 plus ourselves. And that’s like the manageable level that allows us to be involved with all the clients, know the clients personally, the world of restaurants is very different than a corporate world.

It’s a lot of its mom and pop. It’s a lot of people. who are first-generation or second-generation Americans. So we’ve, our travels and our experiences help us help those people be as successful as they can be, given the very challenging world of restaurants in New York and all that entails.

Why is the Restaurant Industry so Competitive?

Julie:
That was my next question. I’ve been reading – I did some research before the show today – and I’m reading that about 50 to 60 percent of restaurants survive past their fifth year of business. So what makes the restaurant industry so competitive?

Michael:
Because things built on dreams are a different foundation than things built on physical things, right? And opening a restaurant is very capital-intensive to get it going. So everybody says if you, whatever your budget is, to open a restaurant, you might as well just double it because that’s going to happen. That’s where it’s going to wind up.

Is it Real Estate Costs?

Julie:
Is a lot of that because of real estate or real estate prices? Certainly, here in New York, it must be very costly.

Michael:
Real estate is definitely one of the areas that’s a big challenge. used to be able to get 20-year leases. Now you can get a 10-year lease or maybe a 5-year lease. So if you think about it, if you’re going for longevity, a lot of places they hit the ninth year and they’re like, Oh wow, you’re going to raise my rent like 50 percent and. There’s a big difference between getting that after 10 years and after 20 years. But on the flip side of it, obviously, we just went through a pandemic, and we can still see the results just walking around our neighborhoods that there are spaces available.

And after the pandemic, there was a lot of incentives, six months free, things like that, lower prices for the first couple of years. Some landlords did a percentage of sales deal just to fill the space. But again, if you’re having challenges getting a liquor license, for example, which became a very big problem in New York and still is a problem or if you’re trying to get gas connected by Con Ed, These are things that are going to slow you down in a market like New York, because New York is very, particular in, some ways. The liquor license is, that comes from New York state. They’re overwhelmed. A lot of people retired in that office.

After an epidemic, they had to train new people to avoid conflicts of interest. They do not hire people from the liquor industry. Therefore, they train people from zero who may not know anything. They may not know the difference between different types of liquor or anything, so along the way, they passed some laws to alleviate this.

You can get a temporary liquor license now, but then all it did at the beginning was everybody applied for a temporary license and the full license. At the same time. So that still created a bottleneck. And it’s like you need to know this upfront when you’re gonna get into the world of restaurants, there are certain realistic ways you have to look at things, right?

A lot of people, when they’re opening a restaurant, if you have a lot of money, you can go into a white box space. and build it out the way you want, get all your brand-new kitchen equipment. That’s going to cost you a million, 2 million, right? So a lot of people don’t have that kind of money. What usually happens is you’re taking over a preexisting restaurant space. And when you’re doing that, you have pluses and minuses. You should have the infrastructure, although sometimes Con Edison will come in and say, This wasn’t done correctly. We can’t turn on your gas. That happened to one of our clients for about, it was about a four-month delay.

The other thing is you’re inheriting equipment that you hope works. And, so you think that you’re getting ahead by doing that, but sometimes you’re not. We had somebody who just took over a restaurant space, and okay, everything’s here. But then they really looked at it and had an engineer look at it, and they’re like, no, you have to replace the floor. And so you can’t do any other construction in the space. So that’s the kind of, that’s how restaurants start. So a lot of restaurants start on their back foot, oh, we have all these expenses. And sometimes they even forget to get to like the PR and marketing point of it until very late in the game.

Our goal is to try and be there early, even if we’re just consulting on certain things or keeping an eye on certain things, because we have to ask a lot of questions when we start. And one of them is, okay, who are you? What’s your concept? What’s your opening plan? Everybody wants to soft open for a month. There are a lot of things that we need to set up so that the restaurant can be successful.

Is it Getting Media Out There?

Julie:
Plus, if you’re working on pitching the media, there’s a lead time.

Michael:
Yes, and the media has changed a lot. it’s over the years. It’s, there’s, there are fewer outlets. It was a very fast consolidation where Vox Media now owns New York Magazine and Grub Street, and they own Eater, and they own Thrillist, and then they decided Thrillist is going to become a travel publication. So we lost restaurant coverage there.

New York is interesting because it’s an underserved market for restaurant information. A lot of cities have a more robust media landscape. Let’s say New York, because there are so many things happening. They will list anywhere from 10, 15, or 20 new openings a week. Now, not all of those are restaurants. Some of it’s a donut shop or bakery things, or the next branch of Chick-fil-A or whatever. But, the coverage is very front-loaded, and it’s very much loaded when you are opening.

Who’s behind it? That’s when you get the biggest push, and that’s a big change. So we have to adjust our PR strategy, starting one to two months in advance, getting all the information together, and then putting the story together, then talking to the media, and then getting your media placements.

And then, depending on the type of project, it either becomes something longer-term or shorter-term. There’s obviously social media and PR were very separate and now they’re linked. Social media is a huge part of restaurant PR and working with influencers and getting them in and getting them to repost and do reels.

All of that is a huge PR component now. Yeah. And starting from scratch, right? If you’re not a known company that’s opening this restaurant, you have to build your social media presence from the bottom up. Basically, from zero and Instagram has made that more challenging, as they pursue TikTok and doing more videos.

Social media companies are, they’re there to make money, right? So they want you to post and then boost your business. Your posts so that you get ads. So for restaurants, the best and quickest way to do it is just getting influencers. And those are the people when you’re sitting and having dinner, and there’s somebody over there with the light, and right over here.

That’s vital for restaurants because you’re reaching a different generation. One of the things the restaurant industry is grappling with is that there’s a huge generational difference. When we all went out to restaurants, it was like me, somebody from the suburbs didn’t know anything about food.

All of a sudden, I’m in New York, and food is just exploding. There was. Farm-to-table restaurants. Oh, what’s farm to table? We didn’t know what farm-to-table was. and what’s regional Chinese, and all these exciting things which were brand new to us. The next generation has come along, and it’s been very different because they’re much more used to having things delivered to them, sent to them.

The building I live in it’s a very tall high rise, and every elevator has somebody from Grubhub or Uber Eats delivering food to people. And so restaurants have to realize that this is a different generation, and it’s not the going-out generation. The pandemic had a certain effect, of course. Delivery is such a huge part of things now. If you remember during the pandemic, there are delivery fee caps, because before that, the companies are charging like 20, 25%, they would put marketing costs on top of that because everything, it’s like you Google and you go to Uber Eats or something, they are serving you things in a certain order in a category.

And if you pay for marketing, you go to the top, right? So all these are expenses. And every restaurant owner has to weigh this along with paying higher wages. And, because the pandemic probably increased kitchen wages by 20, 25 percent across. Which was necessary. You’re having people work 60, 70 hours a week, and they were making like 18 bucks an hour.

Yeah. They work very hard. It’s a thankless job in some ways of working in a New York City kitchen, which could be in a basement, maybe you can’t even stand up straight. It’s a tough job. And, they deserve that. All this stuff is now compounded. We had inflation. Inflation wasn’t just food, by the way. It was cooking oil. It was take out containers, so everybody who takes something from a restaurant or gets it delivered, there’s a take out container involved, right? That’s going to cost you, cause they’re like 50 cents. People don’t realize all the costs that factor in.

How Do You Create A Story For A Restaurant?

Julie:
So, how do you create a story for a restaurant? What’s your approach? So the number one thing for us is, who is behind the restaurant? American media in general is very personality focused, so it’s very important for us that we have somebody with a good story, whether it’s a couple opening their first restaurant or a chef, coming here from, say, Korea or Italy, that it’s been their dream to open a restaurant in New York.

Michael:
The story is about the person most of the time. Sometimes you’ll have something that’s more in the fast casual, or it’s more concept-driven. Our preference is the personal side of things, because that’s just what the media likes. And also the best media opportunities for chefs are things like submitting recipes, quotes.

Media and commerce are also crisscrossing now. So there’s a lot, if you go on food and wine and sites like that. A lot of the ways they make money is by selling products through affiliate links. So they will have, like, tomato sauce or marinara sauce, jams and jellies, pots and pans, and things like that.

And so they will tie in stories. And as for chefs. and then tie in to what they can sell to make their money on the back end there. So if we have a personality that is spoken, spoken has a good story that allows us to broaden the coverage beyond.

Hey, it’s Tuesday; It’s the New York Times. Here’s your three lines restaurants up there, next day is like Eater, so we’re constantly figuring out how to broaden coverage and reach out to TV, for example, which is then you get into having somebody good on camera and a lot of people aren’t good on camera and some people can be trained.

Sometimes there’s a language barrier. Things like that. So we’re looking at a whole package and deciding what our strategy is and what the tools are that we can have in our arsenal to get the publicity, because as you mentioned, it’s extremely challenging. It’s very competitive.

This week, there are 10 known restaurant openings. Next week they’ll be the same. The next week will be less because of Thanksgiving. But then you’re into the holidays, and then you’re into January, which is, just people don’t go out as much in January, or you have Dry January.

So you know, for us, we’re always thinking, okay, what are we doing now? But also, how are we going to approach this in, say, two months, when it’s dry January? You have to be prepared for that now.

So it’s what are your mocktails? What are some specials you can do? Things like that. Because restaurants are thinking, they know January is going to be down. They know, depending on the day, Valentine’s Day could be Valentine’s week. It depends. And that’s the bright spot. Then you go back into spring, and then summer in New York is the great exodus. And we saw that this summer. I don’t know if you saw the report by the New York City Hospitality Alliance that 72 percent of restaurants were down in summer, and that was something that hasn’t happened to that extent before.

Julie:
And what do they attribute that to?

Michael:
I think it was a combination of inflation, people still traveling after the pandemic, and also the fact that now you have a generation that for the first time has to pay student loans back because they were on hold from March 2020. Until last fall, student loans were on hold. If you’re paying a couple of hundred bucks a month, that’s a nice meal in a restaurant for sure.

How Do You Control The Story Once It Is In A Journalist’s Hands?

Julie:
So I think you’ve answered my next question, which was How do you control the story once it’s in a journalist’s hands?

Michael:
Very hard. There are expectations that people have, based on false information that’s out there in the universe. So one I mentioned already was soft launch in and things like that. Years before social media, you could be open for a week or two weeks or a month, and when PR announced it, that would be the opening, right? So that was control.

Now you have Google reviews within 24 hours. So we need to make sure and protect the client and say.

Hey, this is how the media works. The media has hundreds and hundreds of emails coming every day. If they’re covering restaurant openings, they’re getting emails about the opening of everything.

So you need to make sure that you are getting on these lists for openings and then potentially for reviews, and that is so interesting because Google is like another media outlet. Yes, and now even Google has decided that Google is more important than the media because anytime you search for anything, you have AI results right at the top of the page.

Then you have everything else. And I don’t know, sometimes that’s helpful, but if you’re trying to find a restaurant, it’s not super helpful for Google AI to explain something to you. A lot of websites have actually seen traffic go down because of this. But our goal is pretty simple. It’s to get the story together, get the timing together, get everybody on the same page so that ideally we launch a website and social media right around the opening, whatever you’re going to do in terms of friends and family or preview meals. That has to be something that is not open to the public. You have to control everything so that you can give the client the best shot.

It’s very disheartening when some writer will say, Oh, that opened two weeks ago because I saw these Google reviews and that’s, that could be friends and family, or that could just be people trying to be helpful, which is like, Hey, Oh, my friend’s opening a restaurant. I’m going to put a Google review. Don’t do that. Just wait. Wait for it to be organic. Wait for it to be real. So it’s a lot of conversations. It’s a lot of explaining to restaurants the world of the media and how that works, and getting them to listen.

Julie:
Yes. Because, as you said very often, it is a passion-fueled business.

Michael:
Exactly. And the good news is when you’re working with small businesses, independently owned restaurants. I would say we’ve had about 90 90 percent good relations, with people that are, eager to work with us that they appreciate and understand our expertise. We’ve opened at least 200 restaurants in New York. And we understand the challenges and we understand, hoe hard it’s going to be for them to even open, people say, okay, I hired a GM and I, I hired the chef, I hired this. And, sometimes people are giving somebody a chance, right?

Like a chef who hasn’t been an executive chef before, but does that chef know how to do ingredient costing and ordering, and manage a kitchen? And there’s a lot that goes into a restaurant. so we’re also there watching the guardrails as we’re going along, working on the story, working with the owners, but also asking questions at certain points because we’ve done it from so many different angles, and it might be their very first time.

What About Food Inspection Ratings, Food Safety, and Bad Experiences?

Julie:
So I imagine there’s a lot of crisis management in what you do. You mentioned some of the things, protecting the restaurant around too early, Google reviews, etcetera. But what about when it comes to food inspection ratings, food safety, and just bad experiences?

Michael:
Yeah, some of that, some of this will just come out of nowhere. We actually had a restaurant once where they had an A every year, and then one time an inspector came in, looked at something that nobody had ever had a question about, and then suddenly they had a bad rating, and these things do happen.

I don’t know how much the dining public focuses on that as much as they get a great vibe from a restaurant.

Julie:
But it is in the front window, right? You have to make it has to be prominent feature.

Michael:
So, yes, for sure, and now you have a situation where there are not enough health inspectors. So people are waiting to get re-inspected, and so that’s a whole other challenge of just you know that kind of bureaucratic part of things like liquor licenses and so on, we try to pre-protect clients and make sure that they have everything together ahead of time.

Thank you, Michael!

Julie:
Okay. Michael, this has been a great conversation. I learned a ton. I didn’t know all the ins and outs and all the factors that go into developing and managing PR for restaurants. So, thank you so much for enlightening us.

And how can people get in touch with you?

Michael:
You can send an email to [email protected]. Check out our website. We just completely redid our website, made it a lot more modern and friendly, and are happy to answer questions and jump on an intro call and just see what people are doing, what they need.

Julie:
Wonderful. Thanks again, Michael. And for everyone else, if you like what you saw today, please visit my website at wantleverage.com and download my free tip sheet. Make your C suite stand out on LinkedIn. See you next time on PR Patter. Thanks.