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This article has been taken down due to legal action by Menulog.    

The team at Marketing4Restaurants recently saw an ad for a Sensis Website and it was trumpeting the fact that they get 28,000,000 visits per year to their 10,000+ customers. We thought that we would dig into the numbers, because online marketing is all about the data!  We can’t be sure of the number of websites, it just lists 10,000+, but… More »

BRW has an interesting article with the history of Dimmi and online bookings in Australia.  It is entitled Dimmi vs Goliaths – how the restaurant booking app held out for the best offer.  The article raises a number of questions. Live Bookings evidently attempted to muscle into the Australian business early in the life of Dimmi, according to the article.… More »

In life sometimes an opportunity presents itself by chance that you have to take advantage of, which is certainly the case for the Ross Village Bakery in Tasmania. Located in the unspoilt historic town of Ross, the Bakery has operated on site for more than 100 years, and, surprisingly, has become the destination for Japanese fans of the popular anime… More »

Phineas T. Barnum, the 19th century American showman and circus owner once said ‘there’s no such thing as bad publicity,’ or as Oscar Wilde once expressed ‘the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.’ And Mike Duffy, owner of Wellington’s Ekim Burgers’ is certainly being talked about. It goes without saying that owning and running… More »

Yelp buys Eat24 – What’s next? 2015 is shaping up to be a massive year in the Restaurant software industry as Yelp buys Eat24.  This follows on from the Zomato purchase of Urbanspoon, Opentable set to launch in Australia, and the acquisition of Eatnow by Menulog. The Yelp acquiistion will be interesting.  Yelp is a fairly natural channel for online ordering… More »

Some restaurants are getting really good at this.  There are a lot of tools out there now to manage your online marketing – Pages Manager for Facebook, Tweetdeck for Twitter, email programs for your database and great analytics packages for your website.  By combining them, restaurants are increasing the ROI of their marketing and we are seeing a big uptake… More »

Too many restaurants have been ignoring the intellectual property of their business.  There are a number of businesses that use restaurants to provide a service, such as Dimmi and Book A Restaurant.  What some restaurants don’t understand is that they are sharing their customer’s details with these companies and these companies are commoditising the restaurant experience.  Pick a cuisine and… More »

Dimmi recently released a blog article comparing itself to Uber was quite prescient, but not for the reasons that Dimmi stated in the article.  There are a number of similarities between Uber and Dimmi that very interesting to explore. Both Dimmi and Uber are facing changing markets.  Uber is looking at completely replacing it’s drivers with Self Driving Cars and… More »

Have a website:  Many restaurants haven’t got a website because they think it is too expensive, too time consuming or they don’t need one because they have a Facebook page.  The truth is that unless you are an ‘it’ restaurant where everyone wants to go (and realistically, less than .1% of all restaurants fall into this category), you need a… More »

There are a couple of other trends we think are worthwhile keeping an eye on.  Communal dining can be great fun, increases the number of seats that you can have for a given floorplan.  Farm to table is becoming increasingly popular and people are liking the experience of trying different parts of the animal prepared in unusual ways.  Gluten free… More »

Differentiation is the act providing a point of difference and it is becoming the increasingly popular secret weapon in restaurant marketing.  We are seeing a lot of successful restaurants who are moving away from cuisine as differentiation towards much finer types of offerings.  If you look at cuisines, such as Mexican, Thai, Indian, Burger or Fish and Chips, there is… More »

When people think take away they think Pizza, Indian or Chinese, but a growing number of businesses are starting to offer take away or delivery.  Take away food broadens your target market, delivery even more so.  It offers a completely different experience – in home, no need to worry about a baby sitter or a drink driving.  For restaurants, it… More »

In Australia there is not as much focus of Happy Hours as there is in the United States where they are very popular.  Many US restaurants do a great job of getting the most number of turns out of every seat possible.  This is something that many other restaurants do not focus on, but in order to increase profitability, they… More »

Big restaurants have big costs.  The rent is high, the wage bill is enormous.  We think there will be an upswing on micro restaurants, focusing like a laser on a product that they can produce to a very high level of quality and at a great price.   Examples are Food Trucks and the Emapanda Kitchen in Queenstown.  Great food at… More »

Closed door dining has really taken of in Buenos Aires.  It revolves around underground restaurants, where you really need to know someone to find them.  Casa Coupage was recommended by our concierge and they managed to squeeze us in.  You receive the address once you make the booking.  Timings where stressed in the booking and we started to worry when… More »

I am a big fan of Celebrity’s kitchens.  I have eaten on Celebrity Solstice and Century and both turn out an incredible number of meals every day at a very high level of quality.  We had one ordinary meal on Solstice, which was the first one after boarding and I think the kitchen might have just been getting up to… More »

Wayfare Tavern has a policy of keeping tables spare for walk ins.  A couple of San Fran locals had recommended it and we thought we would chance it.  The waitress at the front said “I’m sorry, we only have 2 seats at the Chef’s Table, would that be OK?”  We thought about it for half a second and accepted.  It… More »

Peter Gawron has had Saffron in Arrowtown for over 15 years and turns out some incredible food at a remarkable price point.  Arrowtown is a little historic town about 20 minutes out of Queenstown and Saffron is the culinary highlight of the area.  Being a little of the beaten track, you do feel like you have stumble on hidden gold… More »

The empanada kitchen is a little treasure tucked away in a tiny little space facing a park down by the waterfront in Queenstown. The chef, from Europe, has come up with an eclectic range of flavours, including Angus and Stout (he makes his own stout), cod and salmon, and pork and Chimi. Best thing is, they were just $5.50 each… More »

No trip to Queenstown is complete without a Ferg Burger.  It has long been an institution in Queenstown but getting listed in the Lonely Planet New Zealand travel guide projected Ferg Burgers success into the stratosphere.  It is on most peoples list before they get to Queenstown, all the locals recommend them and if you don’t hear about it, the… More »

Argentinian’s love a great BBQ and many places have elecated it to a high art form.  One of the best that we had was at a Gaucho (Cowboy) Ranch about an hour out of Buenos Aires.  The food was combined with cowboy riding and the owner of the ranch going through the workings of the horse stud to create a… More »

EI Ateno is an old theatre which has been converted into a bookstore and part of the book store has been turned into a café.  The bookstore is quite the tourist attraction in it’s own right and the café obviously creates value out of the many foreigners who can’t read Spanish.  Submarinos are quite popular in Argentina, being hot milk… More »

At Esquire, you expect great food and we got that, but when you are paying as much as Esquire charges, you really need more than that.  The food was great, awesome in fact, but what really made the night was the Sommelier.  When I commented that night to the maitre d’ he told us that our Sommelier was just 21… More »