Miriam Silverberg believes the three restaurants for which she’s the publicist are successful because she’s lucky.
But restaurants don’t market themselves, and marketing is too complicated to be lucky.
Silverberg works with three New York City restaurants— Il Punto, on the edge of both the theater district and the garment district; Pazzia on the residential Upper East Side near homes and schools, and Albella, in the financial district—all of which are managing to survive these difficult times in a competitive market.
And they’re doing that because of the hard work Silverberg’s putting into marketing them. She’s taking note of the location of each restaurant and playing directly to its demographics.
“I’m looking around for businesses that are near the restaurant, feeling that they need to take people out for lunch or dinner and need to have parties some place. So I go through the phone book and make a lot of calls.”
For Il Punto, she contacts the nearby off-Broadway theaters and asks them how the restaurant can work with them.
“For example, for opening night we’ll deliver hors d’oeuvres for 100 people—for the theatergoers—and we’ll get a free advertisement in their program. They’ll sometimes put a poster up in the lobby and a sign on the table saying ‘Compliments of Il Punto.’ We give them the hors d’oeuvres in return for the advertising.”
She’s also worked with the garment center companies because they often have clients they take out for lunch or dinner. During a cold call, if the person she’s called is receptive, she invites him or her to lunch as her guest. “I bring them to the restaurant and they like what they see, they like the food, and then they come back and they pay, naturally.”
