By Nancy Wood
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” – Charles Dickens’s famous first line from A Tale of Two Cities can certainly be applied to the past year. Because while there’s no doubt the pandemic has been one of the worst of times if any semblance of a silver lining can be found for restaurateurs, it was also a moment in time to step back, assess, pivot like a spinning top – and let the creative juices flow.
Dine-in turned to takeout, curbside pickup became the order of the day, menus were pared down and reimagined, and the opportunity for guests to buy alcohol to-go became a reality. And in some cases, dreams that had been percolating for a long time came true.
The underlying theme behind each and every change that impacted a restaurant’s ability to stay safe, stay open and make sales was flexibility and ingenuity. As Georgia and the nation begin taking steps to return to a sense of normalcy, restaurateurs are discovering their new ways of operating and fresh ideas borne from desperate times have some real staying power.
New Ways to Communicate
For the Castellucci Hospitality Group, with Italian and Spanish concepts that typically fall in the fine dining category, the mere idea of takeout wasn’t on the marketing menu in early 2020.
“When Fred came home one night and said I needed to set up all the locations on Uber Eats,” recalls Lauren Castellucci, director of sales and marketing – and CEO Fred Castellucci’s wife – “I said ‘we don’t do takeout – that’s not who we are.’”
At the time, there was some talk of the coronavirus, but, she says, “He had spoken to an executive who had recently been in Japan and said ‘something really challenging is coming our way, and we need to get ahead of it.’”
That night was CHG’s first foray into takeout. “Three weeks later, the entire city was shut down,” she remembers. “From that moment on we knew we had to be open-minded, and even though our concepts were not typically thought of in this particular fashion, we had to make changes and be nimble.” Since two of the company’s concepts are Italian, the menus were more takeout-friendly. But for their Spanish tapas concepts, Castellucci says, “We had to get really creative about our marketing.”
The biggest challenge from a marketing perspective was getting their message out and the frequency of communications that their guests came to expect. Fortunately, over the years the company has accumulated an email database of some 50,000 customers from its portfolio of restaurants.
On a typical pre-COVID week, Castellucci says, “We might email our customers once a week or maybe once every other week to showcase something we were doing in one of the restaurants – a cooking class or special holiday menu.”
But at the height of the pandemic? “We were emailing every single email database every single day.” While that pace was incredibly stressful, says Castellucci, the email marketing ended up not just as a platform for sales, but a platform for communication that included COVID protocols and safety issues. “What we really learned was that guests needed to hear from us and they wanted to hear from us,” she says.
The next iteration of marketing communication was even more surprising: text messaging guests. “I never would have imagined that we would text our guests,” Castellucci says. “To get a text from a fine dining restaurant didn’t seem appropriate.” But to reach a different demographic, “I felt like email and Instagram were getting exhaustive,” she says.
Today the group uses a platform that pushes out text messages about special promotions at their restaurants and offers two-way communication. “We were very careful about respecting the text laws and text privacy,” she emphasizes, “but we send out a message and guests opt-in to receive our marketing. I can’t believe how well guests have responded to it and how effective it is.” In fact, Castellucci says they can send out a message about a $12 pasta promotion on Tuesdays at Sugo Kitchen, their restaurant in Johns Creek, and “within 10 minutes, we have 30 orders.”
Leveraging What You Have
For a large franchise operation like Mellow Mushroom with 180 locations in 21 states – and 44 locations in Georgia – having a concept steeped in the delivery tradition was a built-in asset. Another plus was having their own branded online ordering system in place, enabling the marketing team to push out promotions to guests on a regular basis.
“From March 2020 through the end of last June, the marketing team put together probably 20 different promotions,” says Anne Mejia, vice president of brand development for the parent company, Atlanta-based Home Grown Industries of Georgia. “Some were optional – some we pushed across the whole organization.”
Unlike many franchise operations, Mellow Mushroom has a distinct brand culture. With locations known for their eclectic design and art installations, no two look the same.
“Each restaurant is unique,” says Mejia, “with its own unique works of art.”
Using the company’s emphasis on art and artists during the pandemic reaped some real benefits, starting with their Art of Mellow sweepstakes. “The idea was born after months of dismal news,” re-calls Mejia. “We wanted to do something fun and out-of-the-box.”
Last fall, the company engaged 12 artists to create original art that was raffled each day to customers ordering online. Anyone who ordered could opt-in to enter a randomized drawing, and every 24 hours different kinds of art were given away – from T-shirts, sweatshirts and backpacks to poster, stickers and cups, even garden gnomes.
“If you weren’t a winner,” says Mejia, “you would get a link to some digital art you could use as a screensaver or to put on your phone. Everybody walked away with a little bit of art.” During the promotion, Majia says there was a 3% uptick in traffic and online ordering.
While Majia doesn’t know if Mellow Mushroom will necessarily do sweepstakes again, there is a current promotion with Lagunitas beer to raise funds for animal shelters across the country. “We worked with a couple of artists to come up with some fun, clever merchandise, and we’re donating the sales proceeds to Best Friends Animal Society,” she says.
Every Sunday this summer, Mellow Mushroom restaurants offer a Best Friends package featuring a medium cheese pizza, pretzel bites and a pitcher of Lagunitas beer (or a 6-pack of beer if ordered online). For every package purchased, the company donates $1 to the nonprofit, and customers can also buy specially designed T-shirts, dog bowls, leashes or dog bandanas.
Obviously, driving traffic has been critical throughout the last year, and since online ordering is still popular, special promotions are here to stay. Even with locations open for dine-in, Mejia says they’re still seeing about 25% of their customers order for delivery. And interestingly, phone orders have been really stable.
“I think it’s a testament to the fact that we started in 1974,” she adds. And as dine-in increases, franchisees are once again sponsoring in-restaurant events like trivia nights and live music. One location in Georgia, says Mejia, even holds a Disney character lunch on Saturdays for kids. “You can lunch with a woman dressed like Snow White.”
The Proliferation of Alcohol To-Go
Giving the customer what they want has always been a mantra central to the restaurant business. For a lot of Georgia consumers, that means alcohol to-go. Since the regulations during the pandemic were constantly changing, most restaurateurs were just trying to keep up.
“Alcohol really drives average checks,” says Castellucci, “so if we were able to under the law, we were selling it however we could.”
At the CHG restaurants, the approach was around awareness. “If you were ordering takeout, think of alcohol as part of that component.” Early on, Castellucci says, they were even able to sell wine by the case or half case. “The name of the game was responding to what the customers needed and what they were asking for,” she says.
During the pandemic, meeting customer needs was just as important at Mellow Mushroom. New menu items were introduced as well as a new cocktail program that started last September and a seasonal cocktail program this past April. But for anyone who is familiar with Mellow Mushroom, the beer is the thing.
“Our average restaurant has 24 taps, and we carry a lot of hyper-local beers,” says Mejia, “and our alcohol to- go program is very beer-centric.” When the pandemic
hit and rules became more relaxed, Mejia says the most popular item was a six-pack of local bottled or canned beer. “The second- best-selling item was cocktails to-go,” she adds, “because those are things people don’t like to make at home.”
Even with the new alcohol to-go law in Georgia in place now, Mejia says that “ordering cocktails from restaurants to-go is still in its infancy in Georgia. There are other states that had programs in the past, and now they’re coming back to it,” she continues, “but in Georgia, this is new territory.”
As she says, alcohol by itself is an add-on, “and starting to pair alcohol with food is what we think is really going to cement that guest behavior. We’re starting to see that the secret sauce to all of this is putting alcohol and food together.”
The Rise of the Brand Extension
If anyone has a bead on alcohol sales, it’s Randy Pechin, longtime bartender and owner of Little Spirit, a cocktail bar in the intown neighborhood of Inman Park. As an independent operation, Pechin went through what most owners did – closing for three months, then slowly reopening with fewer seats, social distancing and plexiglass around the bar. Even today, he’s still running at limited capacity, “but it’s working out quite well. We were never an assigned seating space,” he says. “It was always just come in and find a seat to hang out.”
But during Covid, Pechin shifted to assigned seating and taking reservations, which is another thing he had never done. As he moves toward more normal operations, the plexiglass is gone and the outdoor patio seating has expanded, but capacity is still limited.
If there was one pandemic silver lining for Pechin, it may well have been the time he had to research and launch his latest venture: Sideshow – a small walk-up bar featuring shaved ice cocktails. “It’s something I’ve always wanted to do,” says Pechin, “but it’s not something that’s conducive to the Little Spirit space – it’s a little loud when yout’re in the middle of service and you’re having to shave ice.”
Since he already had the space, Pechin and his team began researching and planning. Although he considered opening Sideshow earlier than April 2021, it took a considerable amount of time “and a decent amount of research to get us to where we were happy with the product – and we weren’t in a rush.”
Initially, Pechin brought on someone to specifically lead the program. “Bringing someone in who was able to take the idea of doing boozy shaved ice cocktails and making those delicious – and not just sugar bombs – is a challenge, but she’s very much into the science behind making a good syrup and a good cocktail.”
Sideshow’s space is literally a door with a walk-up window, says Pechin. “We have a little desk that rolls forward, and you don’t go inside the space at all,” he says. Because it’s in a more playful category, Pechin serves the cocktails in large, ornate plastic tulip cups. “We garnish them like they’re a craft cocktail, and it’s intended to be more fun.”
While Pechin does offer beer and wine to-go based on the current guidelines, he hasn’t started bottling cocktails yet. “We will do a to-go cocktail as long as you’re enjoying it on the property,” he says. “But we haven’t broached anything that would be sealed or bottled. We want to make sure we’re compliant and approach that correctly.”
Meant to be a 2021 answer to limited capacity, Pechin says that as capacity is picking up inside at Little Spirit, Sideshow is “also intended to be an answer for the people who aren’t comfortable coming indoors. If it works well,” he says, “it could be a permanent fixture. For now, we’re just happy to have a new part of our brand.”
Brand extensions also took root at the Castellucci Hospitality Group. In addition to launching their own wine label, Más Asi, (which translates to “more like that”), the group created chef-curated packages for special occasions that include wine or cocktail pairings. The idea, says Castellucci, “was to help re-create those special moments even if it was at home.” The special themed packages for Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day included collaborating with an Atlanta chocolatier and a nationally renowned florist for the to-go packages. “We replicated it for dine-in and to-go recently for Valentine’s Day,” she adds.
But one unexpected surprise was a concept rooted in a pop-up. After creating a few pop-ups during the pandemic, CHG’s most successful one is here to stay: MUJŌ, a high-end, traditional sushi experience.
Launched in June of 2020 for take-out only, with partner executive chef J. Trent Harris, Castellucci says, “We thought we would keep it going for maybe a month, and a month turned into three months which turned into six months. And at the end of last year, it was something that we couldn’t walk away from.” The anticipated opening of the brick-and-mortar space is this fall.
Today, as the industry leaves its “winter of despair” and looks forward to the “best of times,” once again, there’s no question the lessons learned throughout the pandemic will not be forgotten. New ways to communicate with guests and creative ideas now rule the day.
“We took risks that we never would’ve taken because what did we have to lose?” Castellucci says. “Nothing was ever off-limits, and I think it’s really shaped the way we approach our business now.”
