Publishing Alinea's process built an audience before opening

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 56:52

   Yeah, yeah. Forum boards. There's a foodie one called Eagle at the time. You can still look at, I mean, like the archives are up. And I was kind of fascinated with open source software at the time. And I do what I always do. And I start like reading how to run a restaurant, like restaurant for dummies. I'm reading all these books. I'm like, just like with the options. I'm like, I feel like none of these actually is, they're not teaching me anything on how to run a restaurant.

2. 57:19

   So I'm now building a restaurant, but I don't know how to run a restaurant. I wrote this one spreadsheet that was, I call it the universal restaurant calculator. It was literally one tab with like 80 cells. So any input that I could think of, like cost of insurance, like that's a cell, right? And I couldn't think of any more cells. Like at the end of the day, like anybody listening to this could probably, if they sat in a restaurant long enough and really thought about it, you could come up with the cells.

3. 57:46

   It's not that, it's not that big. And that's why restaurants fail because the actual bar entry is really kind of pretty low. You know, anyone who has a good dinner party or thinks they can cook something can start a restaurant. So I just started like going, okay, what, how can we learn from our customers? And maybe there's someone else out there that I can learn from. And so I was like, let's just open source the whole business plan.

4. 58:11

   So I created this thing called the Alinea Project on eGollet. And it was like, hey, here's how we're thinking about naming the place. And here are all the names we didn't take, and here are the ones we did take. Here's the menu development. These are foodies? These are chefs? Who's in this forum? So it turns out it was a lot of people. I mean, we got hundreds of thousands of views. So suddenly the press was interested.

5. 58:34

   So, you know, Food & Wine and Gourmet Magazine and, you know, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal were all like, oh, this is interesting. Like, these people are building a restaurant. And did you say openly, like, we're trying to build a Michelin star restaurant in Chicago? I didn't say, I don't think I said Michelin star. I think we're trying to build the best restaurant in America. Trying to build the best restaurant in America.

6. 58:53

   And it needs to be profitable. You start building in public or open sourcing your ideas. And you're saying you're doing it because you kind of want smart people to be pushing back on it. I wanted feedback from people that might come across it. and then I wanted to drum up future customers because when people have an engagement where they feel like, oh, I watched that and now it's open, I feel like a lot of- a little bit like the origin story is already known, right?

7. 59:28

   It's like one of my favorite documentaries of all time that I literally watch once a year is Hearts of Darkness. It's the making of Apocalypse Now. You wanna talk about fear? Every time I'm like, oh, I'm doing too much. I watch Francis Ford Coppola, like, you know, with the Philippine, you know, like Navy and Air Force, like actually going, you know, Ferdinand Marcos or whatever, going to like, you know, get Dennis Hopper out of there.

8. 59:53

   They're actually gonna start shooting. you know he mortgaged his house twice all that stuff right so I'm not really taking much risk by doing a vineyard here compared to that so it's very comforting and I felt like by putting that out to the world people would have this engagement of like they see the process they see how we're thinking about it like we would write like I read I look back at some like there's you cringe always oh yeah it's cringy like you know the purpose of bread like is it you know and why do you think than most restaurants give you bread well it fills you up they can give you less of everything else like that could have been the whole post it's americans like fat and bread is a good vehicle for butter right or oil and we can cut down our portion size if we give them a big basket of bread

9. 1:00:39

   right that is literally why they do it and it's delicious bread's delicious you know but like we wrote like 4 000 words on the purpose of bread but you know we had hundreds of thousands of people And one of the coolest things was that the, Sean Brock, who's a very famous chef now, he was the first customer through the door on the first day. Wow. And he wrote on there. So did you have like a wait list by the time you launched or?

10. 1:01:02

    Yeah, we had, we had like opening night, we had New York Times there, head food critic. Michael Rollman told us like, that guy is the head critic of the New York Times. So you didn't know what anyone looked like back then. So you couldn't know this, but if you hadn't been publishing that stuff, but you opened the same restaurant. There's no chance it would have been as good. No chance. that was like such a marketing feat how do you think about product marketing storytelling