Branching out
Irene Sax reports.
| More 'Front Burner' articles in this issue |
| Let them sew cake! |
| Princely piggy goes to market |
| Don't eat the food! |
| Splatter free |
| Pint and shoot |
| Honey, I shrunk the chef |
New York City—Your restaurant's a success and you're thinking of opening a branch. In Vegas? In London? How about Tokyo? The Hall Company, a New York City–based public relations firm, has opened a Tokyo office to help you do just that.
In fact, that's just part of the business, said owner Steven Hall when he talked to us on—where else?—his cell phone on his way to Japan. Along with partner Sam Firer, Hall teamed up with Alvaro Perez, the Venezuelan founder of Metromet, a Tokyo-based restaurant consulting and management company. By working together, they hope to facilitate American-Japanese restaurant business.
"On the simplest level," Hall said, "we can bring Western chefs to Japan. Metromet will manage the restaurants, and we can do PR in both countries. They have very few people over there who do lifestyle public relations as we know it."
"We can also help Japanese restaurateurs who want to come to New York. They want the prestige of opening here, but there's a vast gap in their knowledge of how to do it. It's more than the language: they don't know the neighborhoods or real estate agents or how to structure a deal. They can get their fish FedExed in from Japan but don't know where to buy milk."
Then there's the matter of staffing. In New York, Hall will help Japanese managers hire and train a Western staff whose résumés and styles might not mean anything to them. In Japan, the problems are different: since they don't have a tipping culture, servers are expected to be just pleasant order-takers. "They don't know how to upsell, to offer different vodkas or suggest customers might want dessert," Hall said. Alvaro's company will show the staff how to approach people the American way.
Won't this limit the attention he can give to The Hall Company's New York clients?
"Far from it," he said. "Everyone wants customers from abroad. With a well-established PR business in Tokyo, we'll be able to place stories about their restaurants not only there but all over Japan." (And beyond: the next step is India, where Hall plans to open an office in Bangalore to tap into the hot Indian economy.)
Now that he's making so many short trips to Japan, how does he deal with the jet lag? "It's a 12 hour flight and a 12 hour time difference," said Hall. "So you get there the same time you leave: not so bad. Of course, when you come back you find you've lost a day. But it's worth it. This is the most exciting thing I've done in years."
