DaveO

A little update. Toscana did NOT contact channel 8/ABC affiliate. The major media discovered the story and showed up on their own. Seems like the media has a good nose for news--probably based on experience.

I do pull for this restaurant. I just like them...both the food and the personality of the owner. @jayandstacey: As a business owner I'd try and get the emails...for so many reasons. yes..of the hundreds that were in line that could turn off some. OTOH, in a couple of weeks when they reopen..they are going to have a hard time getting visibility about the reopening...and there are so many potential people to contact about that. One huge problem that restaurant has is location. It is hidden. It has relatively miserable visibility. Every day I'd guess that 50% or more of the nearby people that could see them simply don't. They have gained customers over the years that were literally a block or two away and simply had never found them. If it were me, I'd put in effort to overcome the hidden aspect...whether emails or flyers, or any of a dozen or more different relatively low cost marketing efforts to just get seen. My experience is the positives of those efforts overcome the negatives....and asking for an email from people waiting in line is somewhat of a negative. I know those guys at Toscana. I'm not sure but I'm pretty confident they didn't contact channel 8. But then that news station is located in Roslyn nearby and getting to Toscana was easy and cheap. One person did everything. She videoed the people in line, conducted the interviews, went inside and got the "inside story" and then did the broadcasting. If she arrived at 4:45 or whenever and nobody was in line she could have gotten back to the news station in about 10 minutes total time. I do know that the news media scours sources for potential news all the time, every day. They need news. Wow...the days of big news crews with a lot of staff are long long long gone. Before writing our story I did interview diners, randomly. It was interesting to hear how they heard about the story. What comprised "viral" in this case? Certainly the word FREE was the impetus for the story to spread. I noticed that the arlnow story was retweeted 30 times (by measurement). People said they received emails. ie someone saw the story somewhere and direct contacted their friends. People in offices found the story somehow and told co workers. People saw it on facebook. Some people got calls, emails or texts from strollers in the courtyard that saw the line and learned about the free meals. One thing was that in this case, the deal was so good...people contacted their friends and family. I don't know how much of that there is with groupons and livingsocials...since a couple of million people get their emails every day. Everyone gets those!!! What I found astonishing to watch was how vividly this thing worked, relative to the very difficult effort this restaurant has had getting noticed. The entire thing occurred in a day. The owner sent a notice to arlnow the day before. They published the piece in the morning...and the news spread to thousands of people over the course of the day...if not 10's of thousands or more...and hundreds turned up. In its own right I thought it was astonishingly viral. Frankly I think the restaurateurs could speak about these things with experience.

@sthitch and @don: I think you guys are very correct. Still I found it amazing on a social media level and how viral that little single story in arlnow worked. It had all the power of a livingsocial or groupon...but even better--> FREE. At 4:50 I was hungry having not eaten that day since an early breakfast and walked by that place. 30 people in line and channel 8 had a videographer. I rushed back grabbed my mobile to take pictures. At 5:10 the line was 60+ strong plus there were folks waiting on the patio who had ordered. Took some pictures and created that story. I know it has social media attractiveness on many fronts across the nation to marketers of social media, hyper local news, etc. I returned in two hours and the line was still 60+ strong of new people. Went and interviewed some people and yup they were in the neighborhood but had never visited this restaurant let alone knew it existed. In retrospect, had I been the owner and had an extra body to spare I would have taken the email addresses of every customer that night. That would have been an email marketing list of several hundred strong. He didn't have extra bodies. The staff was pumping out food at their fastest pace ever. I hope the tip jar helped to pay the staff. Mostly I was fascinated at how viral that little story went and how many people responded. yup, Don---the word FREE does work. but does it pay in the long term??? that is the trick. Also interesting to see how channel 8 news put a hopeful positive spin on it so different from your two experienced/possibly jaded perspectives. http://www.wjla.com/articles/2013/05/damaged-by-flood-arlington-restaurant-gives-out-free-food-89411.html

We found the response to a one day quick post in arlnow to be spectacular and wrote about it on our little school blog: http://www.bartending-school.com/arlington-restaurants-making-chicken-salad-chicken-sh I used to lease restaurants and just know the location inside the Courthouse courtyard is just terrible. Nearby neighbors miss the restaurant because its on the interior of the courtyard and does not have street front visibility. Hundreds of people lined up to get free meals. We interviewed some eating on the patio. Astonishingly some were neighbors and simply didn't know the restaurant was available. They liked the meals, the offer in arlnow and the genuine response from the owner taking orders. It was an incredible example of social media gone wild creating visibility that you can't get elsewhere. Now for the restaurant I hope insurance covers everything and they are back in business in two weeks or so with increased customer awareness.

Burst Pipe Leads to Free Food Offer--Tonight Only Yes, I like this pizza and pasta place and the owner. Here is a one night only opportunity. A burst pipe will lead to 2 weeks or so of renovations. But tonight only they will clear out the kitchen with a free food offer for their patio or takeout. http://www.arlnow.com/2013/05/29/free-food-at-toscana-grill-tonight/ How can you go wrong? Many local customers have grown to love this place. Its a great opportunity to give it a try.

A little recent update and admittedly shameless promotion focused on the employers in this region: Our school did a job fair for the Homestead http://www.bartending-school.com/bartender-jobs-job-fair-the-homestead at our location last week: About 20 grads showed up to get information and interview for both bartending and other hospitality jobs at this noted resort 110 miles away and necessitating a relocation. We can call on in excess of 1500 both recent and old experienced grads for any kind of bartending gig. Our placement/ personnel services are free to employers. Meanwhile, reaching out to that same large base, with regard to a particular upcoming story, we discovered mostly experienced grads bartending in Towson, Waldorf, on H Street, Adams Morgan, Arlington, and in in-house final training to get behind DC's longest bar at Ben's Next Door. If you are in need of new, experienced or any kind of folks...we are a large great free service for bartenders and various other hospitality work. We also can supply endless grads direct for bartending for any party, event, wedding, corporate event, charity event...or anything you can think of. (shameless promotion over)

Crab Decks and Tiki Bars the book and the web site.

Great story leading into a tasty looking cocktail. (would have liked to read the comments on the story...but it was taking forever to load--come on washpo.--if you can't load comments than you just can't be like dr.com geesh.

I was glancing through that list and my thoughts were moving toward .....that is an incredible resource. Freak was far from my thinking processes, but Don: If you possibly think freak... so be it. I'd characterize that list in one word as Valuable, and two words as incredible resource

I have no idea if TGIF is still trying to get its bartenders nationwide to do flair but there at least some TG's in this area with flair bartenders. One of them is in Fairfax. Some years ago the instructors at our school got caught up in flair. There really was a lot of practice and effort involved and they did become the best flair bartenders in the region going so far to be entered in "big time" flair competitions nationwide and in Canada. We had one instructor who was quite a character and got into the flair world enough that we had a visit from the #1 flair person in the world at that time per the competitions that determined that type of thing. In practice while working and with busy crowds they call some of their little tricks working flair. Really simple fiips in the midst of preparing a lot of drinks. But then some of them go far far beyond that and do put on sort of amazing shows with some pretty incredible tricks. It doesn't do anything for me...but the locals have been hired for shows, sponsored shows, done performances in the midst of some corporate events etc. I guess its fine if your thing is watching a bartender flip a bottle and catching it on his/her forehead, bouncing it off their elbow and then flipping it again 3-10 times. So if you wish to see a little flair in this region I believe there are an active group of flair bartenders at a TGIF in Fairfax at the least. If you want to watch a show be prepared to see a lot of drinking drunk bartenders from around the region cheering on some more accomplished flair bartenders try and defy gravity and perform exotic juggling type tricks while flipping bottles and possible breathing fire.

Professional Bartending School Grads: A Free Staffing Source for Caterers Our school has probably been the largest single source for catering staffers for decades (we've been around since 1968). We are the largest bartending school in the region and provide free staffing resources for employers. We are in touch with over 1400 grads at any moment and can provide huge response to your staffing needs We currently are in quick contact with well over 1400 recent and old experienced graduates interested in work. The lists grow and shrink as new grads and old grads use our contacts and some folks disconnect from us. We could expand this list as we could reach out to over 10,000 grads over the last some years that aren't using this resource but at this time this list seems to satisfy most employers that contact us with leads. We are entirely FREE to Employers: Just contact us We have never charged employers. We are not a traditional staffing company but we provide more people to more employers than any other sources around. Our grads are looking for work opportunities. Many of them work full time and want catering and special event opportunities. Among caterers in the area I believe Ridgewells has hired well over 1,000 grads in the last 4-7 years easy. As many caterers know they not only cater their own events but have a separate staffing company. Will our graduates Serve, Set Up, and do other tasks besides bartending??? --> SURE Just ask them...or tell them. Our grads are looking for part time work. Many of them do every task a caterer wants. Just ask them. Our grads can be found region wide: They are available in DC Md North and South and Virginia South to Richmond We are a large regional school we have grads from all over the greater DC metro region, throughout Southern Md, North to and beyond Baltimore, and South to Richmond and West toward .....pretty far West in Virginia. We can probably help find staff that can accommodate events throughout the region. We have experienced and new grads who will work Some of the people on our updated contact lists graduated from our school over a decade ago and have been bartending full time, part time or for events regularly. We can access grads with experience if you desire. This is especially more relevant to bar restaurant and hotel operators. We do staff parties and events directly. We aren't a caterer and don't oversee the staffing...but then the event isn't paying us directly and isn't paying overhead for the staffing. They pay the bartenders direct. When we do staff events with multiple bartenders we will pair new grads with deeply experienced graduates. Contact us for more information Email contact for our placement office is PBSplacement@gmail.com School phone number is 703 841 9700. We are quite a large source for all kinds of bartenders for all kinds of establishments. Roughly over the last 3 years we had graduates land about 1200 bartending jobs/year at least as far as we could keep track. In the last 14 months we counted over 560 graduates landing jobs in DC at over 200 different establishments of every type including venues, parties, large events, etc. I believe we staffed over 50 bartenders in two days of contacts for the inauguration events. That 560+ does not include long time bartenders who are grads such as JoJo Valenzuela at the Occidental Grill or our friend Eddie Silva seen in this video and working at high volume Park at 14th. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LG5zrsvXCuY The rest of our grads are usually split pretty evenly between finding work in Virginia or Maryland. (and I guess that is the end of this little advertisement---thanks, Don )

ah...Michael Landrum. yet another excellent idea. After all is said and done a forum for conversation with accountability wherein you are less than anonymous and can be called out...is by any measure immensely less likely to grow huge than a simple monetized highly commercial site like yelp. It just doesn't occur. Having been in a number of forums and known forum operators, worked to expand the forums, been a mod....it is very rare when they grow dramatically. In general more people would rather not share openly than would. That has been the rule of thumb over years for many topics. Forums tend to attract lurkers in far far greater numbers than participants. Video production is far less expensive than it was and video editing is far easier than it was. Damn worthy idea IMHO.

This story is simply unbelievable: or a testimony on how not to respect customers and employees http://shine.yahoo.com/work-money/kitchen-nightmare-comes-true-for-arizona-restaurant-owners-182329445.html

Don: DR.com is not yelp and yelp is not dr.com. yelp is a huge endeavor with $10's of millions of dollars behind it. From a strong inside web expert I was told that yelp used millions of dollars of its seed money to pay for 10's of thousands of initial reviews. That helped get them started. It created momentum, visibility and notoriety. It essentially created a new phenomena on the web. I think there are great ideas above. I'd try a couple. I'd figure out which one's that you have the time for and on which you need help and I'd ask for help. You have passionate helpful members. Here are a couple of other ideas. This is a slight variation on jayandstacey's idea. I'd get the names and contacts of all relevant print and web media in the area including popular blogs like prince of petworth and similar web publications. I'd keep sending out PR pieces about interesting threads just as jayandstacey mentioned. There are a lot of newsworthy interesting threads here. They keep popping up. Any time one or more pick up those pieces it goes out to tons of new and potential readers and members. 2nd) I'd make the calendar invisible to non members. Then I'd start marketing and mentioning the deals. There are a lot of great deals there available to dr.com readers now. Make the readers or visitors become members. Then start marketing, mentioning, highlighting that feature. People love love love deals. Think groupon, LivingSocial and every other deal in the books. Try and get more deals. Folks love deals. For every member...you have 3, 4, 5, 6-10 lurkers on the site. Try and give those folks more incentive to sign up rather than lurk. Promote the dcdining guide that Rich has developed. help it get more visibility. Its such a rich (no pun intended) alternative to reviewing restaurant options. Its the aggregated and composite reviews of experts. That is rich and worthwhile and will attract readers. Moreover in its current web form it will end up more easily ranking for more search phrases in google search than the forum. It will be found more frequently over time. In a short time the VA list will come out. I'd promote it. A couple of hundred Va restaurants with aggregated reviews by experts and all this neat commentary from passionate foodies on DR.com about those options....and there really isn't a great northern virginia alternative to that information. There are about 2 million people living in greater NOVA. That is a big audience. Anyways good luck. Also if one idea isn't bearing great fruit from the ideas above, others and mine...drop it and try another...and get help. These things do take time.

Had dinner there. An incredibly mediocre experience. We both had the platter. A sausage without roll, two toppings two sides. Such a mediocre sausage experience. german potato salad was tasty. Portions were small. Not the kind of place that would draw me back. Neither sausage was distinguished or memorable

This piece of news caught my attention. It has to do with the closing of a restaurant institution from Northern NJ, near where I grew up. It was one of those institutions known far and wide: Pals Cabin http://www.nj.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2013/03/legendary_pals_cabin_to_close.html The restaurant opened as a little hamburger shack in the depression in 1932. Babe Ruth ate hot dogs there, Liberace played piano there in the early days of his career, and it was included in two separate shows on The Soprano's. (all in the story--none of which I knew) Good hamburger place, good place for family meals as I recall and definitely a landmark in that region. But oof the costs per the article.

If you want to see how reviews can go political look at the reviews for Max's Delicatessan in Birmingham Alabama. I think the guy initially spoke up saying that new laws in Alabama were going to make it tough for people and restaurants. He didn't rip the anti immigrant Alabama ruling...he said it was going to be hard. It generated this attack on him...for political reasons and then it generated a review defense of his restaurant...based on politics again. You can see it here: https://plus.google.com/102137604670770131103/about?hl=en If you filter the reviews by Best or worse you'll begin to see all the politics involved. A lot of politics. not that much discussion of sandwiches

This topic sort of died out and lost popularity before I joined this forum. It's interesting and also to reread the comments relative to the dates when they were made. Yelp is notorious to business people (not just restaurants)...but it seems to have modified and eased up on its actions vis a vis the restaurants and businesses in the last year or two. You don't hear about them arm twisting or threatening the businesses as much or pursuing advertising via threats. This might have coincided with when they went public a little while ago and raised a ton of money. It might have coincided with the fact that they didn't want to encourage law suits once public. They still are adversarial and antagonistic when trying to get advertising. Meanwhile while yelp might have mitigated its "mafia like" approach to potential advertisers in the last couple of years...one thing hasn't changed. Reviews are still faked. Its a big big issue. Reviews are faked in yelp, they are faked in google+ local pages for businesses and they are faked elsewhere. There are various businesses and sources where you could buy reviews. They are all over the web. There are faked positive reviews and faked negative attack reviews. Our different smbs of various sorts which are not restaurants have been the recipients of faked reviews planted by competitors. I've seen them in google, yelp, and yahoo. There are notorious review sites where you can complain about the business. Some of them were getting huge visibility in google search. Google has a forum monitored by its staff for small businesses to try and work through the issues with getting your record straight and appropriately shown in google.com when they insert maps and brief descriptions of those businesses. That data highlights the reviews. That forum over time has been full of complaints via businesses who claim faked attack reviews by competitors. Computer repair stores in one Arizona city and auto rental places in some Florida cities were full of complaints abt competitors generating fake attack reviews. Those 2 come to my mind. I reviewed the details. They were striking. I spoke with some of the businesses. There were hundreds more similar experiences. Reviews on review sites are a modern web way of life. They are often faked. Alternatively businesses try and "manage reviews" to get a lot of positive reviews. There are businesses that operate to generate positive reviews. Its rampant in the dental and auto repair business. While there are people trying to pay "elite yelpers" to write positive reviews....there are all sorts of alternatives out there. Yelp will police those if they can...but yelp won't remove faked attack reviews no matter how much you address it and how much info you give them. Meanwhile review management firms and seo's have found how to "manipulate" yelp a little to try and get more positive reviews showcased and not filtered and hidden. One interesting thing today relative to the DC market. OpenTable is very big here. Its one of the markets that OpenTable is strongest with a large percentage of restaurants using them (larger than most cities). If you currently scan review volume for a significant number of restaurants you can find that there are roughly as many reviews on the restaurants on yelp, google + pages, and opentable. If the restaurants don't use opentable you might find as many google + reviews as yelp reviews. On your mobile you have apps that give you google local results or yelp results or opentable results. I don't think yelp is as powerful with regard to restaurants today as it was a while back. That is my opinion. DR.com is not yelp and yelp is not DR.com Yelp is hugely monetized. It raised millions of dollars. It has this enormous staffing. It has local DC yelp community people on staff. it has an enormous costly paid advertising staff. It has a sizable technical staff. DR.com provides discussions, depth, expertise, fascinating writing, reviews, more discussions etc. yelp does not. It appears to me that if only because there are dramatically more sources for reviews and alternatives to yelp it is no longer as much of a bugaboo and threat as it once was. and that is good IMHO. meanwhile long live DR.com with its quality comments.

I had some sips a while back. Gets a 100 in my estimation also.

Sebastion: Yours is an amazing story, and worth reading about as to the changes that you and your family have gone through: http://www.donrockwell.com/index.php?/user/10412-foodieseb/ Tx for joining. I look forward to visiting the restaurant.

That is a great story about him. Sam, has been the well known, often cited, often mentioned bartender in DC. That goes back decades. Even as he has "created drinks" over the years, I don't think he ever fell into the description of craft bartender (at least as far as I know). For close to 15 years I worked near the Mayflower as a "suit" and would periodically have drinks at the Mayflower, often with clients, often at a cocktail table as opposed to the bar. Very formal place. Very old fashioned/heavily business type environment. I spoke with Sam a couple of times but was neither a regular nor a noted customer. I had no idea he raised that money and delivered so much value to Cambodia. Really terrific story. I did get the feel that he enjoyed, even loved what he was doing at the Mayflower. Welcome back Sam. I'm sure you'll attract a lot of fans to your new digs.

Millie and Al's a true dive bar in Adams Morgan is now celebrating 50 years!!! 50 years. Quite a feat of staying power: "Love and Jell-O Shots: Millie & Al's Turns 50" by Mike Riggs on washingtoncitypaper.com I do recall Millie and Als serves beer and a lot of it. I can't say I recall the food.

Just followed up on suggestion # 3, recruiting a friend/grad of our school who is a great character, currently a bartender at Ancara (he says they are crazy busy for pre theater dining...and his feel is that folks are really enjoying it.) (that is his plug...not mine) Great character btw: he is featured at AARP magazine here and in our school blog celebrating his change of career He has a terrific bar personality so if you stop at the bar at Ancara say hi. He can be very entertaining.

I had left overs from the meal the other day. The homemade pasta was still good. In fact the chicken and sauce were still good. But boy I like that pasta!!!!!!

@ Don: I **LOVE** family style Italian food. When I left I told Max I made a big mistake not finding this place. But I also realized that I might never or hardly ever have gone there. I moved to this area abt 30 years ago. I lived in DC, North Bethesda, and Arlington. I wouldn't of gone. ....or hardly ever. It would have been a trek. Especially based on an old trend to "wine" it up. Living near a lot of restaurants is a plus...considering what you do, enjoy doing, and make a practice of in lieu of cooking, slicing, dicing, blanching, and braising. @Justin: While going here we didn't really check DR.com for menu suggestions. Now.....I'll know what to order. LOL