Smashed special: The Dark Art of Restaurant PR (part 1)

How restaurant PR influences your dining choices

How do you find out about new restaurants to visit? Read newspaper restaurant reviews and consult restaurant guides? Check Instagram, TikTok or YouTube? But have you ever wondered how journalists, guide inspectors and content creators find out about the restaurants they are recommending to you in the first place? Maybe some come to their notice through word of mouth, maybe somewhere new opens up close to where they live or maybe they check Instagram and TickTok too. More likely, they’ve received a press release about the restaurant, or were invited to a preview. You may think critics, food writers and influencers can help make or break a restaurant, but the real power behind the stove is restaurant PR.

I interviewed five leaders in the field to find out how they got into the business, how they go about their jobs, the highs and lows of their careers, what their relationship is like with the national restaurant critics and how the changing face of mainstream media and the rise of social media has affected their work.

The interviewees

Clockwise from top left: Jo Barnes; Gemma Bell; Hélène Cuff; Maureen Mills and Hugh Richard Wright.

• Jo Barnes, Sauce Communications (co-founded with Nicky Hancock)
  Current client list includes Moor Hall, D&D London and Benares

• Gemma Bell, Gemma Bell and Company
  Current client list includes Angela Hartnett, St. John, Dishoom and Fortnum and Mason

• Hélène Cuff, Cuff Communications (co-founded with Jess Harms)
  Current client list includes Orwells, Le Champignon Sauvage and Chris Harrod at The Whitebook

• Maureen Mills, Network London
  Current client list includes Elystan Street, Native and Delamina Townhouse

• Hugh Richard Wright, Restaurant Public Relations & Communications Consultant
  Current client list includes Cafe Britaly, Bellamy’s and Koba

The foundations for the UK restaurant PR industry were laid by Alan Crompton-Batt in the mid-80s. The former manager of post-punk band The Psychedelic Furs and Egon Ronay restaurant guide inspector set up Alan Crompton-Batt PR and chose the notoriously contrarian chef Nico Ladenis as his first client. His greatest claim to fame however was establishing Marco Pierre-White as the first British celebrity chef of the modern era.

Coincidentally, Crompton-Batt has an American counterpart in the form of Shep Gordon. He also started out in music promotion and in 1993 created Alive Culinary Resources and helped make many chefs including Emeril Lagasse and Wolfgang Puck famous. The feature-length documentary Supermench: The Legend of Shep Gordon is well worth watching.

Crompton-Batt passed away of pneumonia in 2004 at the age of just 50 (according to Fay Maschler’s Guardian obituary ‘the bottle got the better of him’) but his pioneering work paved the way for our panel.

Jo Barnes: Alan Crompton-Batt was the first restaurant PR I was aware of. Nicky and I set up Sauce in 2001 in a tiny office above an old print factory in Arsenal with a Rolodex, two mobile phones and a whole lot of self-confidence. He was very sweet. He very kindly took us out for lunch. We were about six months in and then said, ‘Look, I'm here if ever you need my advice on anything.’

Gemma Bell: Alan was amazing. I was very fortunate enough to have lunch with Alan at Cecconi’s in Mayfair before he died. It was a bonkers experience, very entertaining and very boozy. Of course, he was the first restaurant PR and he made Marco the rock star that he was in those days. His wife Elizabeth Crompton-Batt, I really counted as my mentor in the early days. We met up for lunch a couple of months ago. It’s so lovely that we're still in touch and she's so supportive. She's not in the game anymore but she takes a keen interest in all things restaurants.

Despite Crompton-Batt leading the way, there was no set career path for restaurant PRs and the industry as we know it today emerged from a variety of disparate paths. For Jo Barnes, the route was through publishing. As the head of PR and marketing for Quadrille, she worked on various cookbooks including helping Gordon Ramsay sell 50,000 copies of A Chef for All Seasons.

Jo Barnes: I decided I wanted to spread my wings a little bit. I didn't want to get stuck in book PR, which can be a little bit repetitive. I went to work briefly for an agency where that did restaurants. It wasn't a brilliant experience. I learned what not to do. I just thought, actually, I think I can do better.

Maureen Mills: I was with British Airways for nine years in PR in Canada and then moved to London. I was the editor of a magazine called Where London which was owned by a friend of mine in Canada. It got me involved in everything from tourism to theatre, entertainment, restaurants, hotels, everything. I was with them for about six years and then I wanted to do my own thing. I immediately had three clients because I knew all these people in hotels and restaurants really well. One of them was Camellia Panjabi, Namita Panjabi and Ranjit Mathrani of Chutney Mary and they have now been my clients for 26 years.

Gemma Bell: I was working in restaurants and hotels while I was finishing studying. I was working for Marco Pierre White as a receptionist at the Titanic restaurant, which was just horrendous, and then at Asia de Cuba at St Martins Lane Hotel. I then moved back-of-house to the Food and Beverage office where I was always the middle person for Elizabeth Crompton-Batt. The F&B director at the time said, ‘I think you should do PR’. And I was like, okay, I don't really know what it is, but alright. I spoke to Elizabeth and she gave me a couple of telephone numbers for journalists and said, ‘Just invite them for lunch’. And I did, and the rest is history.

Hélène Cuff: I didn't even know that hospitality and restaurant PR existed. I fell into it after doing various other roles like being a PA. My first proper job was with RJH Public Relations, Sophie Wessex’s company. It was a journalist who recommended me to them. I was lucky because, after RJH, I went to Sauce and Gordon Ramsay was my first client.

Hugh Richard Wright: I had my restaurant blog in the 2010s as a hobby. I was actually working in charity fundraising. In 2013, I was approached by Aqua Restaurant Group to go in-house as their communications manager at the point where they were launching Aqua and Hutong at the Shard, two very high-profile openings. In 2015, I spotted a gap in the market. It was a real golden time for independent places opening. Property was cheap, rents were cheap and food was very cool. Lots of small independent owner-operated places opened up, and they weren't well served by these huge PR agencies. There wasn't really anyone who was doing a good service at a price that indies could afford and I thought maybe I could do it myself. Me, a laptop and some business cards, that was it. My first clients were Stevie Parle, and Victor Garvey’s first solo restaurant Encant. Alexis Gautier followed shortly and Linda Lee of On the Bab came along very soon after. Of those names, I’m still with Linda.

Just as there are many routes into restaurant PR, there are also many ways that restaurant PR work is carried out. One constant however is the job of attracting the attention of the national restaurant critics.

Maureen Mills: I know all these journalists, all these restaurant critics really well, personally, I've been to their houses. I know their families. What I do is very personal and always has been. PR is about relationships. It's about networking and relationships and understanding your client's needs, but also understanding the other side equally, what the media are looking for. It's all about information sharing and understanding. If a place is new, there's obviously the news story element and some of the restaurant critics are briefed to do what's new.

‘I know all these journalists and restaurant critics really well, personally, I've been to their houses. I know their families. What I do is very personal and always has been’

Some of my clients say, ‘We care about The Times and The Telegraph and the FT, but we don't care about so much about The Guardian or The Observer’ so you concentrate on those ones. I know Tim Hayward really well. I know what he likes and he doesn't like - multi Michelin- star tasting menus - so I'm never going to get him to places like that. He likes the quirky out-of-the-way places or something more ethnic. So I know him, I deal with him all the time.

I have a tailored approach where every press release, every email is targeted because I've thought about the research. I do personal love notes every time I send out a press release. I don't just push one button and say, this press release goes to everybody. I spend a lot of time tailoring the messaging. That is important because the journalists will feel that there's a special relationship. I even assess at the end of each email whether they get one kiss or two kiss or no kisses. That's how detail-oriented I am. 

Jo Barnes: I’m really friendly with them, I know them all really well, but when it comes to the actual business of criticism, there's always a respect. I know what the boundaries are and I would certainly never, ever try and influence them. Obviously I really hope they're going to like my client and I'll present it to them in the most positive way I can. You come to know the kind of things they like and they're interested in. And hopefully if I can point something in their direction, I think they're going to like, but I would never say, right, you have to write this. If I got a heads up they didn't like it, I would really appreciate that I got a heads up but I certainly wouldn't try and get them to change anything because I just think that's wrong. That's probably why I've still got a really good relationship with all of them because I don't think I've ever abused my good relationship with them in that way.’

Hugh Richard Wright: I'm not going to name names, but there are a couple of critics who I do know very well, who I would say are actual friends, although actually, those friendships predate my working in PR. But even with the ones who I would say I'm friends with, there are Chinese walls. There is no, ‘I'll always review your client favorably’. Absolutely not. Gloves are off and if they go somewhere that's my client and it's shit, they're going to say it's shit.

Hélène Cuff: I've never pretended to be mates or anything like that with journalists. I treat this very much as a professional set-up. We just give the press the facts and any latest news and images. We don't pester press, they know they can trust what we send them and that it's relevant. We would never bombard them because we know they're busy.

In more recent years, social media content creators/influencers have come to prominence, adding another string to a restaurant PR’s bow in terms of strategic approach.

Maureen Mills: It's murky territory. There's some good influencers and then there are hundreds of wannabes who are talking to each other, basically. There are probably no more than 20 that I've encountered that are really viable. I check their analytics and see what sort of results they get. I go on their followers list and swing down every 10th or 15th and just see who it is. There’s a lot of bots. 

Jo Barnes: An absolutely brilliant review from a critic is still the most powerful and instant way to see a massive dramatic improvement in revenue for a restaurant, and if you get all of them loving it, you are off. But it's part now of the bigger ecosystem. There are some restaurants where you just know you're not going to get a critic interested in them. A big international rollout concept that comes to London - you can just see the critics won't go. So that's going to be very much influencer-driven.

Hugh Richard Wright: There's literally a handful of influencers who I work with who I really like. How much of a role they have to play really, I think depends on the time available to you to deal with them and increasingly what money you have to pay them. Because the days of just giving someone a free meal and they'll post effusively about you are largely over. If you want a major influencer to actually create some proper content, you are looking at a significant financial outlay. And typically the kind of places I work with, because they are still these small independent places, just don't have the budget to be spending five grand on a reel.

I also focus on influential people. I would sometimes rather have someone who's got 3000 followers of whom I know, maybe 10% at least, are likely to engage and comment and save and possibly share a nice post or comment than have someone with 200,000 who you might get a blip in your social media followers but they aren't necessarily going to actually come to the restaurant.

Gemma Bell: As a company, we will be very discerning about who we work with. My rule of thumb is if someone emails me wanting to visit a restaurant for free to go on Instagram, then I delete the email. They will always email saying can we collaborate with you or can we partner with you? What does it mean, ‘collaborate’? What you are asking for is a free meal or a free night in a hotel to post on your Instagram.

We'd look at their Instagram feed or TikTok feed and go, okay, who are they reaching? How engaging are they? What's their style of photography? What's the demographic the influencer is reaching? Do we want to reach those people? Are they the ones we want to go to the restaurant?

We count chefs as influencers because they've got loads of people following them on Instagram. We'll invite them to dinners and people completely respect their view of a restaurant. There are influencers where their job is being an influencer on Instagram, but the majority of the time we're working with people who are chefs, photographers, maybe they're a designer, maybe they're in fashion, maybe they're a writer, but they're just really, really good at social media. I'd much rather work with those kind of influencers. 

Before critics or influencers come into the picture, PRs have to find restaurants to communicate about. So how does a restaurant PR go about creating a list of clients?

Maureen Mills: There's got to be a heart in the kitchen and I'm not going to work with some cynical group just to take the fee. I can't do that. It has to be somewhere that I would want to eat and drink privately and be proud of. I love working with smaller places. You never know where they're going to go.

Hélène Cuff: We are champions a lot of the time of existing chefs who've been around for quite some time. They're much harder because the press do go for TV chefs and big characters. There are hundreds and hundreds of super-talented chefs out there that just don't get the coverage.  

Hugh Richard Wright: I'll only work with clients I like who have businesses that I believe in. I will only represent somewhere that I would choose to eat in myself or I would spend my own money, which I would recommend to a friend a somewhere to go. There've been a few times over the years where I've taken a gamble on somewhere that maybe isn't up my street, but I've thought has potential.

I have worked with groups and chains, but I typically work with independent owner-operator places where I'm dealing directly with the owner or owners and the decision makers. I'm not dealing with a marketing director or a communications department. Typically the people I work with, there's no committee, there's no process. If I say right, I'd like to do this, they immediately say yes or no. It's not a case of, okay, we need to run that past finance, or we need to run that past the marketing director, or we need to speak to our owner in another country. It does make things a hell of a lot easier. 

Read part two of The Dark Art of Restaurant PR here including PR and restaurant guides, how PRs get press coverage for their clients, career highs and lows and restaurant PR and the costing living crisis. Paid subscribers can read How Restaurant PR Made Gordon Ramsay World Famous here.