When I ran my own restaurant, I sat through a lot of agency pitches. Some of the people were talented. Almost all of the pitches were the same.
A new website, built the way websites were built ten years ago. A paid social campaign. Often radio. A monthly report with a lot of impressions in it.
What nobody asked was who our guests were, how they had found us, and what they did in the ten minutes before they decided to book. The pitch arrived finished. It would have been the same pitch for a steakhouse, a sushi counter or a dentist.
I used to put that down to laziness. I think now it is something more structural, and more forgivable, and much more useful to understand if you are the one paying.
Advice follows the invoice
Here is how a lot of agencies are paid. A share of the media they place, which for most of the last century was fifteen percent and today is often somewhere between ten and fifteen, alongside retainers and project fees. A website is a project with a fee attached. Production is billable. Campaigns are billable.
None of that is dishonest. It is simply what the business is. But it means the recommendation leans toward the things that can be invoiced, the same way it does for anyone whose income depends on the purchase.
I wrote recently about the pocket sommelier Meta has just built, an agent that chooses for you and is paid by the people it chooses from. This is the same shape, older and better dressed. When the adviser earns on the spend, the advice is rarely *spend less.*
There is no average guest
The second problem is that an agency is built to market to everyone, and a good restaurant is not for everyone.
The guest at a serious wine bar does not hear about it on the radio on the way to work. They hear about it from a friend who went last week. They look at it on a map, read three reviews and look at the wine list, if they can find it. They see it named in a list of the best places for something specific. And now, increasingly, they ask a machine.
None of those moments is a media buy. That is exactly why they never come up in the pitch.
What actually fills the room
The channels that fill a niche dining room now are almost all ones nobody can mark up.
The map listing. Hours that are right, photographs that look like the room, a menu that is current, and reviews that somebody answers like a person. It is the front door for most first visits, and it is usually maintained by whoever had a spare hour in 2023.
The lists that already rank. Being named in the article that comes up when someone searches for the best wine bar in their neighbourhood is worth more than most of what a campaign produces, and it lasts. Getting there takes relationships and good reasons, not a budget line.
The answer a machine gives. When a guest asks ChatGPT or Muse where to go on Friday, the answer is built from text the machine can read: the wine list as words rather than a photograph of a PDF, a description that says what the place actually is, the lists and reviews that mention it. There is no ad slot in that answer yet. There is only whether you are legible.
The host stand. *How did you hear about us?* It is the cheapest market research in the building, and most restaurants never write the answer down. A month of tally marks will tell you more about your marketing than a year of impression reports.
Be fair to the agencies
Some are very good, and the good ones are not threatened by any of this. They will tell you how they are paid without being asked, and they will tell you which of their own recommendations they cannot measure.
That is the whole test, really, and it is the one I would put to any adviser, including me.
Ask them what they would tell you to stop.
A sommelier who never says *don't* is selling. So is an agency that has never recommended spending less. If the answer to *what should I stop* is nothing, you have learned what you needed to know about the rest of the advice.
And where nobody can say whether something works, radio being the usual case, do not argue about it. Switch it off for six weeks in a comparable period and watch your covers and your average check. If nothing moves, you have your answer, and you got it for the price of not spending.
The best marketing I know
Every good room I have worked in was filled the same way. Somebody had a night that was better than they expected, and they told somebody else, and that person looked the place up, and what they found matched what they had been told.
That last step is the one that has changed. The looking up used to be a phone call or a guidebook. Now it is a map, a list and a machine, all of them reading whatever you have left lying around in text.
That is where the money should go first. It is also the part of the job nobody earns a commission on, which is why you will rarely be pitched it.