For restaurants, drinks brands and food producers who need coverage that reaches buyers as well as diners. For non-food consumer brands, see consumer and lifestyle PR.
Alcohol marketing has rules. We know them.
What a spirits brand may claim, who it may be shown with, which states restrict what, and how a partnership has to be structured to stay compliant. Getting this wrong is expensive and slow to unwind.
Our team has run programs for Hennessy, Moët & Chandon, Tanqueray, Johnnie Walker, Champagne Taittinger, Simi Wines, Sierra Nevada and Newcastle Brown Ale.
Restaurant PR that survives a real service
A restaurant’s press needs do not arrive on a schedule. An opening slips, a chef changes, a review lands on a Tuesday. We work at the pace the business actually moves, and we do not need three days to approve a quote.
How engagements work
- Launch — a defined push around an opening or a new product, usually eight to twelve weeks
- Retained — ongoing press office, monthly, for brands with a steady flow of news worth telling
- Project — an awards submission season, a single campaign, or a crisis. Scoped and priced on its own
The first ninety days of an opening
A restaurant’s press cycle has three phases and they need different things. Before the doors open, the work is long-lead: openings roundups, the “where to eat next” lists, the city guides planned weeks ahead. In the opening month it turns daily and online — the outlets that move quickly and the readers who will actually turn up. After that comes the harder part, the reviews and the features, which depend on whether the room is running well enough to survive a visit.
The most common mistake is spending everything on week one. A launch that goes quiet in month two teaches editors there is nothing else coming. Where the restaurant sits inside a hotel, the property’s own calendar changes what is available in each phase — that is covered on hospitality PR.
What travels, and what does not
A new menu is not a story. A chef with a reason to be in that city is. So is a supplier relationship nobody else has, a room doing something structurally different, a price point that says something about the market, or a person whose route into the kitchen is worth reading about.
Part of the job in the first month is working out which of those you actually have, and being straight when the answer is that the story is the food, and it will need a critic rather than a pitch.
Drinks work carries a compliance layer
A spirits or wine programme runs alongside rules that do not apply elsewhere: what the brand may claim, who may appear in an image, which states restrict which activity, and how a partnership or a sampling has to be structured. Much of it reaches the publicist before it reaches legal, so knowing the shape of the answer early saves weeks.
We work with a distributor’s and a brand’s own counsel rather than around them, and would rather rework a concept early than have it stopped at approval.
Send us the brief
Tell us what you are launching, the market and the budget range. You will hear back from a principal, not a form response.
