An Empirical Experience in the Power of Story

By Lorrie Baumann

This afternoon on National Public Radio, I happened to hear LA Weekly food critic Jonathan Gold describing the time he spent eating in every restaurant along the length of Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles. He talked about making up rules about how to approach the self-imposed year-long task, that he decided that he had to take the restaurants in order, and if he skipped one on one day, he had to go back and eat there the very next time he had a meal on Pico Blvd. Toward the end of the year, he thought about whether he could skip a hole-in-the-wall burrito stand if it served food no different from the burrito he’d eaten at a similar stand just down the block during the previous week.

This degree of obsession was very entertaining to listen to, and it could have been dismissed as merely an enjoyable way to kill an hour on a Sunday afternoon, but for the fact that Jonathan Gold is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer. He is, in fact, the first writer ever to win a Pulitzer Prize for food criticism. There is no phrase better than “Pulitzer Prize-winning” to confer majesty on a harmless obsession of borderline lunacy. When Gold talks about eating his way up and down Pico Boulevard, he’s also talking about the cultural diversity of Los Angeles; he’s talking about the preservation of ancient culinary traditions, and about how people with deeply divergent histories and beliefs can live together and learn from each other if we can sometimes put aside for a moment some of our prejudices about what’s good and what’s proper and just try to see the world from someone else’s point of view.
You are asking yourselves what a story about a guy who eats guacamole topped with fried crickets has to do with marketing your trade show exhibit, and I can hardly blame you for that. I suppose it has something to do with how the story made me curious enough to do a little more research about Mr. Gold and discover that he has long red hair and looks rather like a pirate and that he and his wife have two children, and trivial as that all is in my life, I wouldn’t have known any of it if I hadn’t been introduced through a story, and that says something about the power of story.
That brings us to Restaurant Daily News, which provides you with your opportunity to tell your story to the attendees at the NRA Show. Your story has the power to capture the attention of your target buyers and bring them to your booth at the show to hear more of what you have to say.
That is, after all, precisely what you come to the show to do, but it’s not enough just to be there on the show floor; just as the stories of the restaurants along Pico Boulevard weren’t heard until Gold visited, ate the food, and put the experience into words. You also must create for yourself the opportunity to tell your story to the buyers who can make a difference to you, your company and your products. Call Oser Communications at 520.721.1300 today to talk to a Restaurant Daily News representative about how to do that.