Yesterday I had the pleasure of visiting Tracy Green and her students at Newport High School.  Tracy is Newport’s culinary arts instructor and the students are lucky to have her; they’re lucky to have the culinary arts facility.

The culinary arts “classroom” at Newport is a cross between a lab and commercial kitchen.  It’s a large room with tall tables and stools in the front with the rest of the space filled with anything and everything you’d expect in a modern kitchen.  They have a commercial gas range, ovens and deep fryers all under a giant hood system.  There are color coded sets of knives and pans along with color-coded mixers, food processors and blenders that are shared by the different cooking groups in Tracy’s different classes.  And there are all sorts of other toys like immersion blenders, steamer baskets, potato ricers, cake pans, pie pans, cookie sheets and pretty much anything else a four-star restaurant would need.

I had no idea such facilities existed, and they apparently don’t in very many places.  Tracy told me that the Washington Restaurant Association representative who visited said her classroom is the finest of its kind in the state, possibly the country.

I was visiting because a group of her students will soon compete at the state level in a contest where they are judged on a restaurant business plan.  The restaurant her winning group of four students developed is called The Grotto and the concept is classic Italian fine dining with a vibrant bar.  Sounds pretty darn good to me.

What they wanted to talk to me about was marketing their place—building buzz surrounding the opening and then making sure the right people became regulars.  We talked about the power of Yelp and other user review sites, the importance of building strong lunch patronage among the local business crowd, and cross promoting their offerings via earned media, radio, newspaper advertising and e-mail marketing.

I wish the students the best of luck at state.  I think they’ll do great.

Nathan Hambley

Last week, I spent Thursday and Friday in New York City meeting with magazine editors from some national publications, including Travel & Leisure, Food & Wine and Monocle.  I also took a tour of the James Beard House in the West Village, a repository of American food history from the last 50 years—what a place!

Everyone I met with was extremely gracious and I think excited to hear about some of the great things happening in Seattle’s hospitality scene.  Despite the recession, some great new restaurants have recently opened or soon will, including a few Frause clients—Toulouse Petit, Mistral Kitchen and Thierry Rautureau’s Luc.

The fall weather couldn’t have been better in the city, and on Saturday, some friends and I headed upstate to Storm King to take in some big art and nature and have a picnic.  I can’t wait to return, especially since I ate my last Brooklyn-baked pumpernickel bagel yesterday morning.

Nathan Hambley