Plugging away, yet again

[snousle]

Photo in the style of bitterlawngnome


Lots of things keeping me busy lately. Following the Golden Gate Guards run, we had some women up from San Jose for dinner - our first paid guests, in some respects, but not officially. Then my father and his wife visited. They love to eat and drink, and it's always a bit of an extravaganza. Wednesday, my mother arrives.

Apparently, I suggested to my mother on the phone that we should go to French Laundry. Moral: Do not phone your mother after drinking. I would like to go some day, but that six or seven hundred bucks would really be hard to spend just now. In any case, getting a reservation is heroically difficult so it isn't going to happen this trip. Instead, Keller's other restaurant, Bouchon, looks like an excellent lunch destination for an excursion to Napa, so I made a reservation there and hopefully we won't be embarrassingly overdressed.

In the meanwhile, I'm trying to not be snowed by the sheer size of my to-do list. Once an idea lodges in my head, I find it very hard to let go of it. Lately, I've felt discouraged by the growing feeling that many of these ideas are simply out of reach for the foreseeable future. Individually, all are plausible, but collectively they are not. It makes me a bit grumpy when people cheerfully offer up yet more ideas for an already unmanageable agenda, as if they were doing me some favor by enlightening me with their brilliant uses for my obviously unlimited time. I think I shall only entertain ideas that result in less work.

We now have an operating permit for the kitchen, and a business license is merely a few paper-shuffles away. A little liability insurance and I'll be good to go. Which means I have to get off my butt and start marketing; for some reason trying to put the web site together terrifies me. Even choosing a font for a business card is full of agonizing ambivalence. Logo? Forget it, I haven't the faintest idea how to approach it.

Comments

[snousle.livejournal.com]

Mmm, there's lots to say with it. You know the situation pretty well. The logo should communicate the idea of fine dining as a combination of unpretentious luxury and communion with nature. There are some basic contradictions there, I realize... maybe my expectations are too high? Anyway, for the cards, I more or less took jpeace's suggestion, minus the fruit, and found it quite satisfactory.

[bitterlawngnome.livejournal.com]

Typographic is almost always the strongest solution where the "message" is very complex.

Step one would be to define your intended market. Age, sex, income level, geography, language, anything you can think of.

Then, where does it need to work. Size, medium, context.

What are you calling the catering part of the biz, BTW?