Our extensive experience in the New York restaurant industry can count as one of its examples the management of the communication activities for the successful NY restaurant Cardoncello DiVino. The main challenge in a restaurant opening in a city such as New York is the large competition constantly pummeling restaurants.

Every day, in New York, dozens of restaurants open (and close), thus it is fundamental to find the right key to communicate the restaurant’s soul accurately and attractively -as to set it aside from the competition and ensure the best media positioning. For Cardoncello DiVino, we began our strategy by focusing on the main element that sets it aside from any other Italian (and not) restaurant around, namely the Cardoncello mushroom.

Cardoncello DiVino is the only spot in all of the five boroughs of NYC where diners can find and enjoy this legendary mushroom. We thus began crafting communication materials around the element of the Cardoncello, a unique mushroom from Southern Italy that has been revered since Ancient Rome for its unique meaty texture and intense flavor. Even the Catholic Chrurch back in the Middle Ages was so taken aback by the unique Cardoncello that outlawed it as “leading to sin” since it was believed to increase sexual drive.

After bringing to life all these unique aspects and weaving them together, we began reaching out to key media food publications telling them the story of this mushroom and how it captured the restaurant’s owners so much that they decided to bring it to the States and share its flavor (along with other non-mushroom Italian traditional dishes) with New Yorkers.

This storytelling strategy led to a high number of publications covering the opening of the restaurant, its menu, and its unique aspects – setting it aside from any other Italian establishment concurrently opening. Not only traditional media but also social media were used as a tool to enhance the resonation of the message as much as possible, using various strategies such as influencer engagement to ensure that the highest number possible of people would see Cardoncello DiVino and decide to visit the restaurant to try what’s unique about the concept and its menu.