It’s impossible for Jennifer Prather, the Greater Starkville Development Partnership’s special events coordinator, to be physically present in all 31 diners participating in Starkville Restaurant Week, guiding wait staff and assisting them through the event, but her playbook can.
A copy of the playbook, a binder directing restaurant staffs on the ins and outs of the week’s charity and promotional aspects, was left at many locations as a way to answer questions and troubleshoot any issues that might arise during the seven-day event.
“All of our participating restaurants are busy as it is — it’s a great problem — but adding (Starkville Restaurant Week duties) puts a big responsibility on their list. Both the restaurants and the Partnership are trying to make sure visitors have a great experience during the week, because it’s those experiences that will bring tourists back to town,” she said. “Many of these restaurants have staff members who haven’t participated in the event due to the nature of a college town’s rotating workforce. (Student workers) are also working toward finals, and some restaurants are short staffed. These binders are a great tool since the staff can get direction quickly whenever they’re stumped.”
Launched in 2013 as a way to showcase Starkville’s growing culinary scene, Starkville Restaurant Week’s fifth iteration began Monday and runs through Sunday.
The Partnership leverages advertising dollars to promote participating restaurants to out-of-town visitors, especially those making about an hour- or two-hour drive to Starkville for sporting events. The theory is simple: If those tourists visit Starkville for multiple days and have great experiences at local restaurants, they might be convinced to come back and spend their money in the future.
“Starkville Restaurant Week is so much more than just the promotion, though. It’s the manifestation of our whole culinary campaign,” Prather said. “It’s authentic and all about community-oriented relationships, like people sitting at the table with each other, and the relationships between local farmers and our restaurants.”
To help spur local participation, the Partnership added a charity aspect in which patrons ordering entrees at participating restaurants can vote to decide which one of three organizations will receive a $5,000 donation.
Those ballots also collect voters’ information, allowing the Partnership to target them for digital promotions and entice additional visits and spending.
The organization’s advertising budget for the event is about $10,000, Prather said, and it spends about $4,000-$5,000 in April alone.
That figure doesn’t include the manpower time that goes into pre-event wait staff training sessions, logistics during the week and post-restaurant week ballot counting.
“We give server training sessions as many times as our restaurants want. Sometimes it’s for the entire staff; sometimes it’s for specific shifts,” Prather said. “We really see a difference in the quality of service from those restaurants who buy into the whole process.”
That buy-in is instilled heavily at the Veranda, said chef and owner Jay Yates. If restaurant employees, from the cooks who prepare the food to the wait staff selling it, do not have an understanding and appreciation of their product and the impact it can make on patrons, he said, the lost opportunities to draw repeat trips disappear immediately.
To reinforce that knowledge, Yates’ staff holds lineups before busy hours where the staff goes over the menu, samples the food and discusses sales strategies.
“You have to be bought into the process. We believe in eating local, and this is our big showcase. It’s all about the product, all about the food and all about the flavor,” he said. “When we open those doors, it’s game on. We believe in that with everything we do, but these special events are a great way to refocus on community involvement and contribute to the quality of life in Starkville.”
The three charities in this year’s competition are The University of Mississippi Medical Center’s Children’s of Mississippi health care umbrella, Mississippi State University’s T.K. Martin Center for Technology and Disability and Starkville Young Life.
Children’s of Mississippi served more than 180,000 children last year, including almost 1,000 from Starkville and the surrounding areas. It is comprised of three Jackson-area locations — Batson Children’s Hospital, the Eli Manning Clinic and the Hinds Comprehensive Clinic — Children’s of Mississippi-Tupelo and Children’s of Mississippi-Gulf Coast, located in Biloxi.
The T.K. Martin Center is an educational program offering academic services, speech-language pathology and other therapies to children before kindergarten and adults. The organization won SRW’s grand prize in 2014.
Young Life, a national Christian youth and student organization, began a Starkville chapter in 2013. Since then, the organization has spread its ministries to MSU, Starkville Academy and Starkville High School. Hosting clubs, camps and other activities, the organization is led by four staff members and 40 volunteers.
Carl Smith covers Starkville and Oktibbeha County for The Dispatch. Follow him on Twitter @StarkDispatch
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