BentoBox's website for NYC favorite Gramercy Tavern
BentoBoxThe restaurant business has always been a difficult one. Plates break. Checks get miscalculated. Name a potential problem, and it's bound to happen on any given day.
Being good at all that and managing to keep the lights on is a Herculean effort in and of itself, but now, restaurants are brands and the internet exists. That means they need good websites and great SEO.
According to BentoBox CEO Krystle Mobayeni, a restaurant's website should, "give you an idea of what that place feels like before you even come in." When you're looking for a new place to eat, "The first thing you do is Google something, everyone does it. So the first thing that should come up is a property that the restaurant owns." Something that represents that business the way it wants to be seen. And that's where Mobayeni's company comes in.
Krystle Mobayeni has a classic American dream story. She's a first-generation Iranian-American, she's worked for ad agencies, co-founded a digital creative studio, and now, she's running her own company. Back in 2013, "I was working as a freelance consultant... and I ended up working with this restaurant and started learning about how frustrated [the staff] were... They felt like they were being held hostage by all these different technologies they were using, and wanted to solve all of that with their website because it was the only place they had control online. I found that I couldn't give them what they wanted with the tools that were out there." Mobayeni had to give them something though, "So I hacked together something on WordPress and moved on with my life. But a couple of months later a few other restaurants like The Meatball Shop and The Union Square Hospitality Group reached out to me. They had the same pain points, they wanted the same thing." Suddenly, she had a whole new business on her hands.
Mobayeni sees a restaurant's website as the heart of its online brand, and BentoBox helps its clients, "enhance the thing they already do... We can help sell gift cards or sell tickets if they're doing an event. We can do catering orders. Each one of these things augments their operations in a way that's much more high margin and helps them stay in business."
Krystle Mobayeni, CEO of BentoBox
General AssemblyFrom the way it works with its clients (restaurateurs regularly tell Mobayeni she treats them as well as they treat their guests) to its ambition to streamline how restaurants operate, BentoBox is working to change the face of the industry: "We want to give restaurants a system that they own. All of these different third parties become channels, almost like in the hotel industry where you have your Orbitz or Expedia. If you want the best deal, the source of the truth, you go to the hotel or airline's website. I want restaurants to have that same ownership."
When Mobayeni started working with the Union Square Hospitality Group, its myriad of well-respected restaurants all had websites hosted on different platforms. It was unwieldy at best, and she figured that "If a restaurant group with that much means was having a problem, then everybody else was... Restaurants are one of the industries that most appreciate genuineness, and I'm not a great salesperson. So I would say, 'I made this thing! I think it's going to help you. What do you think?''' Needless to say, they were impressed.
Now BentoBox is supporting restaurants of all shapes and sizes, including a surprising number of 2019's James Beard Award nominees (winners were announced this Monday), and Mobayeni is extremely excited to see what the future holds for BentoBox. That said, she's still cautious about the increasing integration of tech in the food world: "I think that when it comes to brick-and-mortar businesses, and with things that are as timeless and important to society as restaurants, it's better in some ways to be less innovative and instead facilitate what they're already doing. Why are we trying to change this experience? It's so good already... Restaurants like to work with us because they recognize that we're not trying to change what they do."
Mobayeni just wants to help them keep doing things exactly how they've been done for hundreds of years, and that's an idea I can get behind.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/lizzysaxe/2019/05/10/krystle-mobayenis-bentobox-changes-the-online-lives-of-restaurants/ 2019-05-10 17:32:00Z
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