Food for Thought with Alex Bielak- Marie’s Menus – Going Social

Marie Pavone

Marie’s Menus – Going Social

I’m pleased to offer up the second serving stemming from my serendipitous discovery of food-related contestants participating in the Innovation Factory’s recent pitch contest. 

As she sits at my kitchen counter, Marie Pavone, runner-up in the hotly-contested event, is the epitome of poised charm. Trained as an engineer, the Ancaster mother of two, is cool, calm and in control. In fact, at times I feel like the one being quizzed: as she jots her own notes, she wants to know what my favourite restaurants are, and whether, as a food writer, I’d be interested in contributing to her potentially soon-to-be-revamped MenusOnly website which already has an average of 7000 unique visitors and 20,000 page views monthly.

I ask her to tell me about her pitch at Innovation Factory as I had had to leave before she got up on stage. She wants to give me some background first. She started the site about 7 years ago after a brainwave: about to go out to dinner after work with some friends, she Googled for a new place to go.

Finding navigating multiple websites and locating different menus time-consuming, she said to herself, “Wouldn’t it be great to have a website where all the menus were there for that city? That was when the idea was born.”

Pavone’s LinkedIN profile articulates her original intent succinctly. “My goal with MenusOnly.com is to
make it easier for people to choose a dining destination by making many local restaurant menus accessible to them. My goal is also to promote the "smaller" restaurants as opposed to the large chain restaurants. We are established now in Hamilton but are expanding to the Halton and Niagara areas.”

She (on the sales side) and her brother (dealing with web matters) ran the business part time, more or less as a hobby, until she went on maternity leave and found more time to grow it, at least until her second child arrived. (I think this gives you an idea of how driven and organized she must be. Most new mothers have less time for anything in my experience...)

Naturally, she’d like to do more: There are a number of enthusiastic endorsements from both restaurants and visitors to the site on the page where restaurateurs can sign up for inclusion. There’s a cost of course, currently about $600 for the year per establishment. 

She was invited to pitch at Innovation Factory in July, after she had submitted her business plan earlier in the year to Lions Lair, another pitching contest. Never having done something like that before, she found the experience “incredible, extremely nerve-wracking”.

“It’s a great place to gauge if your ideas are really feasible. Right after my pitch I had so many people coming up to me shaking my hand, saying it’s a great idea, giving me their business cards… people I would likely never have met otherwise.”

“So, the pitch?” I prompt.

While developing the “competitive advantage” section of her application for Lion’s Lair she recognized times had changed and she actually now faced competition. “Back then I didn’t, but now there’s Urbanspoon, Tripadvisor, Yelp, Facebook, Twitter and Google+,… and I guess Open Table.”

“I realised I had to think outside the box. I researched other websites, not necessarily around food, that are doing extremely well right now.” She realised the one thing she was missing was community.

Her Innovation Factory pitch noted, “Dining is a social experience… 90% of people will ask a friend for a recommendation for a new place to eat. People want to know first-hand from a friend or someone who is knowledgeable…”

She had found lots of people posting about food experiences, “beautiful articles that you wouldn’t see on a review site.”  She felt there should be a collection of all those blogs and articles in one place and that is where she wants to venture.

For now she’s in the idea phase, and contemplating a voting mechanism and some sort of recognition program for highly-rated contributors. Her “ask” at Innovation Factory was for feedback and a team. She got plenty of the former, and various people expressed interest in becoming involved.

“I wake up with a fire and a passion,” she says. The business is now a full-time affair for Pavone. Her (public) Facebook page is peppered with links to inspirational videos that resonate with the drive to succeed so evident during our interview.  She says she absolutely loves being an entrepreneur, creating something, speaking with the restaurateurs, seeing them get excited… and “seeing the benefits of my actions happening for myself.”

While she has lots of opinions on where some of Hamilton’s best food can be found, “depending on whether (she) is with the kids or not,” for obvious reasons she is hesitant to be partisan publicly. With an Italian background, and notwithstanding recently having become a vegetarian, she loves all food and finds Hamilton has a really “good array” of cuisine. “But a lot of people are not aware of it as they seem to stick with the box restaurants.”   

Inevitably her comment leads me to voice my bugbear that I think the City could do a lot more to promote the food scene. She’s quick to reply with a laugh, “I’m here to help.”

That’s great, another recruit to the cause!

To see more pictures, click here.

Alex (Alex can be reached at fft@thehamiltonian.info ) or on twitter @AlexBielak

Food for Thought logo, designed and kindly donated by Ninka Bielak. Ninka can be reached at ninka.bielak@gmail.com.