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May 14, 2007

Good eats | Portland public relations firm Front Burner PR spreads the gourmet gospel

By Whit Richardson

Diners in Maine can expect more than lobster rolls and crab cakes, a fact Jen Beltz and Thom Householder discovered when they first visited the state a few years ago. And since moving to Maine two years ago, they've been trumpeting that fact to the rest of the world.

The couple in November 2005 founded Front Burner PR, a public relations firm specializing in promoting food, glorious food. The company markets a small, but elite, cadre of Maine restaurants and specialty food companies, from some of the state's most well known dining establishments like Windows on the Water in Kennebunk to successful newcomers like Portland's The Front Room and Vignola. Front Burner recently landed its first clients in the specialty food business, Gagne Foods in Bath and Portland's Good Clean Food. And the company also notched a deal with True North Hospitality, which operates hotel properties including the Black Point Inn in Scarborough and Migis Lodge in South Casco.

In short order, the business has taken off. Since January, Front Burner PR has added seven new clients to its list. "[The company] has grown much more quickly than we anticipated," Beltz says. "People say, 'When it rains, it pours.'"

Beltz and Householder came to Maine via a roundabout route from Washington, D.C., where they both worked in communications — Beltz in PR and Householder in Web marketing. They left the big city to attend culinary school in Florence, Italy, and then Le Cordon Bleu in Ottawa. It was while in Ottawa that Beltz and Householder, who have been married 11 years and met while college students in Nashville, Tenn., made the eight-hour trip to visit Portland, a place Beltz in the past had visited for work.

They fell in love with Portland's food scene and what they call its "chef-driven" restaurants. "In Maine there are restaurants and farmers who pay attention to the seasonality of food," says Householder, 40, of what attracted them to the state.

Maine's food led them to move to Portland in 2005. Beltz, 37, tried working in Cinque Terre's kitchen, but lugging heavy sacks of flour proved too strenuous. She did, however, harp on the owner, Dan Kary, to update his website more often and market his events. He asked her to do it.

She did, and Beltz and Householder found themselves stumbling into an untapped market. The best-known restaurants in the New York Cities of the world can afford to pay monthly retainers of around $15,000 for big PR firms to handle their marketing, Beltz says. But smaller restaurants in Maine never knew that kind of service was even remotely affordable. Beltz won't say what Front Burner PR charges, but says restaurants working with them can face monthly retainers of up to a few thousand dollars depending on factors such as location. "One of the reasons we're successful is we're flexible and agile and able to deliver a lot of the results some of these big companies can deliver," Householder says. "But we can meet [the restaurants] on their level."

The Maine restaurant scene has appeared in the news quite often of late, from Portland being named one of three finalists for the Food Network's "Most Delicious Destination" — we lost to our namesake city on the west coast — to Chef Steve Corry of Portland's Five Fifty-Five restaurant, for which Front Burner has done PR, earning a slot on Food & Wine magazine's prestigious 2007 list of Best New Chefs. But while Front Burner PR has had success landing its clients in a number of national and online publications, from Wine & Spirits to Chef Magazine, Beltz makes clear that they are nothing but mouthpieces. "It's the restaurants that are doing this," she says. "And that is such good news for Maine."

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