Anthony Bourdain and Apizza Scholls Share Secrets to Success

I'm a huge fan of Anthony Bourdain whose weekly No Reservations airs on The Travel Channel. Bourdain's show is so engaging because he's not afraid to let his true abrasive yet hysterical New York personality loom large. I find myself imagining how he will react to the country he's visiting before the show even starts since he has such a unique way of looking at the world. It's a real breadth of fresh air in a TV wasteland where so many hosts play it safe. You could move most television hosts around yet the programs would remain the same. By playing up what makes him unique, Bourdain's show is both different and entertaining.

Many business could learn from this approach. Instead of trying to play it safe, take a stand and be different. In yesterday's No Reservations about the Pacific Northwest, Bourdain featured Apizza Scholls, one of our favorite restaurants in Portland, Oregon. Without question, the restaurant has the best pizza in town - a thin, charred crust topped with the fresh, high-quality ingredients. But, great pizza alone wouldn't have given this restaurant the amazing buzz that it has in Portland which probably landed it as the only local restaurant featured on No Reservations. Bourdain and other journalists can't stop talking about what makes the restaurant different from other places. For instance, all the dough is mixed by hand. It's so time-consuming to make the dough that Apizza Scholls usually runs out of pizza every night by 8:30 PM. Yet, owner Brian Spangler refuses to go to a faster means of making dough since he feels that it would compromise quality. Likewise, he's so fanatical about great pizza that he won't let his customers mix and match ingredients like they can at other places. 

Kudos to Spangler for following through on one of the most important elements of building buzz! Be good. Be different. And, people and the press will flock to you.