American Madness

You may recall that the location formerly known as Chickpea, a falafel house off of St. Mark’s Place, was holding a contest to name their restaurant.

Well the winner was announced yesterday. They emailed all contestants that they will now be Kosher Village!

Yeah, I thought that was a pretty lousy name as well and decided to respond to the email and let them know. What happened when I hit respond was that I noticed that the email was addressed not to a ghost list but, rather, contained the email addresses of all the other contest participants. (Ed: The list, by a quick count, appears to contain 3,000 email addresses.)

So, in announcing that they picked a bad name for the restaurant, they also distributed my email address to hundreds of strangers. I emailed them and asked them why they had done that, and instead of getting a response, I received a second message from them that was exactly the same as the first.

Talk about getting off to a bad start! Here’s some advice for building interest in your restaurant: First, hold a contest and choose a bad name (I am not saying mine should have been chosen, but my money says they could have done better then Kosher Village). Second, distribute all of the email addresses of the individuals who showed initial interest in your restaurant. Yeah, this is surefire success.

–Update 1: I checked my email again: make that 3 of the same messages.

–Update 2: And now I have received my first piece of spam because of this list from Allen Stern (astern@citi-habitats.com). When I called Allen he even admitted he got the email address from the Kosher Village mailing.

–Update 3: I have now received 6 identical emails from Kosher Village in the last hour. None is an apology.

–Update 4: Make that 8.

–Update 5: I called Kosher Village, they say they have shut down their server and “We’re sorry about that.” Frankly that isn’t nearly enough.

–Update 6: They clearly didn’t shutdown their server fast enough as email #9 from them just came through.

–Update 7:  And 4 more emails, making the count for the day 13

This entry was posted by Matt Cipriano on Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 at and is filed under American Madness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.