Good morning and welcome back to The Vittles Podcast.
Close listeners of the podcast may have noticed that there’s been a little bit of PR bashing in the recent episodes: last month Ferhat Dirik pointedly said he would never use a PR out of principle, while in the previous episode Montague Ashley-Craig lamented the ‘tyranny of PRs’ and Feroz Gajia talked about the homogenising effect of PR on restaurants in London.
The industry has been grappling with this uneasy relationship between restaurants, journalists and PRs for as long as public relations has existed. On the one hand, pioneering PRs like Alan and Elizabeth Crompton-Batt are partially responsible for the London restaurant scene as we know it today, helping to create the template for the celebrity chef that runs from Marco Pierre-White to The Bear. On the other, both restaurant owners and journalists have talked to us about their feelings of resentment about relying on PR, with some making it a matter of pride to never use or engage with it. Whatever your opinion, PR remains a significant and integral part of London’s restaurant scene. Almost every new restaurant hoping to get press uses PR... and it seems that the more they do, the more the rest of them need to as well.
So it felt like the right time to invite a titan of the restaurant PR industry on this podcast. Gemma Bell is one of the most influential restaurant PRs in the country today, heading up her own agency Gemma Bell & Company, whose clients over the last 15 years have included St. JOHN, Dishoom, Yotam Ottolenghi, The River Café, Koya, Padella, The Clove Club and many more.
I’ve known Gemma for about 15 years and in that time, the industries of public relations and restaurants have changed dramatically, particularly due to the influence of social media. In this podcast we talk about those huge changes, about what clients want from PR, what she feels her role in the industry is, the influence of her mentors (including Elizabeth Crompton-Batt and hotelier Ian Schrager), parting ways with Yotam Ottolenghi and the biggest lesson she’s learnt from the last two to three decades of working in the restaurant world.
We hope you enjoy it.
Like our previous three podcasts, this episode is free to listen to for all subscribers. You can listen to it here in Substack, on Apple Podcasts or through Spotify. If you’re so inclined, please like, share, rate and comment wherever you get your podcasts.
A massive thanks as usual to Lucy Dearlove, our producer, and to the whole team at Young Space, for hosting our recording sessions.
From all of us at the Vittles Podcast, a very happy new year! We thank you for listening, reading and supporting our work. We'll be back with another podcast in February when Adam will be chatting to Gina restaurant owner and Countertalk founder Ravneet Gill. We’ll see you then.
Credits
The Vittles Podcast is presented by Vittles Restaurants editor Adam Coghlan.
Gemma Bell is the founder of PR agency Gemma Bell & Company.
Lucy Dearlove is an audio producer, sound designer and writer originally from North East England, now based in St Leonards-on-Sea. Her food podcast, Lecker, is a two-time winner of the Fortnum & Mason Podcast of the Year Award.
The full Vittles masthead can be found here.
