Communication Conundrum: Must Every Venue Enter the Chat?

There’s no phone at Casa, the good-time 75-seat wine bar in Mount Hawthorne, WA. But people find a way. 

“In the middle of service, they’ll call our pizza shop next door trying to make a reservation for Casa,” says Head Chef and Co-owner Paul Bentley. “So now we’re trying to eliminate the phone at the pizza shop, too.”

It takes confidence to limit communications in today’s chronically connected world. But it can also make good sense: Strip out the channels that don't serve you, free up your energy for the ones that do.

“Casa is a neighbourhood restaurant, we’re not trying to be anything we’re not,” Bentley says. “We don’t have a phone because neither of us wanted to answer the phone, but it’s also about trying to make the numbers work.” Having someone answer the phone, he says, is a full time job. Instead, the restaurant relies on its website. “If someone needs to cancel a booking, they can do it online. They can message us online. All the information is there. When people call, it’s either because they haven't read it, or they can't be bothered reading it.”

Casa isn’t alone. In Brunswick, community-minded Vietnamese eatery Shop Bao Ngoc not only has no phone, it has no set opening hours. Its “open when we feel like it” philosophy sees updates shared via Signal group chat. Potts Point Italian joint Paradise goes further still: no socials, no phone, no email, no booking system, no website. Word still gets around. 

This blueprint isn't for everyone. The IYKYK approach is great – until not enough people know, and you have no marketing framework to fall back on. Instead, the attention economy puts pressure on operators to be everything, everywhere, all at once. So where should you be showing up, and how?

The New Arrival Moment

Good service has long prioritised the "arrival moment" – the first few seconds after a guest steps through the door that set the tone for the entire experience ahead. A warm welcome is plain old good hospitality, but it's also anchored in cognitive psychology: the information we receive first shapes how we interpret all that follows. 

The problem is that most guests form an impression of your business well before they reach the threshold. Many owners still don’t see these pre-arrival touchpoints – your website, booking process, social content – as a form of hospitality, which is a mistake. These “perception moments” are like an invisible welcome, expressions of your brand that shape how diners see you and convert the merely interested into devoted fans. 

Start with a strategy, however rough. It's tempting to jump straight to execution – we need X posts a week, let’s redo the website – but an upfront game plan will sharpen your decision-making, ensure all of your communications are aligned to a single vision, and give you a way to measure success. 

Whether you're working with a communications agency or doing it DIY, the first step is nailing the fundamentals: who you are, who your audience is, your visual style and tone of voice.

“We speak for a long time about what the concept is, distilling it into one line,” says Daisy Tulley of Sydney’s Mucho Hospitality Group, which is behind a string of successful single-drink-focused bars including Bar Planet, Cantina OK! and Centro 86. “We get a good sense of its personality. If the bar was a person, what would they look like? What would they wear? What brands would they engage with? That helps dictate the tone, which filters down to your copy, your content and everything that comes afterward.”

Digital Dining Room

For most operators, the website functions as a home base. It is a single source of truth and an extension of the restaurant experience – almost like a digital dining room.

“You’re not replicating the restaurant one-to-one online – you can’t – but how you position the venue online establishes an expectation in people’s minds,” says Robert Nudds, Strategy Director at acclaimed design practice Studio Round. “We think about it as a central repository. It sets up the premise of the experience, and all communications – your EDMs, your socials – need to ladder back there, so they’re all driving toward the same goal. Which, for most venues, is bums on seats.” 

Peruse fine diner Yiaga’s site and be romanced by outback-themed poetry and soothing animated botanical drawings, priming you for one of the most considered dining experiences in the country. Baba’s Place, a celebration of culinary suburbia in Sydney’s inner west, is reimagined online as a residential fridge complete with pita bread, Arabic Pepsi and clickable magnets. 

Tone matters, too. Every word on your site is a form of communication to be considered. Some venues pride themselves on warm, generous hospitality but list finger-waggy booking conditions that read like a legal disclaimer. For others, so many different people have updated the website over the years, its voice is that of a different business entirely. 

The golden rule? You’re better off having no website at all than one that makes a bad impression, or has been left to gather dust.

And with social media challenging traditional search as the public's first touchpoint for discovery, the right set-up can eliminate the need for a website entirely.

Find Your Following

Social media is a different beast, and arguably a harder one to opt out of. It's not easy to resist the lure of the 'gram in particular. In recent years, even old-school institutions like Pellegrini's, Ling Nan and Supper Inn have caved (though the latter is yet to post). Casa is on Instagram, somewhat reluctantly, maintaining a presence of just three grid posts (total) and the occasional story.

“It started as a joke,” says Bentley. “An old business partner was like, ‘You guys need to post. You need to have stuff on the grid.’ And we said that when we got to 10,000 followers, we would post, no problem.”

18,000 followers in, nothing much has changed. For Casa, it works. 

Melbourne pasta bar Tipo 00 finds its Instagram functions as a kind of visual menu. “We've always kept it pretty simple. We want to attract people who are genuinely interested in food, not those chasing the latest cool thing they saw online," says Co-owner Luke Skidmore. “We highlight things that are unique to Tipo, to give people a genuine sense of how it feels to dine here. We're trying to make the best food and source the best wine that we can, and that's where we want the attention to be.”

Tipo's nearly 60k following includes a large international fanbase, which means a language barrier can come into play. Instagram often becomes a real-world communication tool, with diners pulling up the feed and pointing to images of what they want. 

For the team at Bar Planet, the Skyscraper was never part of the plan. The kooky, kaleidoscopic bar in Sydney's inner west is known for martinis: properly made, theatrically poured. An outlandish garnish of upwards of 20 olives going viral wasn't on the vision board.

"That just happened in the DMs," says Tulley. "Someone responded to a story we posted, saying an olive garnish looked as big as a skyscraper. So we started calling it the Skyscraper, and it's just gone on and on. Now most people find out about us through our socials. It was really as casual as that."

Obsessive social listening is part of Mucho’s strategy, but the Skyscraper moment also worked because Bar Planet’s identity is crystal clear. The group also has a full-time behind-the-scenes team conceiving, capturing and posting content, whether that’s turning popcorn reviews into posts at Bar Herbs or shooting taste tests with punters at Centro 86.

"It's a lot of throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks and what people are engaging with," Tulley says. "You have to be very involved, and obsessed. You need the right people making the content. And you need to really love the community of people that are interacting with your brand, because they're an extension of the bar."

High performance on socials doesn't always equate to selling the venue or its offering – at least not directly. Instagram and TikTok have become entertainment platforms, where audiences can form parasocial relationships with whoever's on camera. Got a kitchenhand with an offbeat sense of humour? Give them a monthly series. A bartender with an unhealthy maraschino cherry obsession? Snap some smartphone stills and let them run with it. 

But not everyone dreams of becoming a content creator. For most small operators, maintaining an active social presence without the help of an agency is too time consuming and asks too much of their team. Trendjacking is the right move for Bar Planet, but for others it can be off-brand (and off-putting). And when content does take off, it also isn't necessarily going to best represent your venue, or generate bookings from people you want dining there. 

There's also a cost to being everywhere, and it isn't just time. “With so much restaurant content online, everyone's looking at the same things and replicating each other. We're losing a bit of creativity and individuality as an industry,” says Skidmore. “And as a diner, when you can see everything before you go, that sense of surprise and discovery starts to disappear.”

The antidote might be restraint, but even that depends on your platform of choice. Playing the social media game will always mean following someone else's rules. On Instagram, quality now matters more than quantity, so you can get away with posting once a week or less. TikTok’s algorithm demands more regular feeding, so the platform is largely out of reach for venues beyond large groups. Or those with time-rich, tech-savvy Gen Zs at the helm, like the founder of Gracie's Wine Room, who built a ready-to-go community through the popular "founder journey" approach. 

Consistency Wins

The toolkit is broad, but ultimately the right approach for your business is one that reflects who you are, serves those you want to reach, and that you can sustain.

“Nothing works in isolation,” says Nudds. “In hospitality you have to take care of a thousand small details to get that big picture right. There's a lot that can go wrong, but there's also a lot you can control. To get things right, you just need to adjust, to turn the dial.”

And happily, less is often more. It’s possible we’ve inadvertently trained our audiences to expect too much communication. One of Casa's Instagram posts clearly lists options for buying gift cards: over email or in-venue. The first comment reads: “Hi, are you able to buy gift certificates online?”

It has not received a reply.