Feeding the Geeks of New Orleans

There are a handful of restaurants and cafés that New Orleans area technologist frequent. Near or at the top of the list is the Fuel Café; located at 4807 Magazine St. Fuel Café is not just a random eatery near a technological epicenter, or office park in the metro area. Fuel Café is engaged with its customers and has cultivated a loyal following through social networking. Additionally the food is delicious, the atmosphere is uniquely New Orleans, and wireless internet is free.

When Maribeth del Castillo (@mbnola) was installed as Chef Partner at the Fuel Café it came with more than her culinary skills. It came with her husband Alex del Castillo (@blackshoe10) who went on a mission to support his wife and promote the coffee house beyond its uptown neighborhood with the widest and fastest growing network on the internet. Del Castillo saw the brand building success of Naked Pizza and set out to carve out a niche for Fuel Café with his wife culinary talents as the corner stone. With a little coaxing del Castillo convinced owner Neal Laney to allow him to use the cafés name to tweet specials under the handle @fuelcafenola.

Del Castillo describes @fuelcafenola tweets as a “21^st Century version of the Krispy Kreme ‘Hot Donuts Now’ sign.” Tweets started with the wake & bake for $4.20 special, despite the illicit innuendo, the special consisted of an oven fresh scratch made pastry and a cup of Fair Trade coffee. The tweets evolved from daily specials into twitpics of signature dishes with a simple description. The true testament to the quality of the product is when the customs started “tweeting out what they were having,” said Castillo.

In an age where Whuffie, the reputation based currency rooted in Cory Doctorow’s novel  Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, is more valuable than traditional advertising the Castillo’s had a lot of it. Alex del Castillo had a simple strategy to his twitter based marketing, “keep the pitch to at most 30-percent.” Castillo used the other 70-percent interacting with the twitter community on everything from restaurant recommendations to jokes; he built relationships. Those relationships ultimately bore customers, who said “There is no way I would have come in here had it not been for you tweeting.”

While much of Fuel Café reputation was cultivated in social media, there is no shortage of praise in traditional media. A New York Post article mentioned the café among one the eight reasons to visit New Orleans. Lorin Gaudin (@LorinGaudin) profiled Fuel Café on the Table For 6 segment of WDSU news. Subsequent to Gaudin’s praise the café was flooded with customers and sold out of all its backed goods. Del Castillo says, “how many people saw it on TV versus clicking a link in a tweet is a good question.” “…and there is probably an interesting discussion about how local TV can leverage twitter and vice versa.”

Twitter has been an effective tool in driving customers to Fuel Café. Chef Maribeth del Castillo delights like MB’s savory fried pies, bacon scones, creamy shrimp and grits, hand formed hamburgers, and praline bacon scones have kept the customers tweeting to check on the availability of those items.

In the waning days of November Chef Mariebeth tweeted, “As some of you know, this is my last weekend @fuelcafenola, last day Dec 2^nd then Chef Lauren in house. Off to new adventures. Thanx 4 <3!” Hopefully Fuel Café has enough whuffie to maintain its engaged customer base. In a city where there is no shortage of great chefs it was a rare treat to be so engaged with one.