Well, here is our debut in the blogosphere!!!!
As we near the eve of our ninth year, we have decided to enter the dance and start blogging. Although it might appear that we are newbies, we have been writing about our trials and tribulations on the net for years now, with our first e-newsletter composed and sent a little over six years ago. Originally, our newsletter was supposed to be a monthly communication meant to let our customers, family and friends know what we were up to, what was cooking etc..... Back in these days, the blogging community was in its infancy and truth be told, we had no idea where to begin.
We wrote articles, adorned them with the best photographs we could come up with at the time (armed with a small Minolta state-of-the-art camera and a whopping 2.1 megapixels, I was almost convinced that I was indeed the new Helmut Newton of digital photography!)... We turned the result into bulky, space hogging PDF's and sent them to the email addresses customers had deigned scribbling on their dinner experience comment cards, only to get a staggering amount of returns and "postmaster-unknown-user/this-mailbox-never-existed -in-the-first-place" type of emailing errors..... to put it in a nutshell, it was most frustrating. I had to go back and analyse each and every one of the returns to see if anything could be done, and our precious word be delivered....
Thanks to a new online editing system, we were soon able to move on to the next generation of newsletter publishing: we would compose and save our writing directly onto our website and send our customers an e-card with a link to the new edition. Still we had to deal with gazillions of returns and bounced emails. We finally had to face the ugly truth:the vast majority of people out there were not nearly as internet/email/tech savvy as we wanted them to be, and did not maintain their e-mailboxes. We ended up sending 3 or four mass emailings per year, to inform our customers of holiday specials and menus.
With the rapid development of social networking tools on the internet, we have decided that it was now time for us to change directions with the way we communicate. We will now use this blog (excusez moi... this journal) the way we originally intended to use our e-newsletter way before it was fashionable to do so. Since lots of things are happening right now with the imminent development of some new exciting projects Eric and I will do our best to keep writing articles, post photos and even videos of our [crazy] lives at the restaurant in an effort to share it with all of you. Please do send us your comments (check out the link below) and become a follower of our journal...
Thank you for checking in, and for your continued support throughout the years. Thank you for making The Paris Bistro the best dining experience in the city.... bar none. Please come dine with us soon and experience the bounty of the seasons through our menu.
À très bientôt.....
Eric, Lori, Eman and the entire staff
