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Food for Thought

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Written by Thom Ring

One of the things I like about Mom ‘n Pop operations is they don’t get caught up in market-research.

Mostly, it’s because they can’t afford it, I’d guess, but I think it might as much be the case that they don’t really care to quantify their customers. When do-it-yourself entrepreneurs get ideas, they make them reality and then test them, not the other way around. That’s why you see Mom ‘n Pop businesses surviving by offering products and services you didn’t even know you wanted, ones you’d never see in the follow-the-poll-results world of mega-corporations.

The Traveler Restaurant serves as the perfect example. When you hear about the deal they offer patrons you’ll wonder if you heard right. The Traveler offers its customers the opportunity to choose any three books from a score of bookshelves that run through its dining room. For free. To take home. You heard it right.

There’s really nothing about this deal that a marketing guru with an MBA might have thought up. The prices on the wide-ranging Traveler menu of decent basic American fare are reasonable, not calibrated to underwrite the costs of the books. And the collection of books doesn’t reflect some deal with publishers looking for writer-exposure or some other marketing-"synergy"-related ulterior motive. Indeed, some of the titles you might run across are so off the media’s radar you’d wonder who would want them. Or who ever did, considering most of them are older than your kids.

Even describing the Traveler’s concept as a concept doesn’t really reflect where the idea came from. It simply was a matter of a restaurant owner with too many books filling his house. As a way of culling his stock, original restauranteur Marty Doyle moved them to the restaurant and began giving one away with each meal. The idea proved so popular that Doyle had to start hunting down books for the restaurant’s collection. When dealers and collectors began looking for specific books or genres Doyle opened a bookstore in the basement.

In the 1990s Doyle sold the restaurant, but by then the appeal of the deal was obvious. The Traveler expanded its offer to three books.

If you have been reading my blogs, you know that books and eating represent favorite pastimes of mine. No surprise, then, that my wife Jan and I head out to Union, Conn., at least yearly to expand our own burgeoning collection. And eat. The menu includes popular deli-style selections as well as variations, like the turkey reuben I had on my last visit, which substituted cole-slaw for the standard reuben’s sauerkraut. I substituted as well, with the Traveler’s fine sweet-potato fires replacing regular fries. Jan’s broiled salmon was a stellar representative of the restaurant’s dinner entrees.

For books, I grabbed a copy of Tobias Wolf’s "This Boy’s Life," which alludes on its jacket to the movie made from the book, it printed so long ago that it touts Robert De Nero and Ellen Barkin as its stars but fails to mention who played the title character. It was a then-unknown Leonardo DiCaprio. I also picked up Lee Iaccocca’s autobiography, now of interest to me after recently reading what he had to say about the current crisis in the American auto industry. My final choice was a book of radio essays written by the late CBS reporter Harry Reasoner. They were from a show he hosted in the early 1960s. I read a few over my reuben and found them entertaining and thought-provoking. Just as I’d found Reasoner way back in his 60-Minutes days.

But three books weren’t enough. I ventured downstairs and soon emerged with two sports books. One, written in the 1970s, promised an expose of Ty Cobb. The other, covering minor-league baseball, included a chapter on the Pawtucket Red Sox and one of my favorite Mom ‘n Pop entrepreneurs, team-owner Ben Mondor. This book was written in the late 1970s, before Mondor’s formula for making a minor-league team a success proved so successful it became a formula adopted nationwide in the minors.

These are books you’d never find at a typical bookstore, but they proved interesting to me precisely because they reflect the interests of readers from another place in time. Market-research would never tell us that, though.

Of course, no pollster ever asked me what I wanted. Right now I could use another order of the Traveler’s sweet-potato fries.

The Traveler Restaurant is located at 1257 Buckley Highway in Union, Conn., and is open daily from 7 a.m to 8 p.m. It’s right off Route 84. Take Exit 74 and follow Holland Rd. to Buckley Highway. Better yet, if you’re coming from the east, try to find Conn. Route 171 and take it through Bigelow Hollow State Park. You’ll be following some of the nicest country roads in New England. Take your sports car or motorcycle.