We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Sam Stuhlman. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Sam below.

Sam, appreciate you joining us today. One of the things we most admire about small businesses is their ability to diverge from the corporate/industry standard. Is there something that you or your brand do that differs from the industry standard? We’d love to hear about it as well as any stories you might have that illustrate how or why this difference matters.

Quality food is all about the ingredients and a great team. You can’t produce great results with cheap ingredients. We have been criticized for not having art ion our walls, for being noisy, and not having the proper wine glasses. My reply is that I would rather put money into ingredients and staff wages than into decor.

Sam, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

We are a full-service Italian/Sicilian restaurant featuring pizza, pasta, and Italian specialties. Zuzzu is intimate, yet neighborly. We boast of our extensive Italian wine list curated by me. When I bought the restaurant 5 years ago, it wasn’t up to its potential as a “destination.” We applied some basic marketing principles to raise brand awareness, but what sets us apart is our concentration on quality ingredients and a unique and rewarding customer experience. Our customers are family to us and often to each other.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

Like everyone, we had to adapt to the new COVID reality. The city shut down indoor dining at the start of the pandemic, so we had to focus on the menu items that were suitable to take home. We were lucky that our chef at the time had a catering business in the past, and that I had expertise in warehousing and order fulfillment.

We took steps to ensure continued sales by
-Setting up online ordering
-Paring our menu down to only items that travel well
-Setting up our dining room to accommodate multiple orders that could be brought curbside
-Adding new products that used ingredients on hand in a new way (in our case it was bagels)
-Planning for the long haul, should the closure continue (we mapped out production areas to make and package granola, soft pretzels, and pastries)

How did you build your audience on social media?

We had existing website and Instagram accounts, but previous owners didn’t use them.

My advice is post, post, post. Too many businesses concentrate on cool websites rather than putting out content and pictures. We used the old website for 4+ years and only recently changed it. We post a lot on Instagram and Facebook. We started an email mailing list less than a month ago and already have 600 subscribers.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.zuzzurestaurant.com
• Instagram: zuzzu_roswell
• Facebook: Zuzzu