Some like it hot! by Lola Sinclair Memories of meals past: How a young Mexican food lover from Southern California ended up in France—and found a touch of home via the Border Grill restaurant's Web site. Run for the border: "Two hot tamales" (aka world class chefs Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger) help bring upscale South American dining to Santa Monica. Planning a tasty Web site: Where do you begin? How do you proceed? Peter Barrett built the Border Grill site from scratch, using imagination and NetObjects Fusion. Freshness counts: Keeping the site fresh keeps visitors coming back. Restaurateur reading: Words of wisdom for other restaurateurs. Ancient history Once a year my mother would drive me and my siblings to a dark, shadowy restaurant called Chez Robert. Paneled in various shades of red, Chez Robert featured complicated, creamy, and caloric French classics served by bona fide French people who all looked pale and nervous despite the perennial sun. After three hours of gastronomic suffering, I longed for the border-town food that was the hallmark of my Southern California youth: cheesy jalapeño burritos. Hibachi grilled corn tortillas. Taquitos and churros drenched in oil and dusted with glazed sugar. Once the Chez Robert meal wore off, I'd sit at the Santa Monica pier eating tamales, relieved that French cuisine would not be inflicted on me for another year. This was back when Lucy and Ricky slept in separate beds, tuna casseroles were all the rage, and the only information superhighway led to San Bernardino. Run for the border "Border food" eventually evolved into an eclectic South of the border gastronomic art form particular to the West and spearheaded, in large measure, by the Border Grill—a lively watering hole and upscale eatery in Santa Monica. Founded by world-class chefs Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger, the Border Grill was where you'd often find me, years ago, kicking back green tamales and margaritas in what was then a local haunt. Those years, unfortunately, didn't last long: Feniger and Milliken quickly rose into the firmament of international culinary fame—with radio shows, books, and guest appearances on "Oprah"—and I, for reasons that still elude me, moved to France. Gastronomically speaking, this was like stepping back into a Chez Robert the size of Texas, and today the closet thing I can get to a cactus-paddle taco or a plantain empañada is the Border Grill's newly redesigned Web site. Managed by the lucky Peter Barrett, who gets to munch on appetizers from Oaxaca and the Yucatan while surfing down corn tortilla superhighways ("If I didn't have a great metabolism, I'd weigh 600 pounds," Peter says), the Border Grill Web site was one of the first restaurant sites on the 'Net. "Mary Sue and Susan wanted to reach the public in every way possible," Peter says. "They thought that the Internet would be a great resource for people to access information about our restaurants and their ideas on cooking in general." Planning a tasty Web site But how do you put a restaurant on-line? Where do you begin? After several brainstorming sessions, one that resulted in the decision to be more cost-effective and do the Web site in-house, Peter and his colleagues had to determine the type and amount of content for the site. "We slowly came to the realization that we could have a 200-page site if we used every idea, so we narrowed it down to just the things we felt our clientele would really want to see and use. "We decided to create the site around general navigation links and each page would have links to its own subpages," Peter adds. Once this basic structure was in place, Peter faced the task of faithfully reproducing the bold aesthetic look of the restaurant itself on-line. "We wanted to give our site a graphic feeling and not just background colors and a few pictures here and there," he says. Using work designed by two London-based artists who created the artwork for the restaurant, Peter did most of the composites and graphics on Macs using Quark and PhotoShop and used NetObjects Fusion 2.0 and 3.1 on the PC for layout and site design. The result is an ensemble of graphic elements that mirror the restaurant: bright, eccentric, cartoonlike mascots, exploding suns and flowers, flying eggbeaters, and dancing piglets. "With NetObjects," Peter says, "I found it was easy to arrange the site just by adding the pages where I needed them. The advantage to using the navbar for us is that they (clients) can go to any page in the site and go to the most popular pages without having to use the back button all the time. It also looked very clean and made the most sense to keep people in the site once they got there." Once they do get there, visitors to the Web site are about as close as they can get to the Border Grill without actually visiting it. From its menu of Pescado Veracruzano or Mulitas de Hongos, visitors can download recipes (think Plum Cardamom Upsidedown Cake or Cinnamon Chicken) or get information on local farmers markets in Los Angeles. There's also plenty of on-line buzz on Feniger and Milliken—their TV shows (Tex-Mex fans should check out the Food Network's "Tamales World Tour"), their cooking classes, and their charity work with the Scleroderma Research Foundation. (Feniger and Milliken manage an annual dinner/comedy event for the foundation that has attracted the likes of Robin Williams, Lily Tomlin, and Ellen DeGeneres. ) According to Peter, "people have told me that they were so glad to find our site because they are big fans of Mary Sue and Susan and couldn't find enough about them anywhere else. Their TV show fans visit the site, our customers visit the site, the artists even refer people to the site to see how we have used their graphics." Freshness counts As the Border Grill expands (with, notably, a new restaurant in Las Vegas), so, too, does its Web site. "I change recipes every quarter," Peter says. "Most of them are from Border Grill books and TV shows. But some of them are just for the site itself, straight from our kitchen to your computer." Customers can also make reservations on-line and interactive projects are being planned that will give repeat visitors the opportunity to win dinner for two or autographed books. Plans for e-commerce are also in the works. "Only recently has the cost of these services come into a price range we feel is right for us," Peter says. Once it's operational, Border Grill fans can order a number of great cookbooks, T-shirts, and chef jackets through the site. For now, however, if you want a copy of, say, their City Cuisine cookbook (whose recipe for Sweet Potato Puree with Honey and Lime redeemed my first scary one-woman Thanksgiving in Paris with French people who couldn't fathom the concept of pumpkin in a pie), you'll have to call the restaurant. [Editor's note: my wife and I recently made the Black Velvet chocolate cake from this cookbook and it was, without a doubt, the best cake either of us have ever eaten, and trust me, we have eaten our share of cakes.] Restaurateur reading For all you restaurateurs out there thinking of going electronic, Peter has some firm advice. "Do your research!" he says. "We looked at tons of sites trying to find different elements that we liked. Doing a site is fairly straightforward. Most restaurants have a graphic identity already in place even if they don't realize it. We are very luck to have very talented artists who have worked with our restaurants doing murals and line art that we can use on our sites. Even if you don't have an artist to work with, you can still hire a graphic artist ... to help you craft an image for you." As far as software is concerned, the choice is (ahem!) obvious. "NetObjects (Fusion) has been a great tool for us to use," Peter says. "I like the fact that if you have no idea of how to use HTML, you can still design a great site with only the knowledge of how to type, cut, and paste. And it doesn't take much but a few great graphics or even using the SiteStyles that come with NetObjects to work to your advantage. Your site not only gives people in your area what they want, but it brings in people from around the world. It is a great universal ad tool." Final words of wisdom from Peter for future electronic restaurateurs: "I would suggest to anyone else that they weigh the cost with the exposure that the Internet can give them, and I'm sure that they will see the overwhelming benefits," he says. "Just make sure that what you put up is quality and not just quantity. Make it easy to use and you won't just get a one-time visitor, you will gain a patron." Of course, having fabulous food won't hurt. Visit the Border Grill's web site. About the author Lola Sinclair is a native of Los Angeles who somehow managed to escape, only to find herself in Paris, married to a Frenchman. She's not complaining, mind you, it's just another example of how life often has different plans than you do. Her bilingual son, Max, is 3 years old and likes to call himself FlouFlou, though no one is quite sure why. They spend part of the year in California, where Lola writes, recovers from the Old World, and drinks lots of margaritas (not necessarily in that order). Lola writes for a number of major publications, but doesn't like to drop names, unless it's to get a really good restaurant reservation. Apparently, Lola's image does not appear on film, and this frightened us to the point where we didn't even want to be in the same room with her and a mirror.