When the Burrito Liberation Front took over Pao Café in February, many, including the owners, thought the coup would only be a temporary marketing stunt during a slow month when the chef and co-owner was on vacation. However, the masses embraced the Burrito Liberation Front (BLF). So what was once a Brazilian bakery and café in Newmarket is now Burrito Liberation.
Pao Café was launched in June 2012 by first-time restaurateurs Matt and Barbee Carano, drawing on Barbee’s Brazilian heritage and serving Brazilian cheese bread panini. While the restaurant created a buzz and good reviews, business was not exactly booming.
“Business was okay,” says Matt Carano, whose full-time gig is as a contractor with Lamassu, a Manchester firm that creates Bitcoin ATMs.
Barbee, who worked full-time at Pao as the chef, wanted to take off the month of February to visit her family in Brazil, as it was a slow time for the restaurant. The couple was faced with either shutting down for the month or having Matt running it and relearning all the recipes.
Instead, Matt came up with another idea. He contacted friend and chef Andrew May, and asked if he would fill in for the month making burritos. Matt knew his friend could make a tasty burrito and thought it would be a manageable way to get through the month.
But he didn’t want to turn off Pao’s regular customers. “If we created a fun story, they would have fun too,” Matt says. He concocted a story about the Burrito Liberation Front “kidnapping” Barbee and taking over Pao with a manifesto to “create the best burritos ever served on the Seacoast.”
He turned to a friend, Mike Finger, principal of Centinel Consulting—a Portsmouth PR firm—to help get the word out. Finger created the name for the fictitious liberation group and sent out press releases. Local media, including a food writer for Seacoast Media Group, picked up the story.
From there, it became a social media hit, Finer says. Matt and Barbee stoked those fires by posting pictures and updates from BLF “leaders” and from Barbee, updating how her captors were treating her (they were treating her to drinks and dinners in Brazil).
Just how well did it work? Matt and Andrew launched their pop-up burrito restaurant at Pao on a Wednesday during a snowstorm, figuring it would provide them with a nice slow day to get acclimated.
“We got completely crushed, and we were running around like crazy,” Matt says. By 4 p.m., before the dinner rush, they had sold out and had to shut the doors. The next two days were similarly crazed, requiring them to close early. “We had to shut the door with people still inside the restaurant and others outside waiting to get in,” Matt says. Those three days, despite closing early, set sales records for the restaurant.
The duo regrouped, and decided to open just three days a week in order to remain open for full days. Barbee even returned home early from vacation to help, and the couple decided their marketing stunt should become a full-fledged business.
The restaurant officially launched as Burrito Liberation at the end of March and is now open seven days a week. Pau employed three, but Burrito Revolution now employs seven.
Our average daily business from last February to this February is 70 to 80 percent more. We think that will only grow,” Matt says. “This is a rebirth and a second chance to do things the right way.”
Current Issue - May 2024