Rachel Ayotte found her profession at the point where a dining room meets a story. She had gone to one of Union Square Cafe's weekly open interviews, and the opening that day happened to be assistant to chef Michael Romano. Danny Meyer was preparing Blue Smoke; Romano was putting out a cookbook. Ayotte helped promote both. The revelation was admirably simple: eating and talking, two things she already loved, might amount to a career.
It is difficult to imagine a better apprenticeship for hospitality communications. A restaurant offers instant lessons in attention. Every plate, greeting, reservation and complaint either adds to the evening or takes something from it. There is no useful distinction between the promise and the experience. The room keeps the score.
Ayotte carried that instinct west. In 2004, at the Los Angeles hospitality firm Wagstaff Worldwide, she met Meredith Vachon. They were both Southerners. They each had a Chihuahua. More consequentially, they shared an impatience with public relations done like an assembly line. Hospitality was intimate; its publicity had become rote. The mismatch nagged at them.
A company appears in the living room
By 2007, the two women were freelancing from different cities, Ayotte in Los Angeles and Vachon in Austin. There was no trumpet fanfare. They ordered business cards, built a website and, with a little over $1,000, crossed the blurry line between doing work and owning a business. Vachon sent the text that made it official: she thought they had just started a company.
They called it bread & Butter. The name has the good manners not to overexplain itself. Food is the subject. Service is the method. Useful work pays the bills.
The firm did not grow by summoning every client toward Los Angeles. It moved toward them. When clients needed New York media, bread & Butter opened in New York. When hospitality businesses in Texas or Las Vegas needed people who understood those markets, the firm looked for local talent. Six years after its start, it had six offices, 25 employees and more than 50 clients.
The arrangement also gave the partnership a useful shape. Ayotte supervised Los Angeles and San Francisco and prepared the Las Vegas office; Vachon led the Texas markets; they shared New York. Advice against going into business with a friend had arrived early and freely. Ayotte's answer was practical. Starting alone is frightening, and counsel from someone inside the daily problem carries a different weight from even the kindest advice offered at home. Their friendship was not an ornamental origin story. It was part of the operating system.
“We grow to accommodate our clients versus bringing on clients to grow.”Rachel Ayotte on the agency's expansion model
That sentence is less a growth slogan than an order of operations. First, locate the need. Then build around it. In an industry fond of expansion maps and breathless scale, Ayotte's model gave geography a practical purpose. A publicist who lives in a city knows which opening people are discussing, which editor has changed beats and which corner suddenly feels interesting. A flight can deliver a visitor. It cannot manufacture familiarity.
The audience is a place, not a trophy
The local-office strategy has a digital twin. Ayotte tells clients they should prefer 500 followers in Brooklyn to 50,000 in Brazil if the business needs Brooklyn diners. The line is funny because it punctures a very expensive vanity. Reach without relevance is a crowd outside the wrong door.
For a restaurant, the final conversion is wonderfully physical. Somebody remembers the place, makes a reservation, crosses town and sits down. Marketing that cannot connect itself to that journey may be decorative, but it is not yet useful. Ayotte's team begins with the brand, its competitors and its target audience, then chooses the means. The channel follows the customer rather than the agency's favorite trick.
The metric that makes it through the door
One campaign makes the method visible. For Lady M Confections, bread & Butter helped develop a partnership with Netflix and Pearl Studio around the animated film Over the Moon. Lady M made a limited-edition mooncake lantern. The agency carried it to media and creators. A beautiful object, a timely cultural release and overlapping audiences did the work together. The campaign generated more than 1.7 million impressions and 19,804 social engagements, along with a sales lift for Lady M.
The point was not to bolt a celebrity onto a dessert. It was to find a partnership with enough shared character that the introduction felt natural. Ayotte likes brand partnerships because they let each participant borrow the other's invitation list. Done well, the result is less advertisement than occasion.
Flexible methods, stubborn intent
bread & Butter began as a public relations firm. It did not remain one in the narrow sense. As diners moved toward social feeds and review sites, the agency added social media, influencer marketing, digital advertising, design, websites, brand partnerships, photography and content. By 2021 it had reached 14 offices. Its present site lists teams from Atlanta and Austin to San Diego, San Francisco and Washington, D.C.
Ayotte's compact doctrine is to stay stubborn about the goal and flexible about the method. It rescues consistency from repetition. The goal is still to make a hospitality business known and chosen. The method might be a press story, an Instagram campaign, a useful website or a cake that turns into a lantern. Loyalty belongs to the outcome, not the old tool.
“To be innovative and the first to try something, you have to be willing to fail.”Rachel Ayotte on moving before the market settles
There is steel under the warmth. When the agency committed to integrated marketing, Ayotte decided clients who could not accept the shift were no longer a fit. Hospitality may be gracious, but it is not passive. One of her bluntest observations is only three words long: “I hate waiting.”
Her career is full of decisions made just before certainty could catch up. Starting with a friend despite warnings that friendship and business should not mix. Opening offices rather than buying more plane tickets. Asking a luxury hotel to try the unfamiliar approach. Letting a communications agency grow creative and digital limbs. The appetite for change is paired with a restaurateur's hatred of empty gestures. A new idea still has to serve somebody.
The publicist takes the editor's chair
Late Checkout began with a recurring frustration. Ayotte's team could recognize a good trend or story, but publication depended on editors with crowded calendars and priorities of their own. Inside bread & Butter, the joke was inevitable: perhaps they should start their own magazine.
Chief Digital Officer Samantha Markiewicz first shaped Late Checkout as a LinkedIn feature. People liked its pace and mix. It grew into a daily newsletter and standalone site covering food, drink, travel, culture and design. In 2025, Ayotte described the ambition with unusual restraint. It was not meant to win a race for breaking news. It should feel like the well-read friend who notices something cool and sends it along.
This is a subtle reversal. For most of her career, Ayotte helped clients earn somebody else's attention. With Late Checkout, she is building attention that the organization owns. The publicist becomes the publisher, not by abandoning curation but by making curation the product.
The move also closes a loop that began at Union Square Cafe. Then, she helped a chef and restaurant tell their stories. Now, she sits where food, travel and culture become an editorial selection. The technology changed from a press clipping to a feed to an inbox. The pleasure is recognizable: finding the thing worth talking about, then pulling out a chair for somebody else.
Good publicity still ends with a person
The communications business is eager to industrialize itself. Dashboards count attention; platforms sort it; automation promises to summon it on schedule. Ayotte uses the modern machinery, and she is candid about the advantage of digital measurement. Yet the durable idea in her work is stubbornly human. A restaurant is local. Taste is social. Trust moves through recommendation. A useful audience is made of particular people, not an impressive abstraction.
That may explain why bread & Butter's expansion feels less like an empire than a seating plan. Put people near the market. Give them the full menu of tools. Listen before prescribing. Keep the room warm. If the media gate is crowded, open another entrance.
Ayotte started by discovering that eating and talking could be a job. Nearly two decades into bread & Butter, she has made the phrase sound less casual, not more. Eating is how hospitality becomes memory. Talking is how the memory travels. Everything in between is the work.