There’s a scene from the Golden Girls—season 1, episode 22—in which Blanche (Rue McClanahan), Dorothy (Bea Arthur) and Rose (Betty White) are commiserating at the kitchen table. Raiding the refrigerator for a suitable late-night snack, Blanche pulls out a chocolate cheesecake. The staccato exchange that follows was a signature element of the show.
“You bought chocolate cheesecake?” an incredulous Dorothy asks.
“For an emergency,” Blanche explains.
“What kind of emergency—nuclear war?” retorts Dorothy.
Floating over to the table in her pink nightgown, Blanche sets the cheesecake down and responds: “Depression.”
And there it was—the debut of a trope that would help the sitcom, which ran for six seasons and bagged 11 Emmy awards, secure its legendary status: Cheesecake fixes everything. The regenerative power of cheesecake would figure into the plots of no fewer than 23 episodes.
Even though the last of those episodes aired three decades ago, there are still hordes of Golden Girls fans—enough for both Hulu and the Hallmark Channel to keep airing the show.
But the chance to sit in the girls’ Miami home and have a slice of chocolate cheesecake? That experience was impossible—at least until last week, when the Golden Girls Kitchen opened its doors in New York’s South Street Seaport.
One for the bucket list
The restaurant is a venture of Bucket Listers, a company that started in 2018 as a list platform that recommended must-do events in cities across the country. Earlier this year, it branched into producing its own.
Enticed by the enduring appeal of the sitcom about four women sharing their golden years as housemates, Bucket Listers secured licensing rights from Disney, whose Touchstone Television production arm created The Golden Girls. The deal allows Bucket Listers to deploy the program’s signature elements—especially sets that accomplish the surreal experience of stepping back into 1985.
“We get super fans here who just walk in and get emotional,” Bucket Listers’ founder and CEO Andy Lederman told a visiting reporter. “The show meant more than just a show.”
Clearly so. The restaurant sold out on its first day in business and is thus far averaging 500 guests per day.
At a time when the restaurant business is still recovering—and in a city where the influence of ecommerce can be seen on block after block of empty storefronts—the Golden Girls’ Kitchen is a case study in how to create an experiential brand in 2022. And how to market it.
Limiting supply increases the demand
The Golden Girls Kitchen is not a permanent attraction. It’ll stay open for 12 weeks. After that, all its interior features will be trucked down to the next scheduled appearance in Miami.
In other words, the place is a pop-up.
That format is more often seen with retail stores like Spirit Halloween and holiday gift shops that appear around Thanksgiving and vanish by early January. But the current economic climate has created conditions that have made the business model viable for sit-down dining, too.
In November, for example, no less a restaurateur than Eminem opened a place called Mom’s Spaghetti in New York’s SoHo district. Entrees included a $15 Spaghetti with Rabbit Balls. Eminem kept his place open for just a week. He also sold out every seat.
But running a restaurant—at least a decent restaurant—has never been easy, and Lederman would like his place to be taken seriously.
“We’re mindful of there being a lot of gimmicky pop-ups,” he said. “We wanted to apply a quality threshold and really make this thing authentic.”
Indeed, even the most devout Golden Girls fan would be challenged to pick a bone with the atmosphere of this place.
The kitchen’s accuracy, for example, extends to the fake wood paneled refrigerator and the yellow telephone on the wall. Blanche’s bedroom is ’80s overload right down to the mauve clamshell chair and the banana-leaf bedspread.
How to make the 1980s come back
But it’s the business model that makes Golden Girls Kitchen an eatery for the times, starting with the marketing strategy.
During its first four years as an events-listing platform, Bucket Listers built up a loyal following. So when it came time to promote Golden Girls Kitchen, the company tapped into its database of 15 million people—a figure that includes its social media tally and those who’ve signed up for its mailing lists. With a receptive audience already at its fingertips, Bucket Listers could avoid costly traditional advertising.
Bucket Listers also attracted diners with a bit of FOMO, stressing that the restaurant wouldn’t be in town for long.
“Creating limited-time opportunities creates a lot of extra buzz,” Lederman said. “We see people traveling from other states to visit because we’re [only] open for 12 weeks.”
There’s also the chance to bag merch from a gift shop located near the door. Sure, fans can buy officially licensed Golden Girls items from any number of online vendors. But Bucket Listers is offering t-shirts and other souvenirs exclusive to the restaurant, creating yet another incentive.
Eking out margins in times like these
The restaurant additionally relies on an operational template calculated to maximize revenue. The menu is suitably themed (Sophia’s Lasagna Al Forno, for example), but small enough to streamline service. And since diners order their meals in advance, the place runs more like a banquet hall than a restaurant, allowing Bucket Listers to save on food and labor costs.
“It’s a restaurateur’s dream to know what your demand is, as opposed to the standard guy on the street [who] has to guess how many people are showing up,” said John Gordon, principal of Pacific Management Consulting Group.
The current economic climate—an anxious one situated somewhere between post-pandemic and pre-recession—also tilts in the restaurant’s favor.
New Yorkers are eager to dine out again. According to data from OpenTable, reservations are up 34% over last year. And in a city where, according to the Department of Finance, pandemic-period storefront vacancy rates rose to 14.2%, many landlords are willing to cut decent deals on short-term leases. The Howard Hughes Corporation, which operates the seaport, was “really happy to have another attraction,” Lederman said.
The ghosts of the girls
Unfortunately, the only feature that fans won’t get at the Golden Girls Kitchen is an appearance of any of the Golden Girls. All the actors who played them are deceased.
Lederman has compensated as best as he can by putting photos of the girls around the space and playing the show’s theme song at least once an hour.
What’s more, he said, “with Betty White’s passing last year, [the show’s] really been top of mind for a lot of people.”
Bucket Listers expects to get 30,000 of them in for dinner before the restaurant leaves town. There’s no telling how many of them will order the cheesecake, but it’ll probably be a lot.
After all, cheesecake fixes everything.
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