The Crisis That Led to Happiness: A Story About a Cheese and Charcuterie Board
Following a dream of learning to play the bouzouki, my adventurous partner and I flew to Greece for nine wonderful days in mid-December.
Back in 2012, when I was a reporter at Bizportal, I wrote extensively about Greece’s economic crisis. The country had not recovered from the 2008 crisis and was struggling with debt equivalent to about 175% of its national output as of 2013.
According to international media coverage at the time, the mood on Greece’s streets was grim. People could not withdraw cash from banks, rushed to buy canned goods, and prepared for a possible departure from the eurozone and national collapse.
By the time of our visit, about eight years after the crisis began and four years after the street protests, the mood seemed optimistic again, at least on the surface.
Our wonderful trip took us more than 2,000 kilometers, from Athens to the Macedonian and Albanian borders in the north. The people we met taught me about determination, optimism, creating something from nothing, and recognizing entrepreneurial opportunities even in the simplest places. They also taught me how customer loyalty can create value and income during a crisis.
Validating a need by traveling the world—is there a better way?
In the years before this trip, I had encountered several travel-related startups and ventures, for example, in the Smartag story, as well as attempts to build recommendation platforms for travelers worldwide.
More than anything, I think these founders need to travel themselves and validate the need.
As we came down from the Acropolis , we began craving good food and a glass of wine. After passing the familiar tourist traps, we sat in the sun on a side street and opened TripAdvisor, filtering restaurants by proximity.
We spotted it immediately: the restaurant ranked number one out of about 3,500 in Athens.
Its name was Cinque Wine & Deli Bar , and we decided to try it. After a five-minute walk, we arrived. To our surprise and delight, it was empty apart from its charming owners. We sat down.
The lovely wine bar was small, attractively designed, warm, and inviting. Evangelia and Georgios, the couple who owned it, smiled, gave us a minute to settle in, and approached with an information booklet and a map of Greece. We had expected a menu, of course.
Evangelia asked what we would like. We asked for her recommendation. She suggested their bestselling signature cheese and charcuterie board, with apologies to readers who keep kosher, and a wine tasting. We agreed and did not regret it.
What put them first among about 3,500 restaurants in the city?
Their physical product was wonderful, as the photo above shows. But beyond the excellent flavors, I want to talk about their user experience, or UX.
Some readers may not see the connection between a restaurant review and a blog about physical product entrepreneurship. But as soon as they presented the product, I recognized remarkable entrepreneurship.
Every morning, the owners bought cheeses, cured meats, fruit, vegetables, and herbs at Athens’ central market. They made small adjustments to the ingredients and a big investment in presentation.
The beautiful board contained not just about 15 varieties of cheeses, meats, dips, and fruit, but also the idea that inspired the couple to create the business.
Evangelia and Georgios could simply have served the dish and wished us “kali orexi,” Greek for enjoy your meal. Instead, they insisted on explaining to every customer how to use the product.
They described where each ingredient came from, which combinations complemented one another, and how best to eat them. Feta, for example, paired with mortadella and preserved-lemon dip, while smoked cheese worked better with salami, apple dip, and a rosemary leaf.
The excellent flavors, knowledge, and instructions that accompanied the product showed why user experience should be a founder’s priority for any product, especially a physical one.
We quickly understood why this small restaurant ranked first in Athens. It was mainly the added value of a personal experience, not just the ingredients, the interior design, or the location.
Customer loyalty built in a moment of personal storytelling and emotion
The experience reached its peak after the meal, when they told us their personal story. That was the moment these two remarkable founders took our loyalty to another level.
Through the conversation, we began to understand their brand and the values behind it, not just enjoy their physical product. Evangelia and Georgios were a Greek couple in their fifties. They explained what led them to open Cinque and climb to first place on TripAdvisor.
Until 2008, they had been a conventional Greek couple, brought up to work, enjoy simple things, and save enough to buy a respectable home.
Then the crisis hit. They lost their regular jobs and found themselves with a comfortable house, including a hot tub, a small vineyard, a garden, and a view of the bay, but no work and a growing tax burden. Greece’s government had imposed heavy taxes on homeowners, drawing on the cultural expectation that everyone should own a home.
Unemployed and approaching 60, they made the brave decision to change their outlook and earn a living from a longstanding passion: good wine and quality food. We found it inspiring.
They opened a small wine and cheese boutique with a modest investment and relatively low risk, and found that it worked. That was their pilot. Soon afterward, they decided to take the venture to the next stage and moved to Athens.
Anyone who has visited Athens knows it is a culinary capital. In startup terms, the couple moved from product-market fit to growth.
At the time of our visit, they lived in a small Athens apartment, worked at something they loved, and were managing to repay debts accumulated during the financial crisis. Their son had taken that passion a step further and was studying winemaking.
“We simply work and love what we do, and people feel it.”
When I asked how they had reached that prestigious top spot in Athens’ restaurant rankings, Evangelia answered without hesitation: “We simply work and love what we do, and people feel it.”
One authentic story, without a marketing budget
Without spending a euro on marketing, growth hacking, mailing lists, or Google Ads, these founders were almost completely booked most days of the week. They had built customer loyalty during their personal crisis.
Their love for the product, honesty, attention to every customer, and desire to create an experience and added value inspired more than 450 customers to voluntarily write reviews in 18 languages. Evangelia did not even ask us to leave a rating.
We had witnessed one story in the wider fabric of Greece: a country whose crisis also created opportunities. It brought many people down, but gave those who noticed an opportunity to change their lives and create wonderful products.
John F. Kennedy famously described the Chinese word for crisis as combining danger and opportunity. Whatever the linguistic limitations of that familiar metaphor, the idea captures the lesson of this story.
We would love to hear about successes or failures that grew from a crisis, or from a moment when you thought you were in one. How do you build customer loyalty during a crisis??