Nick's Steakhouse
Custom eCommerce portal delivers Nick’s home cooking to customers in isolation
Nick’s Steakhouse & Pizza is an iconic Calgary restaurant that opened 40 years ago. They have a well-established brand as a family-friendly sports institution that serves traditional and hearty dishes, and is a destination of choice for local and visiting celebrities and athletes.
The Challenge
Forced to close in-person dining during the COVID-19 pandemic, the restaurant industry was one of the hardest-hit, with many forced to close entirely. While larger franchised competitors were able to absorb the exorbitant margins of popular food-delivery apps simply to maintain brand awareness, a small, family-owned restaurant like Nick’s Steakhouse needed a more elegant solution that better protected their business and preserved their operating margins.
The Solution
Alongside a full in-store point-of-sale revamp, the Barrel team customized an online ordering storefront through the Mobi2Go platform that allowed customers to order their favourite dishes for touch-less takeout or contact-less delivery with ease, and with modern presentation. Using custom coding to ensure the platform’s functionality was exact for the requirements of the business, even complex orders and sensitive food-allergy information could be relayed to the kitchen accurately. In order to amplify the launch of the new portal, Barrel deployed a sophisticated combination of paid and organic social media messages, coupled with a custom-produced animated “how-to” video, so that any Nick’s faithful, no matter how technologically inclined, would able to support their favourite restaurant with ease.
The results
In the first two weeks, Nick’s Steakhouse saw: