I ask this question fully realizing that you may not be able to muster an objective perspective about your own PR. I get that. Sometimes we all get a little too close to our businesses for our own good, which is one of the reasons many chefs and restaurateurs are willing to shell out beaucoup bucks for a publicist who can serve as the barrier between misguided ideas and the rest of the world.

Unfortunately, many publicists aren’t willing to play that gatekeeper role because they’re too afraid of offending their client. And some have their own ideas that, well, seemed so good at the time …

For instance, I came across a staggeringly bizarre press release a few weeks ago. That's right, the release made it into my inbox, even though I am not a journalist, which happens to releases gone wrong -- everyone makes fun of them. Why did this release become the butt of many jokes? I'll just say that the pitch hinged on the premise that the fast food industry's supersized meat sandwiches trend is driven by misogynistic marketers and society's collective infatuation with the phallus.

The thing about it is, one will never know if it was the client who demanded the release or the desperate PR firm that dreamed it up. (I say desperate because I don't want to assume the alternative, which is that they had other news, but chose to run with this instead.)
 
To my mind, though, it doesn't matter whether this idea originated with the publicist or one of these companies' marketing departments. Any PR pro worth her paycheck would have put the kibosh on this idea immediately.

See, clients ask for a lot of wack-a-doo things. There's one guy around town who demands that crabcake be printed as one word, Food Lover's Companion be damned. And, I guess, what's a gal to do if the client threatens to fire and the mortgage is due?
 
Stick to your guns, I say. Find a way around it, I implore.

And, chefs, listen to the person to whom you pay scads and scads of cash when they tell you something ain't gonna work. Their outsider perspective and frank assessment is one of the reasons you hired that publicist. Are they always right? No, no one is. But if, more often than not, you don't believe them, I have to ask, why the hell are you paying them?