Eats, beats and tweets at Nyood

There isn’t much Roger Mooking doesn’t do. He’s head chef at Nyood, a restaurant on the same strip of Queen St. as The Social and 69 Vintage. He’s also the host of Everyday Exotic on the Food Network, an MC, vocalist, songwriter, and producer. In August 2008 Mooking released his debut album, Soul Food. Well-wired and web savvy, Mooking hosts a vlog on his website and regularly tweets, using the handle @rogermooking.

One night at Nyood Mooking decided to tweet while he was calling out orders as an experiment, and found users quickly tweeted back, from both inside the restaurant and out. The tweets started a conversation about Nyood that was seen by countless followers.

Both Mooking and restaurant manager Sacha Elwakeel saw the potential twitter held for Nyood and talked about different ways to incorporate twitter into their service. Instead of simply strategizing a plan to gain followers, they decided to take twitter to the next level and give it its own event.

The result was Eats, Beats, and Tweets, a two night event that kicked of the Winterlicious festival on January 29. Nyood hired DJs to spin during dinner and projected the restaurant’s twitter feed onto the rough white wall opposite the bar. Before the event Nyood contacted all of its reservations to make sure they had the restaurant’s twitter address, and gave out its password--scarface--to any diners who didn’t want to join.

During the event Nyood staff met with each table, helping newbies set up accounts and post their first tweet. Elwakeel says many of the guests hadn’t used the service before and signed up to participate. “Twitter owes me big,” he laughs.

Guests tweeted to request songs, comment on dishes, and order shots. “They were fascinated they could order drinks without talking to the bartender,” Elwakeel says.

Initially Elwakeel wasn’t so sure about the whole mobile revolution. “My pet peeve is people bringing blackberrys into the restaurant,” he says, pulling out his own to peck at the buttons and imitate a distracted diner. “I thought: how can I turn this into a good thing?”

Testing out twitter on such a large scale was a bit nerve-wracking, Elwakeel admits. “It’s a big risk letting people comment,” he explains, “I can control the food and the atmosphere, but I can’t control new technology.”

But the evening went well, and was successful enough that Nyood is considering planning a similar monthly event. “The only problem was that we were focused on twitter and not the tables,” Elwakeel says, explaining that tweeting added an extra task for a staff already working at break neck speed.

“It was a fun thing,” he says. “But would I do it every night? No.”