What I Learned

Edina-based Parasole opened Chino Latino in Minneapolis’s Uptown neighborhood in 1999. Chino Latino’s billboard ads have gained plenty of notoriety over the years.

“There was a big protest a couple years ago, when people thought we were making fun of Third World countries . . . ‘Wok the dog’ just drove them up the wall. That’s the one that started it all. The next month, I did a different billboard that said, ‘Mommy, Mr. Whiskers didn’t come home last night.’ That just made them crazy. The next month I did one that said, ‘Toned-down billboards for your driving safety.’ That infuriated them.

What I learned, or rather what was reinforced, was the idea that with a small, one-unit restaurant, the message has to be the breakthrough. When we started Buca in ’93, we did a billboard that said, ‘Italian dinners and sanitary bathrooms.’ Jay Leno got a copy of it and held it up on the screen. If you do a good message, it will, in fact, break through. We mean no harm by these things; we’re just having fun.”