I like to call it the three G's. That is Great food, Great service and Great entertainment. Any one of the three will make me come back to a restaurant. Great food makes me more tolerant of poor service or a boring atmosphere. Entertainment and great service from the staff creates the power of redemption for a less than desirable meal. Give me great food and an atmosphere that's fun and I'll serve myself. Naturally, you're not going to open a restaurant, or at least keep it open if the food is not great. Controlling the quality of service your staff is providing may be an exercise in futility. The décor and atmosphere can be created.

Deciding on the décor of your restaurant is a difficult task. The motif can either excite or bore the people who dine in your restaurant. If you get a motif that has people mingling with other tables talking about it you have a winner. There is a little town in Arizona named Oracle where you can find a textbook example of what I'm talking about here. Frank Palazzolo is the owner and the pizzeria is Nonna Maria's Pizzeria. What is it about his establishment that has the town coming in to see what the talk is about? Art. The food brings them back. Frank is an Italian restaurant owner and part of a close family who spent time growing up in Sicily. As a child he was taught the basics of drawing by a nun, took that knowledge and expanded it. Inspired by the pop art of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, he began painting with a similar style using bold, bright colors as a way to relax.

"I started painting characters from old movies and television shows I watched as a child," Frank says. "I started painting them eating pizzas because I watched and enjoyed these characters and wanted to do something that would keep them from being forgotten and give people, especially kids, a taste of the past. What can a kid relate to better than pizza? This is my way of saying thank you to these characters I loved as a kid. I also want it to inspire a younger generation to go out and rent some of these old black and white movies and discover what it was about them that made us love them."
Displayed in his pizzeria are more than 50 paintings of everyone from The Little Rascals and Frank Sinatra eating pizza and pasta to The Honeymooners and The Blues Brothers. What makes the décor such a great concept is that it invites customers to try and figure out who all the characters are displayed around them. "It's like an appetizer before the food," Frank says. "It's great because customers immediately start talking about all of the characters, their favorite episodes and movies in which the actors appeared. What's really great is customers at one table start talking to other customers about the people in the portraits and trying to identify all of them before their food gets to the table. People like the paintings and the settings I put the characters in so much that I often get customers requesting me to paint them eating pizza or a specific television character they loved from their childhood."