Attentionistas / Experiences

Second Life Loves

EN-P: JeVon and our children!

JN-P: My Second Life is pretty good. I have Exeter, our amazing children and our entire family and friends. We’re surrounded by some amazing people.

F Te Evolution

JN-P: fête is pronounced ‘fate’, like ‘date’, and that’s really the start of the story. Fête was born when Exeter and I were dating and looking for places to go. Many of the restaurants were selfservice or abandoned. Those that were worth visiting were located exclusively on resort sims.

Overall, there was an absence of locations that were suitable or available to anyone that honestly and seriously wanted to take someone on a date. We figured this was a dilemma other couples were facing, and since we loved roleplay, we conceptualized our own restaurant.

My summers in the Hamptons (particularly South Hampton where you could sail your boat to a beach club restaurant) inspired the first, and currently main, location - fête: The Restaurant Experience. Fête opened its doors privately in July 2021 and went through several tests and adjustments before it opened to the public in September.

We partnered with pose and backdrop store, Synnergy, and operated the Switzerland Ski resort in winter of 2021.

Then, a year later, fête branched out on its own and opened fête: Venice, Italy. Each resort opened in the fall and usually stayed open for about four months.

We’ve also collaborated with other resort owners, to operate restaurants within their privately owned properties, such as the Ishatar resort, which had a Moroccan theme, and Izakaya, which was a Japanese restaurant at the Koyo Resort.

In May, we opened a new location - fête: NYC - which is in Wandering NY. Next, in June, we opened Hitchcock’s in the popular lobby of The Ritz Hotel.

Exeter and I already have started the creative process for a further resort destination scheduled to open in the fall.

Owner Roles

As owners, we do everything necessary to ensure a great guest experience, including waiting on tables along with our staff members.

The Guest Experience

From the fête experience, we want them to get the romance and the feeling that they’ve stepped away from their normal day-to-day, and focused on the people with whom they are dining.

Unexpected Pleasures

JN-P&EN-P: We love roleplay. We love that we can bring our years of roleplay experience to the restaurant in a different and unique way. We enjoy meeting people from across the grid. Designers that we love and admire eat at our tables.

We enjoy being part of people’s milestone moments in their lives. We coordinate everything from proposals to weddings, baby announcements and gender reveals. We host countless birthday parties and anniversary dinners. We have groups of girls for bachelorette parties or bridal showers.

Our guests trust us with those events. It’s an honor and we take it seriously when constructing an event, because we know it will be a memory for them. We value our guests, and they feel valued when they visit, and many come back. We become part of their story.

For example, one couple booked a table at fête for their first date. A few months later they came back, and he proposed at the same table. That table was special to them because it was “where it all began” and, hey, we’ll be there for the next stage of their story.

JN-P: One of my favourite stories is about a couple whose experience made me lean over and say to Exeter, “See this is why we do this”! Outside of SL, they lived in different countries. When they reserved a table for a date night, they asked to see our menu beforehand, which we found puzzling.

When they arrived that night for dinner, they explained that in RL, they had each “ordered in” the same items that they would have ordered on our menu. During their date at fête, they were eating in RL!

For us it’s the romance, but food is universal. So, it’s heart-warming when you see two people sitting here, bonding and chatting.

It’s about spending time with someone you care about it, whatever the relationship is between you.

Exeter and JeVon

Nova-Parnes (with son, Ethyn), hold court in the entrance bar of their recently opened project, fête: NYC.

Inspiration Sources

JN-P&EN-P: We love restaurants. We are foodies. The restaurants we’ve been to and enjoyed in RL influence what we do.

JN-P: This is a hard question. A lot of the things we do, weren’t really planned to be what they ended up being.

For example, when we got married, we wanted a destination wedding in Venice, Italy. So, we created a “Venice, Italy” region. Our wedding guests loved the region and started requesting to stay there after the ceremony. Our friends told their friends who wanted to visit too. Before we knew it, fête: Venice, Italy was born, and we were running a full resort.

EN-P: For me, fête is an amalgamation of experiences and restaurants that I have been to over the years. The various menus are more personal, I think, as we spend hours and hours poring over recipes and restaurant menus to create the menu in SL. Then we hunt through and find food around the grid to match what we are trying to represent.

JN-P: Exactly. We will rename something to reflect a dish we have had in RL. Like, in NYC the menu has items our real moms make - our favorites of their dishes.

CHEF’S KISS

EN-P: The fête Tomahawk is our real signature dish. It’s a bone-in ribeye that has the Fête logo seared into it with a hot branding iron. It’s become really the one item that is universal at all our restaurants. It’s our ‘theme’ item.

JN-P: My mom’s dish, and of course my favorite, is the Mofongo. Monfongo is a Puerto Rican dish that I love but, also, I love my mom’s version of it.

We brought the concept to Lucas LaMeth, who is known for making food inworld. He created it perfectly. So, when we opened fête: NYC, how could I not have it on the menu?

EN-P: In fête: NYC, the Fried Chicken is how my mother cooks it - fried then coated with a honey pecan glaze. It’s the perfect mix of salty and sweet.

JN-P: Exeter and I have met in RL, in New York. To illustrate how much we are foodies, we went into Chinatown one afternoon and visited three different restaurants that were listed as having the best dumplings in NYC.

We did our own dumpling tour! We went in, ordered dumplings, ate them, and went to the next stop and so on! The soup dumplings were so good!

HIGHS AND LOWS.

JN-P&EN-P: The high point is the recognition and the referrals we get from our customers. Opening new projects and challenging ourselves with the next project. being able to collaborate with other people on the grid.

The only lows are the challenges that sometimes arise from server lag and user errors.

Second Life Business

EN-P: Well, fête does a few different things. We have the dining rooms, catering, private events, concerts, and special resort destinations that we do every fall that stay open for a few months, and we are the creators of the Viva Las Divas drag review.

As for what makes a business successful, you must treat it like a business and not a hobby. You must put in the work. If you don’t treat it like a real job and put in the effort to make it succeed, then it won’t.

JN-P: To echo what Exeter just said, you must be dedicated and realize that you have to start small and then build.

At first, you’re going to have to do everything yourself, because only you know the goal and how you want to establish your business. Hiring people immediately and trying to manage a team while building a brand is very difficult and it doesn’t allow you to focus.

Spirit Sources

JN-P: Our source is each other, really. We inspire each other to be better and do better. We’re both driven and dedicated to what we do.

Rl Impact

JN-P&EN-P: We’re just very observant about the places we go to eat.

We often take pictures of restaurant light fixtures and send it to each other if we aren’t together at the location.

EN-P: Well, it can literally be anything. Maybe we like how the mirror is hung in the bathroom, or the style of fork etc. We take a pic of it and text it to each other.

We have our own little mood boards in our minds lol. These pics get added to our collective consciousness and we incorporate the things we like into what we are building.

JN-P: Going back to when we were dating, we visited some amazing restaurants here in SL. But many of them were almost fanciful and fantasy. They were beautiful, but we knew RL restaurants didn’t look like that.

So, we wanted to mimic the RL experience. Exeter and I love decor and interior design. When we open a location, we want to have fresh design ideas and showcase the current design trends that we see and love in RL.

We hope that when we bring it into SL, others love it too.

EN-P: That is true. We want authenticity. We want you to feel like you are really there, that its immersive and real.

JN-P: We do go out to eat a lot and we both travel for work a lot, and we know what we don’t like. When we planned out the format of fête, we took the things we did like and combined them.

Inspiring Staff Loyalty

Being transparent and making sure they are paid fairly, so that working for us is worth it to them. They are our team, and their role is just as important as ours to running the business. We support them in their own endeavours and their projects outside of the restaurant. Our team has slowly become our friends and we treat them how we want to be treated.

Roleplay Joys And Limits

JN-P&EN-P: Our team loves to roleplay and takes its cues from our guests’ interactions. None of our servers’ responses are scripted.

EN-P: It’s always a challenge, right? Some guests want us to be very present and into the RP. Others want us to leave them alone.

JN-P: Yes, I think the challenge is reading the table and reading the guest. We have guests that arrive and greet us with paragraphs of RP, and so we follow suit.

In turn, there are guests that want to focus more on their conversation and the ambiance and would rather not RP at all. Not everyone is comfortable RPing.

EN-P: Every table is different. More positives than not. The worst example of a challenging table was a couple that literally broke up over dinner! That was a difficult situation to RP.

JN-P: It was a rough night. We won’t mention names, of course. but they arrived and sat dow

Midway through the second course they began arguing in Local, and this wasn’t cute bickering! The woman stood up and left.

We were all here and a little stunned because we weren’t sure if this was part of their roleplay or if it was really happening.

The server asked us, “What do I do now”? We said, “Well, we handle it like a real restaurant would. Go over and ask if everything is all right.”

They did go over to ask him if everything was OK and, surprisingly, the gentleman stayed and finished the rest of his meal courses. He tipped very handsomely and when he did meet someone else, fête is where they came. The two of them have been back a few times. So, he is just fine with his new love.

Overall, having been open for two years, we’ve seen it all at this point!

Wait, I take that back. We haven’t had anyone say “no” to a proposal, which always makes me nervous when someone plans a proposal here. I know one day it’s going to happen, but I’m hoping it never does happen!

WHAT COMES NEXT?

EN-P: We’re going to Disney World!! Kidding. We just opened a third location at The Ritz Hotel, which has a 1920’s theme.

All locations are being MyStory enabled (MyStory is an attachable HUD that gauges your avatar’s health, happiness, and hunger amongst other physical needs). g