HATTIE: (Voiceover) Two and a half hours from Boston, just a short drive off Highway 127 and nestled in the trees, we find Michael Gagne's Robinhood Free Meetinghouse. You can dine with Michael in this 1856 post-and-beam church that has been completely restored. You can book the upstairs for special events, or if you need fabulous food delivered, he caters, too. Like every great small-business owner, Michael not only delivers a consistently fabulous product, he takes time to listen to and to get to know his customers.

MICHAEL GAGNE (Owner/Chef): (Voiceover) We have the best food around. We're all handmade. There's no "from the can to the pan."

(Voiceover) All sauces are by reduction. We make our own stocks, bone our own meat, sausages, sorbets, ice cream, spreads, etc. If you don't like our food, it's our fault because we actually made it. Ordering ... artichoke strudel, onion tart.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) The food is delicious, of course, but I asked Michael how he reminds people to keep coming back.

MICHAEL: Our basic vehicle is our mailing list, which is a `Do you want to be on it?' mailing list.

(Voiceover) We don't sell that list. We send two mailings a year, which provides me a vehicle for my personal philosophy, and we do use local advertisers to help promote it, etc. We put the whole thing together. It's not a shiny, professional, glossy thing at all. It's homemade.

We send the mailing to a mailing company, you know, who specializes in printing and doing bulk mailing. We used to actually do pizza parties where we'd have our staff come in and stuff envelopes.

(Voiceover) I don't ask my clients to do my marketing. I don't do surveys. I don't ask anything of them other than, you know, `Please come to my place and let me try to please you.' For advertising purposes, even if they don't open the mail, they see my logo and the fact that it came from me. So for 59 cents a mailing, I know that someone's actually seeing it. But I do get a lot of positive response from people.

(Voiceover) Because I have a rather personal relationship with most of my clients. I do walk the tables during dinner. I mean, I'm vested in their enjoyment of the event. I don't ascribe to the theory that chefs are artists. We're craftsmen.

And the times that art is achieved when we actually transcend the temporal are rare, but that's what we're shooting for.