3 minute read Fountain soda or cans: which one keeps your margins afloat? You spent three weeks perfecting the burger. Then the delivery driver showed up and the soda was wearing it. Soda looks like the smallest decision in your restaurant, right up until you add up the margins, the ice, the refills, the equipment, and the bag of fries swimming in Sprite. Clients ask me all the time whether I'd go with a fountain or cans. I always start with three questions: How many drinks

3 minute read Your bartender remembers that the guy in seat six takes his martini extra dry with three olives. Nobody remembers the $8,000 holiday party inquiry that came in on Tuesday. The martini gets an olive. The party gets lost in somebody's inbox, and the money goes with it. That's the job of a restaurant CRM (customer relationship managment). It doesn't need to be expensive software, another dashboard, or a training session your managers suddenly have a dentist appoint

In 1961, two brothers sold their company for $2.7 million. Their name is still on 40,000 buildings. They are not. The uncomfortable part is not that Dick and Mac McDonald sold. It is why the business was sellable at all, and whether yours is. The 2026 version of this problem The National Restaurant Association projects $1.55 trillion in industry sales this year and 1.3 percent real growth. Fine at the top line. Underneath it, the picture for owners is harder. 42 percent of op

Aperol Grew Tenfold. The Recipe Fits on a Napkin. 3 minute read Aperol was 84 years old when Campari bought it. Since then it has grown more than tenfold. Nobody reinvented the product. Campari reinvented what happens between the bottle and the glass. If you own a restaurant with one great dish and a team that makes it three different ways, keep reading. This one is about you. Vacation in a Glass Order an Aperol Spritz and you can practically see the vacation forming. Orange

3 minute read Red Lobster can cook. The biscuits are still the best free bread in casual dining, the seafood boils were a smart addition, and bringing back hush puppies was the kind of move that tells guests someone is listening. The kitchen is not the problem. The problem was signed in 2014. That year the owners sold the company's real estate for $1.5 billion. Twelve years later, one of the funds that now owns the chain marked its equity down by 98 percent. Same story. Twelv

More tacos are coming. A lot more. TSG Consumer has run this play before. The last time the firm backed a regional cult brand with a permanent line out front, it was Dutch Bros. That one ended in a national footprint and a public listing. They also invested in Pura Vida Miami what is on a fast growing pace trajectory. So when TSG announced a strategic investment in Los Tacos No. 1 this month, the interesting question was never whether the company can open more restaurants.

Alexander Zverev beat Ben Shelton in Queens on Sunday. Good match. I was watching the concession lines. Because for three weeks every year, the USTA operates what is functionally the highest-margin restaurant company in America, and almost nobody in our industry studies it as one. They should. Start With the P&L In its most recently reported year, the U.S. Open generated $559.6 million in operating revenue against $282.2 million in operating expense. That is a $277.4 million

The Tariff Is Not the Problem. Your Menu Might Be. A 50% tariff on dairy sounds like a trade story. For restaurant operators, it's really a menu, purchasing, and margin story wearing a trade story's clothes. Canada's new counter-tariffs on U.S. goods took effect September 8, 2026, covering roughly $27.6 billion of U.S. imports. Dairy is one of the most exposed categories: certain milk concentrates, whey products, and casein face 50% tariffs, while cheese and several other dai

Wrong Question, Right Question We keep asking, "what can AI do for restaurants?" I think we should be asking, "are our restaurants operationally clean enough for AI to actually help us?" Because AI doesn't fix a messy operation. It just makes the mess move considerably faster. Garbage In. Very Expensive Garbage Out. I've spent more than 20 years building, operating, and scaling restaurant businesses. One thing hasn't changed: a system is only as good as the information going

Pizza Hut Wasn't Exactly a Little Side Project Pizza Hut was founded in 1958. Outside Mainland China alone, the business runs more than 15,500 restaurants across over 100 countries, generating roughly $10 billion in annual systemwide sales. That's not a failing neighborhood pizza shop with a broken oven. That's one of the largest restaurant systems on earth. Yet Yum! looked at a portfolio holding Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut, and Habit Burger & Grill and effectively asked: where

Restaurant leaders love to talk about stamina. Maybe we should talk more about recovery. For years, I wore the 14-hour day like a badge of honor. First one in, last one out, lunch eaten standing up like a horse at a trough, phone always on. Vacation? Sure, right after we fix labor, food cost, staffing, training, the broken dishwasher, and whatever happened during Saturday night service. In other words: never. There's always one more fire, and restaurants are extremely good at

Salad and Go looked like somebody had finally cracked the salad problem. Healthy food. Drive-thru convenience. Tiny restaurants. Affordable pricing. No giant dining room to staff or heat. Fast service. Basically, a salad concept designed by someone who'd actually looked at a restaurant P&L instead of just a menu board. I've spent a good chunk of my career building health-conscious concepts myself, DIG's vegetable-forward menu, By Chloe's plant-based platform, so I watched Sal

One Protein. A Lot of Menu. One of the smartest things a restaurant concept can do is create more perceived variety with fewer ingredients. Chicken is nearly perfect for this. Take essentially the same protein and build a chicken sandwich, tenders, a wrap, a salad, a bowl, a taco, a breakfast bowl, a kids' meal. Add buffalo sauce and it's Buffalo Chicken. Add hot honey and congratulations, you have a limited-time offer. Add Korean chili sauce and your marketing team has conte

Dear CEO don't mess with the logo our guests may not like it. There's an old rule in restaurants: when the dining room is on fire, don't start redesigning the menu. Cracker Barrel may have just handed the restaurant industry a very expensive version of that lesson. In August 2026, David Deno officially took over as CEO of Cracker Barrel Old Country Store, replacing Julie Masino, who had led the company since 2023. Deno isn't a newcomer, he ran Bloomin' Brands, parent company

If you have 47 KPIs, you probably have zero KPIs. Restaurants today are drowning in data. POS reports. Labor reports. Inventory reports. Guest reviews. DoorDash. OpenTable. Scheduling. Accounting. Forecasts. We have more numbers than ever, and somehow the answer to "how did we actually do yesterday" can still take 20 minutes to find. That's the problem. A KPI, a Key Performance Indicator, should tell you something important about the health of your restaurant. More importantl

The smaller restaurant group advantage.....give your leaders more space to expand A great restaurant operator gets two offers. One's from a giant company with a household name and a paycheck with a comma in it. The other's from a five-unit growing group with an ambitious founder and a recruiting budget that could not, under any circumstances, afford a mascot. Help is on its way. Who wins? Most small companies assume the big one does, then quietly go sulk about it. I don't bu

Think of it as the sequel nobody asked for but everyone's watching anyway, the chicken sandwich war's louder, saucier younger sibling. And tenders might actually be the stronger business. Yes, we are absolutely in a chicken tender war. KFC opened with an actual "battle cry" press release in October 2024, introducing Original Recipe Tenders with an ad campaign so satirical about the whole "chicken wars" concept that it basically wrote this article's headline for me. McDonald

My dear manager, congratulations. You’re the manager now....and somehow, by Monday morning, everyone expects you to think like the CEO. Most restaurants do not have a labor shortage. They have a development shortage. I've watched this exact moment play out more times than I can count in twenty years of running restaurants: the best server, or the most reliable line cook, gets promoted into management on Friday. By Monday, they're expected to understand P&L statements, employ

"Welcome Home" Most operators would say: great food, friendly service, a clean dining room, accurate orders, reasonable wait times, and a bathroom that doesn't make the guest question what the kitchen looks like. All important. But those are the minimum requirements, not the experience. A great restaurant experience is the collection of small signals that tell a guest: you are welcome here, we know what we're doing, you can relax, we're paying attention. In two words: "Welcom

My spouse recently stepped into a C-level role, and our dinner conversations have quietly turned into leadership case studies. At this point, the only person at the table who isn't being performance managed is the dog. One question keeps coming up: when should a leader step in, and when should they let the team figure it out? In restaurants, that's never theoretical. It's Friday night, the kitchen is buried, the host stand has lost the waitlist, a manager is avoiding an angry