October, 2023

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Restaurateurs are giving their menus an upgrade

Restaurant Business

State of the Plate: Menu trends columnist Nancy Kruse examines operators' push to make their menus more experiential with options such as truffle and caviar.

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Disgraced Chef Mario Batali Teases a Comeback on Instagram

EATER

Scott Eisen/Getty Images He’s in his “virtual events” era, apparently After a nearly six-year social media hiatus, disgraced chef Mario Batali is officially back on Instagram. The chef made his comeback to the platform on October 21, complete with a slightly blurry photo of red-sauced pasta and a cryptic announcement: “Mario Batali virtual events coming soon.

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Table Turnover Rate in Your Restaurant: How to Improve & Seat Incomplete Parties

Lavu

What is Restaurant Table Turnover Rate? Table turnover rate measures of how often a table is occupied by a new group of guests during a specific period of time. It is calculated by dividing the number of guests served by the number of tables available during that time period. For example, if a restaurant has 10 tables and serves 30 guests in a four-hour period, its table turnover would be 3.

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An Evening in the Bucolic Bliss of JOLO Winery and Vineyards

Sante

Nestled within the heart of North Carolina’s picturesque landscape of Pilot Mountain sits one of America’s hidden gems – JOLO Continue Reading

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Less Stress, More Success: Accounting Best Practices & Processes for 2025

Speaker: Amanda Adams, Fractional CFO, CPA

Are you ready to elevate your accounting processes for 2025? 🚀 Join us for an exclusive webinar led by Amanda Adams, a seasoned fractional CFO and CPA passionate about transforming back-office operations for finance teams. This session will cover critical best practices and process improvements tailored specifically for accounting professionals.

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10 Tips for Using Reviews to Boost Your Restaurant’s Online Following

Restaurant Engine

It’s key to engage with your customers through their online reviews. You can do all the marketing in the world. You can entice people with the best offers. And you can work hard to close the sale. Just as important, though, is using your strong, positive online reviews to leverage trust and loyalty in your restaurant. Your happy, satisfied customers are your brand ambassadors and pivotal to your marketing strategy.

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How Technology Is Transforming Restaurant Checkouts

Modern Restaurant Management

When you ask your diners how they would like to pay, when was the last time they handed over physical cash? Perhaps you don’t even accept cash anymore? You wouldn’t be alone; well-known brands including Prezzo, Itsu and Côte Brasserie have all made the decision to go card-only for good as a means to reduce costs and speed up customer service.

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The nugget-ification of America cannot be stopped

Restaurant Business

Can the nation's collective palate evolve beyond the chicken nuggets they loved as toddlers? Or will we finally reach peak nugget and find another craveable protein to dip in all those terrific sauces out there?

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Ordering Channels and Preferences Have Shifted: How Restaurants Can Win The Customer

Modern Restaurant Management

Surging prices have been top of mind for consumers for two years and counting, leaving restaurant leaders questioning how inflation might influence diners’ behavior and overall spending habits, including their usage of digital ordering and third-party delivery apps– both of which gained momentum during the pandemic. While restaurants might have expected to see a bigger shift back to in-person transactions as a result of customers looking to cut costs, there simply hasn’t been a

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Jeremy Shanker, Corporate Wine Director at Mina Group and Master Sommelier To Judge 2024 Sommeliers Choice Awards

Sante

MINA Group, led by James Beard Award-Winning Chef Michael Mina, is a San Francisco-based restaurant management company specializing in creating Continue Reading

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Split Shifts: What Are They And Should You Be Using Them?

Sling

If you’re a restaurant manager, you know it can be tough to schedule your employees around service times and rush periods. Especially if they’re accustomed to working a straight eight- or ten-hour shift. Thankfully, there is a solution: the split shift. What is a split shift? What are the advantages for employees and managers ? And is a split shift right for your business?

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Reduce Bias in Hiring: Structured Interview Questions for Employers

Structured interview questions are a valuable tool for reducing bias in hiring. They help: Ensure all candidates are asked the same questions in the same way Level the playing field so all candidates have a fair chance of being successful Improve credibility, reliability, and validity Download the guide to get the most out of your interview questions!

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Accounting dashboards help keep your restaurant on track

Margin Edge

If you’re in the restaurant business, you know there’s not a lot of downtime. As an operator, you maintain a fast pace to keep everything running smoothly and regardless sometimes things will go wrong. But when it comes to your finances, you literally can’t afford mishaps. That’s where easy-to-understand dashboards can save both time and money. Dashboards translate information into a visual to make data easier for our brains to understand.

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Confessions of a Tableside Flambéur

EATER

Lille Allen/Eater A former fine dining server dishes on how the flambé, a dying convention of French haute cuisine, became the ultimate tableside flex I can feel sweat soaking through the armpits of my $5,000 Tom Ford suit and a nagging itch along the starched collar of my custom-fitted tuxedo shirt. Even though I’m working at one of the most popular restaurants in New York City, I’m dressed better than most of the men in the dining room.

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The Best Social Media Platforms for Restaurants

Restaurant Engine

The best social media platforms for you are the ones your customers are using. Is your restaurant using social media? And if you are, are you using it effectively? How many platforms are you using? Are you on the best ones for your target audience? In this article, we look at the best social media platforms for restaurants. You don’t have to be on all of them.

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The Best Pre-Launch Marketing Strategy for Your Fine Dining Restaurant

Modern Restaurant Management

Launching a fine dining restaurant is an undoubtedly exciting venture, but it's not without its challenges. With the fierce competition in the food industry, a well-thought-out pre-launch marketing strategy is crucial to ensure your restaurant gets the attention it deserves. With 60 percent of new high-end restaurants failing within the first year, it’s clear that far too many budding restauranteurs are not pursuing the optimum marketing strategies.

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Food & Beverage Industry Report 2024

Driven by a diverse and exciting ecosystem of passionate, ambitious, and often young entrepreneurs, the Food & Beverage (F&B) sector is a highly competitive environment full of immense challenges and exciting opportunities. Expert Market’s 2024 industry report, sponsored by Toast, is informed by a survey of 522 U.S. food and beverage professionals, from restaurant owners to food service managers, providing insights into the real-time challenges and opportunities within the industry.

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How a new carbon footprint disclosure law in Calif. will affect restaurants

Restaurant Business

Working Lunch: Townsend Brown, policy analyst with Multistate, joins the podcast to discuss the law. Also, the restaurant industry may have beaten back another tip credit proposal.

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THE HEART AND SOUL OF WHAT WE DO AS COOKS

Culinary Cues

I admit that sometimes I look around at the state of the world and wonder “what is the possible meaning to what I did for a living as a chef”? With all the pain and suffering, mistrust, and angst, and hate and fighting – is there a real benefit to what cooks do daily in restaurants around the world? Reading the newspaper or watching the endless hours of television talking heads and “breaking news” can be exhausting and demoralizing.

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Robots, Uncle Nearest, and Patrick Durbin

Sante

[link] Sandra and Emiliano discuss the plusses and minuses of robots for restaurants on the Santé Tasting Room podcast. They also cover the amazing growth of Uncle Nearest, and interview Patrick Durbin, the founder of Sea Bird. Click here to subscribe to the Tasting Room podcast. Don't miss an episode!

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The Pastry Chefs Defining Restaurant Dessert Right Now

EATER

Kelly Nam finishes a mugwort maple tiramisu with mugwort tea at New York City’s Joomak Banjum. | Lanna Apisukh These five chefs are pushing pastry forward, making it an especially thrilling time to order dessert Pastry chefs are back. During the pandemic, they were often the first to be cut as restaurants slimmed down operations. This meant that many of the country’s most skilled dessert makers could be found running their own pop-ups and micro-bakeries from home.

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Why Every Small Business Needs an HCM Solution: A Comprehensive Guide

Managing HR tasks like payroll, compliance, and employee data can overwhelm small businesses. That’s where a Human Capital Management (HCM) solution comes in. Our eBook, Why Every Small Business Needs an HCM Solution: A Comprehensive Guide , shows how an HCM system automates tedious processes, ensuring your business stays compliant and efficient. You’ll learn how to simplify payroll, eliminate costly errors, and empower your employees with self-service tools.

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Buzztime Weekly Bar Trivia Challenge – Week 4

Buzztime Business

Are you hungry for more trivia? Is one night of bar trivia per week not enough to satiate your senses? Buzztime has tens of thousands of questions in its database. Pub trivia hosts and players could spend a lifetime with them! However, as the years pass, some of the questions become outdated and obscure. Events that are important one year become irrelevant many years later.

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IoT Is Revolutionizing The Way Restaurants Operate and Manage Food Safety

Modern Restaurant Management

IoT has become an indispensable tech solution for the restaurant industry. Integrating IoT devices and connectivity drives efficiency, enhances food safety, mitigates risks, increases transparency, reduces waste, and provides many other benefits for restaurants. In fact, leveraging IoT is revolutionizing the sector by optimizing supply chain management, enhancing the customer experience, and facilitating data-driven decision-making.

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Ban on cashless restaurants moves closer to reality in Los Angeles

Restaurant Business

The City Council directed staff on Wednesday to start drafting an ordinance. It would put LA among a number of other cities and states that require businesses to accept cash.

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Inflation has a new victim: Girl Scout cookies

The Salt

Many Girl Scout councils are raising the price of their popular cookies from $5 to $6 a box. The increase offers Girl Scouts and their customers a bittersweet lesson in inflation.

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Maximize Restaurant Profitability: 5 Key Strategies to Control Costs Effectively

Running a profitable restaurant requires more than great food and service. Our guide breaks down five actionable strategies to help you control costs and maximize profitability. Learn how to track and reduce food waste, optimize labor costs with smart scheduling, make data-driven decisions with regular P&L reviews, and manage fixed and variable costs efficiently.

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Lea & Perrins Bloody Mary Mix

Sante

Enter the world of exquisite taste and finesse with the Lea & Perrins Bloody Mary bartender's mix - an enchanting creation that rivals the ecstasy of bespoke cocktails, right from your kitchen. This is not just another premixed drink; this is your passport to the realm of upmarket mixology.

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An Eater’s Guide to Phuket, Thailand’s Island Hotspot

EATER

Austin Bush Millions cram into Phuket’s popular beaches and resorts, but diners should look elsewhere to taste the mix of southern Thai, Hokkien, and Baba food that makes the island arguably Thailand’s most underrated food destination Phuket is one of the biggest travel destinations in the world. In 2022, 9 million tourists visited Thailand’s largest island (down from 15 million in 2018) in search of white-sand beaches, clear waters, and palm trees.

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Webinar: Build your Customer Base with Buzztime

Buzztime Business

Having a difficult time trying to build a reliable customer base for your bar or restaurant? When you sign up for Buzztime you automatically tap into a base of amazing Bar Buddies who will become dedicated regulars to your business. Sound too good to be true? Come check out our Webinar on Tuesday, November 7th at 11:30 am ET where we will go over how the Buzztime Bar Buddy can help drive business on those slow days during the week.

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It’s Hectic Season for Restaurants

Modern Restaurant Management

It’s a trend well-known to restaurant operators, and yet each year brings the same scramble: young people who provided a ready supply of flexible labor over the summer simultaneously change their patterns – resigning to focus on school, moving back to college, or limiting their availability to accommodate other activities. In 2021, for example , 36.6 percent of teens 16-19 had jobs during the summer, dropping to 30.5 percent during the school year.

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Best Practices to Streamline Compensation Management: A Foundation for Growth

Speaker: Joe Sharpe and James Carlson

Payroll optimization can be one of the most time-consuming and complex factors of small business management. Yet, organizations that crack the code on streamlining employee compensation often discover innovative avenues for growth. With the right strategies in place, outsourcing and streamlining payroll processes can result in substantial time and resource savings.

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Chipotle is preparing to open the new Farmesa concept as standalone restaurant

Restaurant Business

The healthful bowl concept has closed its test unit in a Kitchen United but says it is moving that test to the next stage. Yet officials are not revealing any details.

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Worldwide, women cook twice as much as men: One country bucks the trend

The Salt

A new gallop survey finds the gender gap in home cooking has widened. Globally, women cook an average of 9 meals per week, compared to 4 meals for men. And some countries have bigger gaps than others.

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Serafin Alvarado, Master Sommelier and Director of Wine Education at Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits To Judge 2024 Sommeliers Choice Awards

Sante

Serafin Alvarado’s love of wine began more than decade ago, as a room service waiter for Hilton Hotels in his native Puerto Rico. It was the beginning of a career path that would ultimately lead him to achieve the remarkable distinction of becoming a Master Sommelier (M.S.

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This Is Muffin-Top Dining

EATER

Molly Valdez & Judson Valdez Why eating only the best part might actually be the worst Bad Roman, the latest restaurant from the Quality Branded group, is three flights up the Shops at Columbus Circle, above the Whole Foods and past the Paper Source, in an upscale Manhattan mall. It remains impossible to get into. And it might be the restaurant that most exemplifies the current maximalism trend popping up in the restaurant world, a marked penchant for the loud and campy and irreverent.

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Pricing for Profit: How to Set, Negotiate, and Succeed

Speaker: Igli Laci, Strategic Finance Leader

In today’s competitive market, pricing is more than just a number — it’s the cornerstone of profitability. The right pricing strategy ensures that you capture the true value of your offering, paving the way for sustainable growth and long-term success. Join Igli Laci, Strategic Finance Leader, in this exclusive session where he will explore how a well-crafted pricing approach balances customer perception with business objectives, creating a powerful tool for securing both competitive advantage a