Instructables: The World’s First Open Source Restaurant

Instructables.com is an “open source” website that allows people to post and view instructional videos on just about any topic you can think of.  The website is completely free and part of a larger phenomenon on the internet based around Creative Commons licensing – the liberalization of copyrights in order to enable the free flow of information...

Commercial Cookware: Weighing The Trade-Offs Before You Buy

It goes without saying that commercial cookware is a must for any restaurant’s kitchen.  These are the tools of the trade, and if you’re looking to buy professional cookware, chances are you already know exactly what you want and where to get it. The...

Need To Reach Your Customers? How About Communal Delivery?

If you’re a regular reader of The Back Burner, then you know how I feel about diversifying your revenue stream so that when diner’s spending habits change, you have multiple sources of income for your business.  As dining room visits declined last year, more and more restaurants started looking for different ways to reach their customers even though they weren’t coming into the restaurant anymore. Restaurants in St. Cloud,...

Taste & Food Safety: 2 Reasons To Clean Your Beer Taps!

If your restaurant or bar has beer on tap, you already know how much customers appreciate a good pour.  Beer on tap tends to taste better, and from a business perspective, buying kegs gives you a better margin than buying it in bottles or cans.  For most restaurateurs, beer taps are a win-win. But one thing that’s easy to forget are the food safety issues associated with your tap system.  Over time, yeast, mold, and bacteria...

The Trouble With Yelp

The food service industry as a whole has had decidedly mixed feelings about Yelp, the San Francisco-based internet company that provides user-generated reviews about a variety of businesses, including restaurants. As I wrote last year, Yelp had many owners...

Mission Street Food: The Non-Profit Restaurant

Some restaurant owners may feel sometimes like they’re running a not-for-profit restaurant, especially after last year, but for most the intention has always been to create a successful and profitable business. That’s not the case at Mission Street Food in San Francisco, where a couple of ambitious restaurateurs...

A.I.S.: The Ultimate Social Media ROI tool for Independent Restaurants

Here we are once again, the cacophony roared up after the SuperBowl over the legitimacy of ROI in social media whether it’s measurable, valid, does anything or whether it’s just a bunch of numbers the next “expert” throws up to validate his job/salary/cost. The roar seems to be mainly coming from marketers, advertisers and mediums which like to stir up the noise level about how wonderful social media is and yet fail to...

Is Your Food Safety Program This Hardcore? It Should Be.

McDonald’s hasn’t grown into a multinational restaurant chain without doing a lot of things right.  And whatever you think of their culinary achievements (or lack thereof), you can’t deny that they’ve built an empire in food service. If one lesson is clear from the rise of McDonald’s, it should be that you don’t build an empire without a premier food safety program.  As a recent article in ...