It’s such a buzzword these days it has almost become cliche, but nevertheless green restaurants are an important and lasting trend.  Customers are the main force driving this, and consistently they say they value restaurants with green practices.  Giving customers what they want while reducing your operating costs through more …

After eating a fish salad at a Chicago restaurant, in which he claims the salmon was undercooked, a man developed a nine-foot-long tapeworm.  The restaurant denies they are responsible for the man’s unwelcome gastronomic guest. The man is, of course, suing.  In general, however, scientists are concerned with a growing …

Customers love ordering good fish when they go out to eat.  Species with powerful name recognition like orange roughy, grouper, and salmon are great sellers on the menu and can be found in restaurants across the country.  But are consumers getting exactly what they pay for?  Some fish species, especially …

Promoting your restaurant is a never-ending task.  As a restaurateur, you understand just how important marketing is to your success.  You probably also don’t have the resources to carry out a massive campaign (like Coke or Budweiser), and every dollar you spend needs to come back as a paying customer. …

In tough times, people always rely on familiar, basic foods to get them through.  Trends in the restaurant industry so far in 2009 have borne out this truism.  For Native Americans, the equivalent of chicken soup and hamburgers is Indian fry bread, a staple in their diets for 150 years, …

Summer heat has a way of putting your customers in the mood for cool, refreshing drinks.  You already have the standards covered: cold beer, ice tea, and maybe even margaritas or daiquiris, but are you really satisfying your customer’s demand for great cold drinks? Mixology is the study and development …

The Restaurant of the Future is in Holland, but at first glance it doesn’t seem like anything special.  It just looks like a cafeteria, with a salad bar and long tables.  But there are things going on in The Restaurant of the Future that make this nondescript cafeteria very different. …

To most Americans, goat meat sounds like a foreign and unsavory dish consumed in far-off places by people who don’t have many other options.  In reality, goat is the most commonly consumed type of meat the world over, and not just in the Third World.  America is one of the …

National chains like The Cheesecake Factory, Chili’s, and T.G.I. Friday’s have rolled out smaller, leaner, competitively priced menu items that are having considerable success targeting two primary consumer concerns: watching their weight and watching their wallets. For years the trend in the food service industry was towards bigger and bigger …

The Darden Group, which operates both Red Lobster and Olive Garden national chain restaurants, is understandably also the largest purchaser of seafood in the U.S.  As concern grows over the dwindling seafood supply in the world’s oceans, Darden has made every attempt to stay out in front of the situation …