The following is a great review of Klick Kitchen by an industry insider with a lot more personal experience in the food service industry than I have. I came across Klick Kitchen last year and while the concept was intriguing, the price at the time was not. Since then they …
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How To Rock Your Restaurant Marketing Efforts
A common misconception in the food service business is that booking live music takes more time and effort than it’s worth. The process of finding bands, paying them, and providing enough space for them to perform can be a distraction at best and a downright money loser at worst, or …
Read More »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 …
Read More »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 …
Read More »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 suspicious because it seemed like the only way to get good …
Read More »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 are trying …
Read More »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 …
Read More »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 …
Read More »Community Based Restaurant Marketing: Get Some Real Bang For Your Buck
Fine dining restaurants in Denver, CO are pooling their resources this weekend to kick off Denver Restaurant Week, an annual event that allows diners to sample the city’s fine cuisine over the course of a week for an incredible price: $52.80 for two. Tons of restaurants are participating in the …
Read More »Restaurant Marketing: The Future Is Now
Foursquare is a location-based application for mobile devices that allows users to discover and rate local businesses and then share those discoveries with their social network. Since I wrote about Foursquare last year, the company has really started to take off, landing promotional deals with Bravo, Warner Bros., and HBO. …
Read More »Asian Carp Have Only One Predator: Restaurants
Invasive species take over new habitats so quickly because they usually have no natural predators in their new home, allowing them to reproduce quickly and overwhelm native populations competing for the same food. The latest foreign invader to make headlines in the U.S. is Asian Carp, a fast-moving, quick-breeding intruder …
Read More »Want To Start An Independent Restaurant? Start With The Incubator
Every restaurateur has been through the baptism by fire known as Opening Night. Those who have survived can testify to the nerve-racking experience of preparing menu items for the first time for a dining room full of people. Many hopeful entrepreneurs have had their dreams realized or crushed on opening …
Read More »Text Message Ordering: Why Your Customers Already Love It
One of the biggest shifts in customer behavior over the past few years has been the preference for take-out food. All the major national chains (Applebee’s, Chili’s, etc. etc.) have added drive-up service for their customers. And I’ve written on this blog about taking your restaurant’s food out, whether it …
Read More »How To Take Restaurant Marketing Underground
Since last August, when I first posted about the blossoming underground fine dining scene in San Francisco, the phenomenon has grown exponentially and started spreading up and down the west coast. From Vancouver to L.A., chefs are ditching the kitchens of established restaurants and setting off on their own, and …
Read More »If It Makes Sense For McDonald’s, It Probably Makes Sense For You
McDonald’s has been an increasingly lone bright spot in the dark world of food service during a recession. Sales are up, new restaurant layouts appeal to a wide range of customers, and Starbucks has a serious competitor on their hands. McDonald’s success can be attributed to a lot of things, …
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