Restaurant Trends and News

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. …

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 …

At the National Restaurant Association show in Chicago earlier this month, Greg Grossman, a promising new chef, impressed show participants with his cooking demos.  He has open invitations to work in the kitchens of some of America’s top chefs, including Grant Achatz and Eric Ripert.  He also has a book …

As I noted in a blog post earlier this year, restaurants, especially high end ones, get hit hard in a recession.  Eating out is a luxury, not a necessity, to most people, and it therefore becomes one of the first to go when people start watching their pocketbooks.  Luckily, when …

After about a century, the Cuban sandwich is finally getting its due respect.  The sandwich was first developed in Florida for the purpose of feeding hungry cigar factory workers, and the cigars are probably more responsible for the sandwich’s namesake than any connection with the long isolated island nation. What …

The liquor laws in Utah have always been bizarre.  From requiring membership in “private clubs” to drink local microbrews to no Sunday beer and liquor sales to limiting beer to 3.2% alcohol content, the requirements placed on restaurants, bars, and liquor stores have always been more stringent than in other …

iPhone apps are all the rage right now, and already there is an app for just about anything you can think of under the sun.  This includes the restaurant industry, and these 10 apps are affecting how consumers make their decisions on where and when to go out to eat, …

You’ve heard about organic ingredients.  You’ve also heard about food miles and skyrocketing food costs.  Anybody in the restaurant business can tell you these issues have affected their customer’s tastes and their bottom line.  Stir in increasingly frugal customers and you’ve got a recipe for trouble in any restaurant.  That …