Italian Grandmas Run Staten Island Restaurant

The Enoteca Maria restaurant of Staten Island, NY serves truly authentic Italian style home cooking every evening.  They can make such a bold claim because anyone who ventures into the kitchen in this small 35-seat restaurant will find an actual Italian Grandma bent over the stove conjuring up classic recipes that have been passed down for generations. Enoteca...

4 Things You Can Learn From Restaurant Chains

Big operators like Chili’s, Applebees, The Cheesecake Factory, and others are always looking for ways to improve taste and customer experience while increasing efficiency.  These companies spend a lot of money every year in research and development, and studying the trends that come out of the big chain restaurant’s R&D can be very informative. As it was originally ...

Sardines: Sustainable AND Delectable??

Sardines don’t exactly evoke thoughts of fine seafood to most Americans.  Instead, many think of tin cans packed with greasy, mushy fish and some kind of sauce.  Growing up, I only ate sardines on camping trips, and then only reluctantly.  I doubt anyone would look at sardines on the menu and think “That looks good!” But in fact fresh sardines can be delectable.  Long a favorite fish on Mediterranean menus, sardines...

Does The Rise of the Spanish Mean the Death Of French Cuisine?

French food has always been the gold standard in fine dining.  Over the years the fusion of French cuisine with flavors from around the world has bred a culture of ingenuity and dynamism that helped perpetuate French style cooking as the center for culinary excellence.  But recently some trends have started pointing in other directions, and author Michael Steinberger even argues ...

Man Blames 9 Foot Tapeworm on Chicago Restaurant

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 trend across the world: tapeworms are multiplying.  The phenomenon is mostly blamed on the new popularity...

Fish Fraud: Tempting, But Definitely Not Worth It

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 those with a light white meat, can be interchanged fairly easily without the knowledge of the customer. It’s an age-old...

Menu Trends: Native American Fry Bread

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, dating back to the days when they...

How To Grow Sales With A Commercial Bar Blender

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 of cocktails, and it has become an increasingly popular field in the restaurant industry in recent years.  The reason...

Weird Food: Goat Meat Isn’t Really All That Weird

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 few holdouts where goat hasn’t really taken hold. Until recently, that is.  There has long been localized markets for goat meat, especially in immigrant...

Menu Trends: Smaller Portion Sizes Seen As A Big Value

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 portion sizes.  The “bigger is better” approach worked as long as customers...