Walk into any casual full-service chain and count the friction points before you’ve ordered your first drink. The menu — laminated, multi-page, every surface covered in promotional pricing and limited-time offers. The QR code that sends you to a mobile ordering experience you didn’t ask for. The tableside tablet that wants to take your order, […]
A bankruptcy court just approved the breakup of Fat Brands across four separate transactions. Eighteen restaurant chains. $1.4 billion in debt. One concept shut down entirely before the sale was even complete. Thirteen brands handed to the lenders who financed them through credit bids totaling nearly $955 million. Two more — Hot Dog on a […]
There is no feeling in this business quite like a full dining room. Tables occupied. Conversations overlapping. The pass moving. The cast in rhythm. The kind of energy that makes you forget, for a few hours, everything that keeps you up at night. It is real. It matters. And it tells you almost nothing about […]
The dashboard is green. The numbers are clean. The room is dying anyway. Forty-four years on the stage, and the same argument keeps coming back wearing a new outfit. The revenue-management thinker has the data. The frame the data sits inside is the room the operator cannot see he is standing in. There is a […]
After 44 years in this business, I still ask questions to anyone with a pulse in the operation. Not because I lack confidence in my own judgment. Because I understand something that took me longer than I’d like to admit to fully accept: Knowledge isn’t static. Reality isn’t either. And treating a snapshot as your […]