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May days can be crazy. For the restaurant industry, May means preparing for lots of table turns on Mother’s Day, heading to Chicago for the industry’s largest trade show and readying for the upcoming summer season. For those making a living in...
“Leaves a little bit to be desired.” That’s the verdict that Mike Rotondo remembers most from a fateful run of focus-group testing conducted by Tropical Smoothie Café in early 2008.“We got rave reviews, [for our smoothies]” Rotondo said, but when...
In the spring of 2008, immigration agents with drawn guns raided The French Gourmet, a fine-dining restaurant and bakery in Pacific Beach, Calif. Agents arrested 18 employees, including a few who had worked for the restaurant for 16 years.Two...
When most of us consider artichokes, what comes to mind are pizza toppings, salad additions and purees—not sandwich accents.Yet the humble artichoke is exactly the ingredient with which Au Bon Pain’s culinary team began engineering its most...
Julia Child, the grande dame of American gastronomy, often would vent her frustration at those individuals who demonized ingredients like butter, cream and salt, claiming that they led to health problems.“Everybody is overreacting,” Child told a...
Local, seasonal ingredients are often thought to be the stuff of high-end independent restaurants. But don’t tell that to the executives at Burgerville.The 40-unit, quick-service burger chain based in Vancouver, Wash., has been using local...
The federal menu-labeling bill may be a done deal, but some multiunit operators are continuing the debate over whether the national guidelines go far enough.Several prominent foodservice operators maintain that limiting the mandate to chains with...
It started with ketchup, a seemingly all-American invention that is actually Asian in origin. Chinese ketsiap was a fermented fish sauce adapted by the British, while Malaysian kechap was a soy sauce adopted by the Dutch. Both have long since been...
By the end of the year, small indoor gardens featuring herbs, tomatoes and other produce will be taking root in Sodexo school accounts nationwide.The Gaithersburg, Md.-based company, which manages food-service in more than 470 school districts...
Over the past year, restaurants have been plugging the holes in their operations to hang on to recession-weary customers, and according to the 2010 Leaky Bucket Study, they have begun to turn the tide.The overall industry “leak size,” which...