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Menu Tracker: New items from Burger King, Krystal, and Buffalo Wild WingsMenu Tracker: New items from Burger King, Krystal, and Buffalo Wild Wings

Plus innovation at Beans & Brews Coffee House, Bruster’s Real Ice Cream, Chester’s Chicken, The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, Dog Haus, Eggs Up Grill, Friendly’s, Fuku, Grimaldi’s Pizzeria, Insomnia Cookies, Nekter Juice Bar, Noodles & Company, Playa Bowls, Ruby Slipper Restaurant, 7-Eleven, Smokey Bones, Sprinkles, Studio Movie Grill, Tacos 4 Life, Taziki’s Mediterranean Café, Velvet Taco, Vitality Bowls.

Bret Thorn, Senior Food Editor

June 2, 2023

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June is LGBTQ Pride month, and a number of chains have specials promoting that, including Fuku, Noodles & Company, and Sprinkles. The first two are donating proceeds to organizations committed to assisting those communities and Sprinkles is making an upfront donation to the Los Angeles LGBT Center.

Dog Haus once again has a monthly special with $1 of each sale going to No Kid Hungry.

Other chains are kicking off the month with reformulated versions of existing items: Chester’s Chicken has upgraded its sandwich, and Krystal reformulated its fries. Insomnia Cookies, on the other hand, is reprising several old favorites, and Smokey Bones is bringing back its bacon doughnut.

The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf has a new matcha imported from Shizuoka, Japan that it’s then blending with syrups and dairy in ways that the tea growers might never have imagined.

Beans & Brews Coffee House, for its part, has its own line of energy drinks.

Buffalo Wild Wings and 7-Eleven have new wing sauces, Bruster’s has some fruity ice cream specials, and Friendly’s has the latest in its line of Conehead sundaes.

Burger King is testing a new chicken biscuit in select markets, and Velvet Taco now is serving breakfast-inspired items at its Dallas locations.

Tacos 4 Life has a Buffalo Chicken taco.

Vitality Bowls and Playa Bowls both have new bowls and smoothies, and Nekter Juice Bar has new flavors of its Skoop non-dairy frozen dessert.

Studio Movie Grill has movie-themed drinks, just as you’d expect.

Eggs Up Grill, Grimaldi’s Pizzeria, and Ruby Slipper Restaurant all have summertime specials and Taziki’s Mediterranean Café has new permanent items.

 

Contact Bret Thorn at [email protected]

About the Author

Bret Thorn

Senior Food Editor, Nation's Restaurant News

Senior Food & Beverage Editor

Bret Thorn is senior food & beverage editor for Nation’s Restaurant News and Restaurant Hospitality for Informa’s Restaurants and Food Group, with responsibility for spotting and reporting on food and beverage trends across the country for both publications as well as guiding overall F&B coverage. 

He is the host of a podcast, In the Kitchen with Bret Thorn, which features interviews with chefs, food & beverage authorities and other experts in foodservice operations.

From 2005 to 2008 he also wrote the Kitchen Dish column for The New York Sun, covering restaurant openings and chefs’ career moves in New York City.

He joined Nation’s Restaurant News in 1999 after spending about five years in Thailand, where he wrote articles about business, banking and finance as well as restaurant reviews and food columns for Manager magazine and Asia Times newspaper. He joined Restaurant Hospitality’s staff in 2016 while retaining his position at NRN. 

A magna cum laude graduate of Tufts University in Medford, Mass., with a bachelor’s degree in history, and a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Thorn also studied traditional French cooking at Le Cordon Bleu Ecole de Cuisine in Paris. He spent his junior year of college in China, studying Chinese language, history and culture for a semester each at Nanjing University and Beijing University. While in Beijing, he also worked for ABC News during the protests and ultimate crackdown in and around Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Thorn’s monthly column in Nation’s Restaurant News won the 2006 Jesse H. Neal National Business Journalism Award for best staff-written editorial or opinion column.

He served as president of the International Foodservice Editorial Council, or IFEC, in 2005.

Thorn wrote the entry on comfort food in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, 2nd edition, published in 2012. He also wrote a history of plated desserts for the Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets, published in 2015.

He was inducted into the Disciples d’Escoffier in 2014.

A Colorado native originally from Denver, Thorn lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Bret Thorn’s areas of expertise include food and beverage trends in restaurants, French cuisine, the cuisines of Asia in general and Thailand in particular, restaurant operations and service trends. 

Bret Thorn’s Experience: 

Nation’s Restaurant News, food & beverage editor, 1999-Present
New York Sun, columnist, 2005-2008 
Asia Times, sub editor, 1995-1997
Manager magazine, senior editor and restaurant critic, 1992-1997
ABC News, runner, May-July, 1989

Education:
Tufts University, BA in history, 1990
Peking University, studied Chinese language, spring, 1989
Nanjing University, studied Chinese language and culture, fall, 1988 
Le Cordon Bleu Ecole de Cuisine, Cértificat Elémentaire, 1986

Email: [email protected]

Social Media:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bret-thorn-468b663/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bret.thorn.52
Twitter: @foodwriterdiary
Instagram: @foodwriterdiary

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