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New items from Burger King, KFC, Subway, and PopeyesNew items from Burger King, KFC, Subway, and Popeyes

Plus innovation at &Pizza, Another Broken Egg Cafe, Bonanza and Ponderosa Steakhouses, Brooklyn Dumpling Shop, Burgerville, Chester’s Chicken, Chopt, Church’s Texas Chicken , Cinnaholic, Dillas Quesadillas, Dunkin’, Eureka!, Fiiz Drinks, Friendly’s, Fuzzy’s Taco Shop, Hot Head Burritos, La Madeleine, Lazy Dog Restaurant, Newk’s Eatery, Ninety Nine Restaurant & Pub, Oakberry, Penn Station East Coast Subs, Pita Pit, Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen, Potbelly, 16 Handles, Smalls Sliders, Tony Roma’s, Tous Les Jours, Tropical Smoothie Café, Velvet Taco, Voodoo Doughnut, and Wetzel’s Pretzels

Bret Thorn, Senior Food Editor

October 18, 2024

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Is it a happy coincidence or is it orchestrated that just as Halloween approaches the ghost pepper is trending like crazy?

Reportedly so-named because its heat can sneak up on you like a phantom, ghost peppers at restaurant chains tend to be considerably more muted than they are raw, and they are all over the place.

Subway has a new bread named for the chiles, and Penn Station East Coast Subs is offering ghost pepper cheese on sandwiches free of charge.

Ghost pepper sauce is on the new Ghost Burrito at Hot Head Burritos and on the Scary Hot Fries at Eureka!

Incidentally, autumn is when peppers are harvested in case you feel like making a seasonal play with them.

Speaking of which, there are seasonal specials from Burgerville, Church’s Texas Chicken, and Chopt.

Halloween specials abound. They’re at Burger King (along with an 8-ounce tub of ranch dressing at select locations), Cinnaholic, Dunkin’, Fiiz Drinks, Smalls Sliders, Tous Les Jours, Voodoo Doughnut, and arguably Fuzzy’s Taco Shop.

Popeyes is ready for Thanksgiving with its seasonal Turkey, and Wetzel’s Pretzels is jumping ahead to Christmas with frozen hot chocolate.

Brooklyn Dumpling Shop has jumped on the SpongeBob SquarePants anniversary bandwagon, but 16 Handles is focused instead on season 2 of Squid Game.

Related:Menu Tracker: New items from Popeyes, Taco Bell, and Jimmy John’s

There are whole seasonal menu rollouts at Another Broken Egg Café, Friendly’s, Lazy Dog, Ninety Nine Restaurant & Pub, and Tony Roma’s.

Newk’s Eatery has a new line of wraps.

Then there are a bunch of chains that are just doing their own thing &Pizza is doing a new riff on its Farmer’s Daughter Pizza that it recently brought back.

Bonanza and Ponderosa Steakhouses have new tenderloin options, Chester’s Chicken has new chicken bites, KFC has new sauces and tenders, La Madeleine has new crêpes among other things, Oakberry has new layered smoothies no-doubt intended for social media, Pita Pit has packaged brownies, Potbelly has a sandwich with mac & cheese on it, Tropical Smoothie Cafe has lavender drink that shimmers, and Velvet Taco’s Weekly Taco Feature has all sorts of things on it, including chicken tenders and pork belly.

 

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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