U.S. budgets include 
restaurants again

U.S. budgets include 
restaurants again

When economist Arjun Chakravarti gave his keynote economic overview last month at Technomic’s Trends & Directions Conference near Chicago, he said the world might come to rely on the American consumer to stabilize the global economy and slowly drag it back to continued growth.

Europeans likely would struggle under austerity measures, he said, and growth would slow in emerging countries like China and Brazil — so in the meantime, it’s up to us to pick up the slack.

I sure hoped he didn’t mean me. I just signed up three years ago for all this debt — mortgage, two cars, student loans — and I have a baby in diapers and one on the way.

But the opportunity for restaurants to turn economic uncertainty into sales, as he suggested, made more sense a...