Family Dining

5 questions not to ask at the NRA Show

The National Restaurant Association’s May convention is an ideal place to find answers to everyday dilemmas. Here's how to avoid being hissed off the trade-show floor.

Taco Bell’s secret recipe for new products

BloombergBusinessweek opens the doors to the chain’s test kitchen to reveal the innovation team’s source for ideas and how a product goes from prototype to promotion.

Operators find ways to straddle the line of restaurant and retail to bring more business in-house.

What should have a been a sleepy end-of-summer week instead brought to light some surprising developments regarding several of the industry’s most-watched brands.

In the past 13 months, four big fish—Priceline, TripAdvisor, Yelp and Google—have gobbled up companies in the online-reservations business to the tune of more than $2.8 billion.

Given the staggering increase in year-over-year sales, one might expect there to be a corresponding uptick of mentions of chocolate hazelnut spread on menus, but in fact the number of menus that mention chocolate hazelnut spread has remained right around 2 percent of all menus for the past year and a half.

See if you know what you need to at this point about the rules, regulations and obligations of the Affordable Care Act.

To generate buzz for the release of its new smartphone app on Oct. 28, Taco Bell went silent on all of its social media channels for one day, replacing its characteristically prolific posts with one disruptive message: “Taco Bell isn’t on Instagram [or Twitter or Facebook], it’s #onlyintheapp.” It was accompanied by a link to download the new app, designed heavily around mobile ordering and payment.

After spending an evening at a recently opened casual Cajun restaurant in St. Louis, senior associate editor Sara Rush, was asked by the owner for her opinion on his operation. What ensued was a classic, “you kids can’t really think this way” discussion.

Is scheduling certainty the next battle in the labor fight?

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