Patricia Cobe

The only way I got through the long, icy winter we recently endured was by dreaming about sunny summer beach days. The beaches in the Northeast are some of the most beautiful in the world. And for sunbathers looking for great eats, close to the sand and waves are shacks, stands and restaurants serving up the best lobster rolls in the world.

When Christopher Cramer took over as executive chef at the Sonesta Bayfront in the Coconut Grove area of Miami, the restaurant was a cookie-cutter dining venue geared to hotel guests. A menu of standard-issue steaks, burgers and salads didn’t do much to excite local residents and workers.

Dairy prices seem to be going up faster than cream rises to the top of a vat of milk. While relative bargains were available when cheese prices crashed in January 2009, there's been a surge upward since then. To ease the pain, some operators can cut down on the number of cheesy appetizers and entrees they serve, but concepts that focus on pizza, cheeseburgers, enchiladas and quesadillas simply can't do without it.

I always approach the aisles of the National Restaurant Show with a plan: hit my favorite coffee places first for a cup of extra-bold java or a latte, then snack on samples of bacon, cheese and bread so I can have “breakfast” before the big graze begins. This year started out the same, as I walked the floor at Chicago’s massive McCormick Place, but I soon got caught up in a feeding frenzy, elbowed by the thousands of attendees all vying to taste the latest and greatest of 2011.

Restaurant Business sat down with Peter Backman, managing director with Horizons, a London-based foodservice consultancy, to compare restaurant trends in the U.S. and the U.K.

The Manhattan Cocktail Classic kicked off with its 2011 gala. An estimated 3,000 revelers in cocktail party garb—none of whom seemed like sober scholars—traversed the four floors, sampling handcrafted cocktails at 100 stations manned by the industry’s master mixologists.