Patricia Cobe
Senior Editor
Articles by
Patricia Cobe
Page 182What's happening at the table across the pond
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.
Catching the spirit of the Manhattan Cocktail Classic
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.
You can’t learn everything in culinary school. Or business school. Some lessons you’ve just got to learn on the job. With that in mind we set out to gather a little collected wisdom from the industry on how to do some of the more obscure tasks an operator might face. Challenges abound out there. Hopefully this will help get you through a few of them.
Commodity prices are on the rise. And animal proteins—always one of a restaurant’s more expensive buys—are getting hit hard. But there are ways you can purchase and plate beef, pork and lamb to ease the pain—without shortchanging your customers or your profits. Listen to what these chefs, suppliers, economists and other experts have to say.
Culver’s, famous for its Butter Burgers and frozen custard, is heavily franchised—only nine of its 427 stores are company-owned. But to keep messaging consistent and response time short, Culver’s centralizes its social media efforts, monitoring Twitter and Facebook from its home base 24/7. Tweets and posts fall on the agile fingers of the internal marketing team with help from an outside agency.
Product recalls can be devastating to the restaurant industry, yet traceability along the foodservice supply chain is complicated and outdated. “Foodservice is where retail was 40 years ago,” said Syndee Stiles, vice president of operations support for McLane Foodservice, at Restaurant Leadership Conference session on traceability.
Opening one of the restaurant industry’s largest conventions, commentator Laura Ingraham asked attendees of the packed Restaurant Leadership Conference to raise a hand if they were inspired by any of potential contenders for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. A hush filled the room and not a hand was raised.