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Menu items have to work hard for a living. They must fit with the concept. Sound and taste good. Make money, of course.

If you’re a growing chain, hunches, assumptions, emotions and instinct go just so far before managing by them becomes a risky business.

David Zebny, the man behind Z Square, may have discovered an underserved niche between the bakery-cafes (read: Panera) and the casual dinnerhouses (Applebee’s, et al).

From day one David Zebny envisioned Z Square as a chain of hip restaurants with high-quality food, modest prices and enough design variety for each place to at least look different from the rest.

The answer will tell you everything from what should be on your menu to what your marketing plan should look like. We tag along as four restaurants do the research.

Five portraits form a multi-generational celebration of life in the family store.

In compiling our second annual ranking of the fastest-growing up-and-coming restaurant chains in America —the ones tallying sales between $25 million and $50 million—we were struck by how many new growth stories there were to tell. Thirty-one of this year’s Future 50 growth chains, or 62 percent, are entirely new to the list. That tells us that the entrepreneurial spirit thrives in 2007, and that the restaurant business is still where it lives.

Big money is flowing into small growth chains like never before. Here’s how to get a piece of the action.

The new Whole Foods Market in Portland, Maine, is a 48,000-square-foot behemoth, just two blocks off the turnpike spur that connects Maine’s largest city with a string of affluent towns along the coast.

Foodservice suppliers provide a look at products designed to make an operator’s job easier.