Restaurant Reset

In June 2005, before the iPhone existed, Noah Glass started a company that let people order food by text message. Some of the very first orders came from his mom and his grandmother. Twenty-one years later, Olo powers digital ordering for roughly 850 brands across 90,000 locations, and more than 100 million guests order through it every year. Olo went public, then was taken private by Thoma Bravo...

A seafood chain's menu looked completely normal online. Then Loman pulled it out of the point of sale and it broke their ingestion tool. Every item had a modifier. Every modifier had a sub-modifier of every other modifier, ten levels deep. Somebody built that on purpose, years ago, and nobody has touched it since. Christian Wiens is founder and CEO of Loman , an AI phone agent that has now han...

Jennifer Dodd took over Main Squeeze Juice Co in 2024 walking into a brand where franchisee trust had been obliterated. Four months later sales were up 35%, and they held it for over a year without a single base price increase. She walks Andy through how she rebuilt that trust, the demographic patterns she has been reading since 2007, and why she believes the competition restaurant operators shoul...

Joseph Szala has publicly graded three restaurant rebrands. Domino's worked. Long John Silver's worked. Cracker Barrel did not. His read is that the logos had almost nothing to do with any of it. Cracker Barrel sterilized the interiors, lost the rocking chairs and the old man on the sign, then let a rebrand take the blame for a shift that was already underway. Domino's ran an ad where...

Suzie Tsai runs one of the fastest-growing Korean fried chicken brands in America, and most days her job is saying no. Bonchon's CEO walks Andy through the filter she runs every decision through, from franchise deals to vendor pitches, and why patience beats urgency almost every time. In this episode: (03:52) Why her first official act as CEO was restoring two Korean characters to the Bonchon...

A guest ordered mac and cheese from California Pizza Kitchen, got a container of cheese sauce with no noodles, and posted it to TikTok. Within days it was everywhere. CPK's answer wasn't a statement from corporate it was their head of culinary, mid-photo-shoot and openly annoyed, being handed an iPhone and told to film a deadpan training video teaching his own cooks how to make it right. T...

Most of the restaurant industry sells self-ordering kiosks on one number: labor saved. Brandon Barton thinks that's exactly the wrong pitch. As CEO of Bite, whose software runs kiosks for Portillo's, Chopt, Krispy Kreme, Big Chicken, and Arby's inside Love's Travel Stops… he argues that a screen isn't a cost cut. It's a hospitality channel, and it can out-serve a slammed ca...

Christopher Sebes has already been handed the restaurant industry's lifetime achievement award. Most people take that as a cue to slow down. At 72, he started his third career instead. On this episode of Restaurant Reset , host Andy Grindstaff sits across the mic from the man who hired him a decade ago, the founder who built the platform Andy now runs. What follows is part career retrospective...

Loyalty used to be a competitive edge for restaurants. Now it's table stakes, and the question executives are asking has flipped from "how do we launch a program" to "how do we prove this thing makes money." The uncomfortable answer, according to loyalty expert Olga Lopategui , is that most of them can't. Olga is the founder of Restaurant Loyalty Specialists and a forme...

In 1985, two of the most successful trial lawyers in Los Angeles walked away from the law, mortgaged their homes, and opened a pizza restaurant on the quiet side of Beverly Drive. Their fancy menu bombed almost instantly. The chef they hired from Spago lasted a month. And then a barbecue chicken pizza turned California Pizza Kitchen into one of the most influential restaurant brands in American hi...

Everyone in restaurant tech is racing toward AI ordering and automation. The customer data tells a different story. Only 9% of consumers say they'd rather order from an AI voice than a person, and the number one frustration is still the same one it's always been: the order being wrong. In this solo episode, Andy Grindstaff walks through a Global Payments consumer survey on how people actua...

Mike DeJong ran 5 Nothing Bundt Cakes bakeries at the same time. From the outside, it looked like a growing empire. From the inside, he was working more hours, opening more locations, and somehow making less money. He calls it the operator trap, and he's blunt about how it closed on him: he had built a job, not a business. The wake-up call came on a tarmac in Mexico. His manager quit by phone....

Troy Hooper 's career looks impossible to explain: culinary school at 17, licensed yacht captain, 15 years fixing broken restaurant businesses, and now scaling Pepper Lunch from 5 North American locations to a planned 1,200 by 2030. What holds it together is one conviction he's carried through all of it: master the thing you're best at and build relentless systems around everything els...

Joseph Palladino spent 22 years as a beat cop in the Bronx before a line-of-duty injury rerouted his life into restaurants. What he brought with him (accountability systems, data-driven performance tracking, and a cop's instinct for what kills an operation) became the engine behind Nick & Sam's Steakhouse, one of the highest-grossing independent restaurants in the country. They made $2...

Andy Grindstaff has spent his career at the intersection of restaurants and technology. He worked at restaurants long before he helped build the tech that runs them at Genius. In this solo Q&A episode, he answers your questions directly. The DMs. The emails. The real stuff people have been asking since the show started. And the questions are good. Andy covers why AI projects keep failing in re...

Zack Oates is the founder and CEO of Ovation, the guest experience platform used by thousands of restaurant locations across the country to collect feedback, recover unhappy guests, and build the kind of loyalty that actually shows up in revenue. Before all of that, he went on a thousand dates, wrote a book about it, and turned the whole thing into a keynote called Dating Your Customers . It sound...

Roni Mazumdar is a software engineer from RPI who was working at Johnson & Johnson in 2011 when his father, a former fruit cart vendor and retired NYPD traffic cop, was getting close to retirement. Roni didn't want his dad to feel irrelevant. So he found a listing on Craigslist and they opened a 28-seat Indian restaurant together in New York's Lower East Side. His father ran the front of house...

Andrew K. Smith is the co-founder and Managing Partner of Savory Fund, one of the most active restaurant investment platforms in the country. 13 brands. Owned, operated and scaled up to 575 restaurants in 29 states. Over $3 billion in cumulative sales. 40,000+ jobs created. But the story of how he got here starts with his wife Shauna. In October 2008, while the financial world was collapsing, she...

Kevin Boehm co-founded Boka Restaurant Group in 2002 with a single restaurant in Chicago. Today, Boka operates 30+ restaurants across Chicago, Los Angeles, and Brooklyn, serves 2.5 million guests a year, and generates more than $250 million in annual revenue. Boka restaurant has held a Michelin star for 15 consecutive years. Kevin and his partner Rob Katz won the James Beard Award for Outstanding...

John Tesar's career is the kind of arc that sounds made up. Anthony Bourdain called him "the single most talented cook I ever worked with." He later wrote Tesar into Kitchen Confidential as Jimmy Sear,— a character defined by equal parts chaos and brilliance. In 2011, D Magazine put "The Most Hated Chef in Dallas" on its cover with John's face. Eleven years later, in 20...

What does it actually take to build a restaurant empire from a single steakhouse without a famous name, without outside investors, and without ever letting your team see you doubt the destination? Benjamin Berg has the answer. And the war stories to prove it. Berg is the founder of Berg Hospitality Group, one of Houston's most dynamic restaurant companies: 13 concepts, 1,200 employees, and $75...

What does it actually look like to build a cult restaurant brand in a boomtown city and then have the guts to pull back before it kills you? Sarah Gavigan didn't set out to open Nashville's first ramen shop. She moved back to Tennessee after two decades in LA film and music production, couldn't find a decent bowl of ramen anywhere in the city, and started cooking 50 pounds of pork bone...

Ben Diaz didn't set out to become a chef. He thought he was going to be a pharmacist, until he followed a girlfriend to the California School of Culinary Arts and cooking took over. He never looked back. What followed was two decades of building in the most demanding kitchens in Southern California. Hotels. High-volume events. Catering for 1,000 people at JW Marriott, Omni San Diego, Luxe City...

Nick Elmi won Top Chef Season 11 in New Orleans. Most winners parlay that into a media career, a fast-casual empire, or a product line. Nick went back to Philadelphia and opened a 22-seat restaurant called Laurel. For 12 years, he cooked in that kitchen. He earned a James Beard nomination for Best Chef: Mid-Atlantic. Michelin came to Philly and listed his restaurant. Before that, he trained under...

What does it actually take to go from 2 locations to 50 (with hundreds more in the pipeline) without VC money and without losing your mind? Josh Halpern, Chief Business Officer of Crave Worthy Brands and the architect behind Big Chicken's explosive growth, sits down with Andy Grindstaff to pull back the curtain on one of the most unusual brand-building journeys in the restaurant industry. Yes,...