Restaurant Reset

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...

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,...

Carin Stutz started working at McDonald's in high school to help pay for college. She never left the restaurant industry. Over the next four decades, she climbed from hourly employee to the C-suite… serving as COO of Red Robin, President of McAlister's Deli, CEO of Cosi and Native Foods, and holding leadership roles at Wendy's, Applebee's, and Brinker International (Chili's, Ma...

Before “AI” became the buzzword on every restaurant tech panel, Carl Orsbourn was already leading the digital transformation of foodservice. The co-author of Delivering the Digital Restaurant and The Path to Digital Maturity , Carl has been on both sides of the industry: running 1,000 ampm convenience stores with $1.3 billion in sales before leaving it all to build ghost kitchens, dynamic pricing...

Before she was known as The People Doctor, Marissa Andrada spent three decades leading people and culture at some of the world’s biggest brands: Chipotle, Starbucks, Red Bull, Kate Spade, and GameStop. Her career has touched over a million frontline employees , and she’s made one thing clear: you can’t scale a brand without scaling your people. In this conversation, Marissa sits down with Restaura...

What happens when restaurant owners finally get honest about what’s breaking their business? In this special Q&A solo episode, Andy answers the toughest questions he’s received from operators… the ones that don’t have easy answers, but every leader needs to hear. He covers the hard truths about what’s really killing margins, why burnout isn’t a badge of honor, and how to make smarter, faster d...

Tony Roy was leading international operations for a global tech giant when he made a bold decision: leave it all behind to build tools for single-location restaurants. Today, as the Co-founder and COO of Popmenu , Tony’s helped more than 10,000 independent operators grow smarter, simplify their systems, and save hundreds of hours a year through automation and AI. In this episode, Tony and Andy go...

When most people think of innovation in restaurants, they picture shiny new POS systems or loyalty apps. Jason Riggs wants you to look somewhere else: the edge of the operation. The headsets, timers, and drive-thru systems that quietly run the business. As the former GM of Hardware at PAR Technology and current strategic leader at Audivi AI , Jason has built everything from fleet tracking for truc...

Nathan Downs went from cooking in Michelin-starred restaurants to building a technology company that’s rethinking how the world eats. As CEO and cofounder of FoodSpot, Nathan is leading the charge in smart vending: a growing industry that’s making fresh, high-quality food available 24/7 in hospitals, campuses, offices, and even food deserts. His mission is simple but ambitious: democratize access...

When Adam Brotman joined Starbucks, the company didn’t even have free Wi-Fi. A few years later, he helped architect one of the most powerful digital ecosystems in restaurant history: the Starbucks app, Rewards program, and Mobile Order & Pay system that changed how every brand thinks about loyalty. In this episode of Restaurant Reset , Adam breaks down how it all happened and what every operat...

Most operators try to scale their restaurants by tightening systems or adding tech and somewhere along the way, they lose the soul that made guests fall in love in the first place. Chef Jackson Kalb never made that trade. From being fired at 26 and sleeping in his childhood bedroom to now running seven successful restaurants across Southern California, Jackson has built a hospitality group that sc...

How do you bring a legacy restaurant brand back to life? Not with buzzwords. Not with gimmicks. But by giving people food they actually crave (and making sure your team can execute it flawlessly). Chef Mike Gieseman has spent two decades building craveable, profitable menu items for brands like Qdoba, Quiznos, and Taco Del Mar. As VP of Culinary & Innovation for REGO Restaurant Group, he led Q...