Restaurant Rewind

Not every service standout earned that distinction by indulging customers’ every whim and preference. Some of the hospitality industry’s most admired brands garnered respect in part by drawing a firm line and refusing to cross it, no matter how much business was at stake. They simply tell customers, Nope, ain't going to do that.  This week’s episode of Restaurant Rewind looks at several of tho...

If you think the term “happy hour” was coined in the 1960s or '70s to tag post-work booze fests, you’re off by about 50 years and 100 proof. The wordsmith behind that phrase was none other than a sobriety-minded Uncle Sam. It’s one piece of the restaurant jargon whose roots we trace during this week’s episode of Restaurant Rewind, the podcast that delves into the business’ past for a deeper ap...

Deep-frying a whole turkey has become a popular way of preparing the star of Thanksgiving feasts. Proponents say it yields a more delicious centerpiece in considerably less time than roasting. So why was there ever a time that cooking method was not a consideration, be it for a restaurant chef or the home cook? It's likely a result of the option being just a mad foodie’s fever dream until an a...

Red Lobster has been making headlines for offering an all-you-can-eat deal that worked too well as a traffic driver. Management acknowledged that the spike in food costs ate about $11 million in profits for the third quarter. The situation is hardly unprecedented in the restaurant business—even for Red Lobster itself. Two decades ago, it similarly saw margins crunched by an all-you-can-eat crab le...

For roughly 15 years, no other restaurant in the country could match the sales volumes of Hilltop Steak House, a kitschy mega-restaurant perched atop a hill outside Boston. It wasn’t unusual for the local favorite’s annual revenues to top $25 million, even surpassing $30 million for at least one year. Even more amazing was how the place did it. Though Hilltop specialized in doormat-sized steaks, i...

Decades before the phrase “fast casual” was coined, a restaurant concept little noticed outside of New York City was using a self-service format, rapid-fire cooking and a Chipotle-style production line to offer a steak meal for less than $9. We’re not talking about something from the Roaring '20s. Tad’s Steakhouse was grilling its strip steaks several dozen at a time to offer a bargain-price s...

The restaurant industry cursed her at the time, but Lady Bird Johnson served up some tough love in the 1960s that’s arguably still paying benefits to the business today. She moved the nation’s fight against highway litter and garish roadside billboard from the margins to the mainstreams, forcing the public and the industry to change some decidedly litterbug ways. In the process, the genteel Texan...

If you can play a guitar and sell records, why not parlay your notoriety into a second career as restaurateur? That questionable line of thinking has led a number of stars to try their hand at the business, usually with unexciting if not disastrous results. But that can’t be said about the late mega-star who epitomized the laid-back lifestyle, the antithesis of what’s needed to succeed in a notori...

No, McDonald’s never blended earthworms or cow eyeballs into the ground beef for its burgers. And Kentucky Fried Chicken didn’t change its name to KFC because the birds it sourced were mutants with six wings and couldn’t legally be called chickens anymore. But, astoundingly, those reports did get some play in the pre-internet age, and you can still find references on the (mis)information superhigh...

Buzz can be as much of a factor for a restaurant’s success as the caliber of its food and service. Yet the industry has seen countless instances of reality falling short of the hoopla. This week’s edition of Restaurant Rewind looks back at a prime example, the Wagamama ramen chain. The brand’s success in Europe fostered ample talk that the low-priced favorite of London hipsters would make a simila...

The movie business is having a blockbuster summer, with restaurants enjoying tie-ins with such certifiable hits as “Barbie” and “Super Mario Bros.” But marketing collaborations haven’t been the only ways the film and restaurant industries have fed off one another, as this week’s Restaurant Rewind podcast attests. The two have been intertwined likely from the first time a director yelled “Action!”...

Every now and then, a public restaurant company finds itself in the crosshairs of an activist investor who’s convinced it can do a better job of running the business. But few of those attempts to wrest control of an operation come close to Starboard Capital’s successful attempt nine years ago to boot the whole board of Darden Restaurants and sharply change the casual-dining giant’s direction. And...

Restaurateurs greeted the initial demands for a $15 minimum wage with disbelief and ridicule. Now the industry is facing proposals to set a floor of $30 an hour for some employees. Is it déjà vu all over again? Will that level of pay become the new wage target for organized labor and politicians, the way $15 has been for years? Or is the demand for a $30 wage merely a test to see how high the pay...

McDonald’s and Starbucks have both aired plans to shoehorn more units into less densely populated markets they would have bypassed with nary a second thought 10 or 20 years ago. Chances are they may find a few traditional Dairy Queens already pumping out cones and cups in those long-overlooked nooks. The home of the Dilly Bar and the Blizzard was an early believer in the potential of the byways an...

Boston Market is  once again snagging headlines , though not for the reasons that made it one of the most talked-about restaurant concepts of the 1990s. The talk back then was of upending the industry with an operation unlike anything the business had ever seen. Its management crowed about the brand hitting the $1 billion systemwide sales mark faster than any concept that had preceded it. Now the...

He ran a soft-porn magazine, called Muhammad Ali a pal, cycled through romantic interests the way some restaurants run through specials, and relaxed by racing boats and piloting a hot-air balloon. 

Imagine that you’re the head of the second largest restaurant company in the business, overseeing the likes of Burger King, Godfather’s, Steak and Ale and Bennigan’s, making a huge salary, though you’ve already made millions upon millions.  But you decide to pack it in to buy an upstart concept no one had ever heard of, to start all over in building a restaurant brand. As this week’s episode of Re...

Ask outsiders to name the visionaries who built the restaurant industry into the social fixture it is today and chances are you’ll hear names like Ray Kroc, Dave Thomas and Howard Schultz. Odds are the list won’t include a force who midwifed a whole category of the business, even though he was active in the field far more recently than those dynasty builders. And that’s not even considering his st...

If you’ve ever wondered who came up with the idea of having servers introduce themselves by name, ponder no more. The lore holds that it was Joe Baum, who was to the restaurant business what Steve Jobs was to personal tech. And how about the ubiquitous gimmick of having the now-familiar server approach with a giant peppermill, ready to do some personalized grinding? Same guy. But Baum’s impact was...

This year’s baseball season has been a tough one for some of the biggest names in the sport. Might it be time for some of the fallen stars to consider a late-innings switch into the restaurant business? On this week’s edition of the Restaurant Rewind podcast, we take a look at a few of the celebrated restaurateurs who made a big name for themselves on the baseball diamond first.  Some youngsters m...

The restaurant industry’s romance with Wall Street is back on, with chain after chain set to find out how much the stock market loves them. Cava is expected to get a read this week, possibly followed by brands ranging from Gen Korean BBQ to Panera Bread and its sibling concepts, Caribou Coffee and Einstein Bros. Bagels. Will the stampede set a new high-water mark for restaurant IPOs? Can the volum...

The jingle tinkling out incessantly from rolling ice cream trucks is as much a sign of summer as anything Mother Nature flashes. But for the treat purveyors themselves, it might as well be a bugle sounding, “Charge!” It’s time for their turf war to resume. For decades, the treat-shops-on-wheels have clashed over who has dibs to particular routes and stopping points. On this week’s episode of the R...

Let the swells have their $900 fish whisker souffle. New York City’s true gift to the culinary arts is just fine for me. I’m talking hot dogs, the consummate Big Apple delight. From stockbroker to starving student, New Yorkers have a special fondness for the $2.50 tube steak, especially if it fueled their climb from down-and-out to doing OK. Come along as this week’s Restaurant Rewind podcast slat...

Cookie concepts are growing at a head-turning pace. If that sounds like déjà vu all over again, you’re showing your age. Indeed, the restaurant business saw a similar boom in the segment nearly 50 years ago, when consumers found their indulgence opportunities increasing at a breakneck clip because of upstarts like Mrs. Field’s, Famous Amos and David’s Cookies. What happened to those champions of t...

Ever wonder how a high-end restaurant chain could end up with a clunky name like Ruth’s Chris Steak House? If you’re familiar with the Ruth in that moniker, the mystery is about as vexing as picking an even number between one and three. There was no way that a force like Ruth Fertel would not leave her mark on the business, literally and figuratively. Here’s just a few bulleted items from her life...