Restaurant Rewind

The question of the moment for many restaurateurs is how readily customers will accept menu price increases to counter the soaring costs of food and labor. While the rate of inflation may be unprecedented, the challenge is decidedly not, as this week’s edition of the Restaurant Rewind podcast attests. Host and Restaurant Business Editor At Large Peter Romeo looks at past instances of operators hav...

Commercial airliners can take restaurant chain executives only so far in the quest shared by many of inspecting and approving every proposed site for a new unit. The more feasible alternative has long been the use of corporate jets to zip from one location to another. But as this week’s Restaurant Rewind podcast notes, that reliance on private craft has not been without turbulence. Host and Restau...

To people of a certain vintage, the mention of Woolworth’s lunch counters pulls up strong memories. Children of the early '60s might recall them as the setting for a crucial step forward in the fight for equal rights. A group of college-aged youngsters galvanized the nation by trying to order a meal and refusing to leave when they were denied service. The youths were violently attacked because the...

With a little help from the My Pillow Guy, Hardee’s was served an ideal opportunity last week for the sort of marketing exposure it could never afford. With a single tweet, the chain snagged one mention after another on some of TV’s most-watched programs. The experience echoed past instances of restaurant chains turning an off-hand comment or passing event into an opportunity for truly breakthroug...

Today, diners can’t lob a jalapeno in a decent-sized town without hitting a Mexican restaurant of some sort. Many likely don’t realize the way was blazed for those options by a former Green Bay Packer and a displaced West Coaster who couldn’t find so much as a taco in his new Midwest haunts. As this week’s Restaurant Rewind podcast reports, the unlikely pair would introduce patches of the heartlan...

All these years later, the commercial is still a stunner: The onetime leader of capitalism’s archenemy, plugging a very symbol of the American free-enterprise system. Yet there was Mikhail Gorbachev, the last premier of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, relishing a visit to Russia’s first Pizza Hut with his granddaughter. If that wasn’t controversial enough, much of the spot’s dialogue was...

He’s known as “the Jackie Robinson of restaurants,” an African-American who made his name in the business back in the early ‘60s, when people of color were seldom found in the front of house, never mind with their name on the deed. Through his dignity, business acumen and warmth for all as a host, Ernie Royal proved that the skin color of anyone you put in chef’s whites is as insignificant to thei...

Looking to hire restaurant pros with a proven knack for delighting customers? Have you thought about Ronald McDonald or the Burger King? They could use the work, as this week’s Restaurant Rewind podcast attests. Host and Restaurant Business Editor-at-Large Peter Romeo looks at how onetime superstar mascots have been sidelined by the current trend of spotlighting food, guests and less-controversial...

‘Tis the season for steamed-milk mustaches and pumpkin ending up where no squash has gone before. Like the swallows that made Capistrano famous, restaurant marketers seem to know instinctively that it’s time to bring out their riffs on the pumpkin spice latte. More a blend of pumpkin-pie seasonings than a true jack-o-lantern extract, the PSL and its derivations have proven they’re among a select g...

It’s not uncommon to forget about something we stashed away in an attic or basement because it’s no longer being used. But how often is that item a restaurant? Yet that’s essentially what happened at a mall in Wilmington, Del., as this week’s Restaurant Rewind podcast reports. Tucked behind a wall, where shoppers and staff couldn’t see it, was a Burger King that had been mothballed in 2009. It was...

Two of today’s most powerful sales drivers for restaurants are delivery and digital technology. Both have been extraordinary strengths for Domino’s. Why, then, is the pizza giant hitting an uncharacteristic slowdown? This week’s episode of Restaurant Rewind looks back at how the pie maker got to its position of prominence in the off-premise market and what the trajectory is likely to be near-term....

Copycatting a successful restaurant concept is as old as the industry itself. Witness the recent  efforts by Crumbl Cookies to block upstart competitors from lifting signature features of the fast-growing baked-goods specialist. But few of those alleged thefts of intellectual property are as outrageous as a situation that had to be resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1992. It involved a bra...

Subway is in the midst of a turnaround that pivots on the sandwich chain’s new ad campaign, Eat Fresh Refresh, a successor to some of the most effective marketing the restaurant industry has ever seen. Following up on the likes of $5 Footlong spots and the long-running focus on a customer’s loss of 245 pounds from a Subway diet can’t be a cakewalk. Just how difficult that challenge must be is the...

Tensions between McDonald’s and its franchisees have escalated into a public dispute, centered this time on the franchisor’s new policy for contract renewals . The franchisor has flat-out warned it’ll use the re-ups of 20-year pacts to scrub the system of operations showing their age. The rank-and-file counter that a 20-year run is a pretty good indicator that they know how to run successful resta...

Gasoline prices have never been as high as they are currently, but the damage to restaurants and the economy in general is likely far lower than a fuel crisis many Americans still vividly remember. Those who are too young to have caught that truly historic wallop may be surprised to learn just how much of a disruption it was to day-to-day life. Indeed, as this week’s edition of Restaurant Rewind r...

As the richest man in the world, Elon Musk has a pretty good record on startups, from PayPal to Tesla to Space X. But now he’s bringing that Midas touch to a field where past successes and staggering financial resources are no guarantee of another triumph, as this week’s Restaurant Rewind podcast attests. Host and Restaurant Business Editor At Large Peter Romeo looks at past instances of corporate...

Gunmen have turned the most unlikely of settings into sites of horrifying carnage, as the recent tragedies in a Uvalde, Texas, grade school and a Buffalo, N.Y., supermarket readily attest. Fortunately for foodservices, the shooters haven’t chosen restaurants as their stage, or at least not recently. But as this week’s edition of Restaurant Rewind vividly shows, the business hasn’t always enjoyed s...

Nelson Peltz must love those square burgers and Frosties. Fourteen years after buying Wendy’s, the activist investor has alerted federal regulators that he’s interested in acquiring the burger chain again. If past is prologue, it’ll likely be a rollercoaster ride for investors, staff and any other stakeholder, as this week’s Restaurant Rewind podcast reports. Host and Restaurant Business Editor-at...

McDonald’s withdrawal from Russia has been big news, but the attention is nothing compared to the to-do that accompanied its entry into what was then a part of the Soviet Union. The opening of the first store 32 years ago was heralded as a turning point in East-West relations. No wonder the ramp-up to the first store took 14 years. Much of that time was spent on the initial unit’s supply chain, bu...

One of the downsides of being a public company is the fickleness of Wall Street. If investors so much as suspect a holding will fall short of expectations, they’ll mercilessly hammer down the value of a high-flying issue, even if the business fundamentals remain largely unchanged. They can fall in and out of love as easily as a teenager. A case in point: Dutch Bros, the drive-thru coffee chain tha...

The restaurant industry has seen more pendulum swings than some clock stores. Right now, the business is in a shrink-the-menu mode, a place it’s been about every 10 or 11 years. Give it a bit, and the trend is likely to swing back to expanding bills of fare in hopes of sporting at least one item for everybody. The same pendulum effect is visible in the portfolio strategies of the industry’s larges...

Chick-fil-A emerged long ago as one of the highest-volume players in fast food. Now it’s leaving many full-service chains in the dust with average annual sales of $8.1 million per free-standing store. It might have never gotten there if it hadn’t been for one of the more memorable marketing efforts in restaurant history, the iconic Eat Mor Chikin campaign. For 20 years, consumers were urged by a g...

After seven decades in business, Sonic finds itself once again in alignment with the lifestyles of the times, President Claudia San Pedro commented while being honored last week as the 2022 Restaurant Leader of the Year. In honor of her selection, this week’s edition of RB’s Restaurant Rewind podcast looks back at how Sonic, one of the industry’s older quick-service chains, got its start. Technolo...

Baseball has always had a unique connection to America’s other favored pastime, dining out. The restaurant industry has routinely provided a second career for the pros after they hang up their spikes. Just this week, two-time World Series champion and former Blue Jay Todd Stottlemyer revealed that he intends to open two units of the poke chain Koibito Poke. With the new MLB season underway, this w...

A corporate raider who once muscled companies into all sorts of major changes is resuming his old activist ways, this time with McDonald’s as his target. Carl Icahn’s demand that the burger giant deliver on promised shifts in its purchasing policies is a flashback to the bruising proxy battles that have cost  many a big-name director their seat on a public restaurant company’s board. This wee...