One of the most difficult facets of managing a restaurant is keeping within the limits of the vague laws regulating restaurants. Lawmakers are not doing restaurants any favors by writing laws that leave critical issue unclear. This ambiguity is often left to the courts to be clarified. The courts have handed down three very significant […]
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Hooters, Sauce, and The Challenges of Server Bloggers
The rise of social media has created an unexpected challenge for restaurant companies and their employees. Restaurant companies have used this technology to reinforce the image of their brand. Their employees also have the ability to connect with large numbers of followers in a way that some companies see as a threat. In the […]
Restaurant Indusry Insider 3/6/2011
This week a report from the NPD Group seems to be making all of the headlines. This in depth analysis of the restaurant industry as a whole has made its way to the desk of every reporter covering restaurants in the country. It doesn’t paint a pretty picture of the industry. It shows that the […]
Restaurant Industry Insider 2/27/2011
This week, I was fortunate to have a great conversation with the General Manager of one of the premier restaurants in my city. During our conversation, the topic of online reviews came up. She mentioned how much the negative reviews bother her. This confused me because I had spent hours reading these same reviews and […]
Restaurant Industry Insider 2/20/2011
Another week has passed and if you are reading this, you have survived the Valentine’s Day weekend. Hopefully you all did well enough to negate any damage done to your sales by the recent snowpocalypse. This week we had the nominees for the restaurant equivalent of the Oscars, a few major reports making news, and […]
Restaurant Industry Insider 2/13/2011
The Valentine’s Day weekend is hopefully providing a nice boost to everyone’s period two numbers. It is probably also adding significantly to everyone’s workload. No need to worry though. I have you covered on this week’s industry news. While you have been patiently explaining why you do not have an opening at 7:00 on Monday […]
Restaurant Industry Insider 2/5/2011
Each week, I write a column entitled “Weird Restaurant Stories” for another site in The Hospitality Formula Network. This requires me to search through hundreds of headlines to find the strangest stories to occur in restaurants during the past week. This is generally light hearted reading designed to entertain. During this search I also run […]
Food Allergies: A Responsible Approach
I have one hard and fast rule when it comes to waiting tables. No one dies on my watch. I have had several guests leave the restaurant in an ambulance, but none of them have died. It is a simple thing, but it helps me sleep better at night. I may not be changing the […]
Aspirational Dining in a Recession
(Note: In the previous post I defined the growing market segment of “aspirational dining” restaurants. This is valuable background to this post and merits a read.) What sets the “aspirational dining” market segment apart was their creation of the perception that their food cost more because it was worth more. This perception is what made […]
Aspirational Dining Defined
I am a Mac guy. This means only the occasional interruption for updates from Microsoft. These are most often for Word for Macs. Yet in none of these updates have they added to my spell check dictionary words like “Barack Obama, Al Qaeda, or Facebook.” If they do implement this change they can use this […]
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About The Author
David Hayden was born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri. He took his first serving job in 1996. Since that time, he has worked for over a dozen different restaurant companies. He has held both hourly and salaried positions at independent and corporate restaurants. He has waited on over 100,000 guests and trained hundreds of servers. He has been named "Best Server in Kansas City" the last three years by the local weekly paper.