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December 2012

Cover Stories

Lessons from the first year of ShopHouse, the "Asian Chipotle"
The fast-casual industry buzz is all about how the “Chipotle effect” has propelled this segment into super growth mode. But few have felt the effect as keenly as Chipotle’s own culinary manager Nate Appleman and director of concept development Tim Wildin....
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Menu R&D

Sea change
Sustainability and traceability are top of mind for restaurateurs with seafood on the menu—and the guests they feed. To ease those minds, certification is becoming more formal and widespread....
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New and noteworthy in drinks: chocolate wine and aged cider
Chocolate meets wine Wine snobs may cringe, but red wine flavored with chocolate is a rapidly growing trend, especially among Millennial consumers. Expanding shelf space to accommodate the proliferation of new labels demonstrates this new category’s popularity on the retail side; calls for chocolate wine on-premise are sure to follow....
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2013 equipment round-up
High-tech or not-so-high tech, this year’s crop of new equipment is bound to ease both back-of-house and front-of-house operations. High-tech Temperature probes and electronic control panels have become standard on many ovens. Now that same sophisticated technology is being used in the new Blast Chiller with Epicon from Traulsen. Upon insertion of a temperature probe into food, the chiller launches an auto-start function to bring the food quickly down to 37°F. The chiller also features a touch-screen operating panel and programmable memory....
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A warm bed for winter produce
Risotto is one of those adaptable dishes that can carry a wide range of flavors and ingredients. That was Jon Benson’s thinking when he added it to his late fall/early winter menu at the Californian restaurant in the Hyatt Regency Huntington Beach, California. The risotto can change as “our chefs hit the farmers markets and see what’s coming out of the ground that day, or choose the best from our two boutique produce suppliers,” says Benson, who is the director of food and beverage for the hotel....
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Pulled pork pushes menu options
Noodles & Co., known for its globally inspired noodle bowls and salads, introduced its first sandwich LTO in October. Pork was the protein of choice for its cross-functionality and global popularity....
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Skills

I was recently in a coffee shop when a cockroach crossed my laptop. The manager came over and offered to buy me a free coffee, but basically apologized by saying, “Hey, it’s New York. Every restaurant has roaches.” Is that true?
You raise two important issues in your question: How widespread are cockroach infestations and how can restaurants minimize them? How should you handle a situation when a guest sees a cockroach or other pest in your establishment? Since these are big questions, let’s look at Part I this week....
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Last week we answered the first part of this question, “Doesn’t every restaurant have cockroaches?” This week, let’s focus on the second part—how do you handle the situation if a guest sees a cockroach or other pest in your establishment?
Clearly, brushing the situation off as no big deal did not sit well with this guest. The lack of a response from the staff was not encouraging either....
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Donatos' strategy for employee retention
Two to three months after employees join Columbus, Ohio-based Donatos pizza—after they have gone through a phone screening and two rounds of in-person interviews prior to being hired—they are interviewed again, in what the company calls an “entrance interview.”...
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MonkeyDish

Everything guide to seafood certification
Finding a trusted seafood supplier takes time, research and money, but certification programs hope to make the process a little simpler for the sustainably conscious buyer.  Industry leaders have turned to seafood certification for a simple way to identify sustainable/eco-friendly fisheries.  Here is some information on the certification process, the state of the seafood supply and how to buy sustainable....
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Some cities are making it a lot easier to open a restaurant
Every business person knows you can’t fight City Hall. But what if you no longer needed to? What if city officials, instead of piling up obstacles between a restaurant and its opening day, tried to bulldoze them out of the way? That’s a tantalizing experiment underway in two of America’s biggest cities. In New York and Chicago, the mayor’s offices are serving up a new paradigm for licensing restaurants: treating them like customers instead of combatants....
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What Taco Bell learned from the biggest new product launch of the year
What’s it like to be involved in the biggest new product introduction of the year, the menu item that helped bring your company into the next era? “The journey has been unbelievable, and consumer excitement about it has been absolutely overwhelming,” says Stephanie Perdue, director of brand marketing for Taco Bell Corp., who oversaw the company’s new Doritos Locos Taco. “This has been a real passion project for everyone.”...
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