How to set up your restaurant team for success in 2020

Short of being shot at and missed, nothing is quite as exhilarating as starting or running a successful restaurant. But as any food service operator will tell you, it grows more challenging with each new year. The restaurant business is the only business where there are more ways to lose money than make money. 

Tough new challenges around labor, rent, technology, training, and competition abound in 2020 and beyond. When you’re being squeezed by so many different factors, what are the critical things to do?

Should restaurants donate excess food? The answer is not so simple.

At the end of the day, Karen Paek loaded up her car with several garbage bags of unsold loaves of bread and drove to a homeless women’s shelter on Los Angeles’ downtown Skid Row. Paek, the manager of Bread Lounge, a café and bakery in LA’s trendy Arts District only a mile from Skid Row, had donated bread before, but this time the shelter politely declined.

“The front desk person gave me a look and said, ‘Oh, more bread?,” Paek said. There were rows of tents outside the shelter, so Paek offered free bread to the homeless people living there. “People would look inside the bags and say no thanks, or just walk away,” she said.

Restaurants take aim at improving manager turnover rates

Shake Shack, Red Robin Gourmet Burgers and Yum Brands’ Taco Bell are among the restaurant chains getting creative to keep their managers sticking around longer.

The restaurant industry has long struggled with high turnover rates, caused in part by low pay and a workforce that skews younger. In 2018, turnover rates in the hospitality sector surpassed 70% for the fourth year in a row, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

How Power and Influence Have Changed in NY Dining

Power in the restaurant world is the ability to shape one of the most meaningful ways people come together in public space. It is the capacity to transform neighborhoods, even entire cities. It means deciding not just who gets to be in the room, but where the room is and what the room is all about.

In New York, power is building empires and running the hottest restaurants with the most coveted seats — the ones that diners wait hours to snag, the ones that awe friends and astonish colleagues. It’s deciding what people will eat, creating dishes so moving that their techniques and flavors inspire copycats across the country. It’s sheer, unrelenting visibility: winning award after award, popping up every time someone turns on the TV, endorsing an endless parade of products.