Restaurant
In Marker. More on Medium.
Inside the brave new world of data-driven, search-optimized virtual restaurants that exist only on DoorDash and GrubHub
For a small town of 4,000 people in New York’s Hudson Valley, Highland Falls punches well above its cultural weight. In more normal years, tens of thousands of tourists would descend upon the town to tour the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and nearby Revolutionary War sites. Billy Joel, a onetime resident, wrote a beloved B-side about the place. And late last year, Highland Falls became the chosen host of another national institution: Chipotle’s very first ghost kitchen, a new store model with no in-person ordering and no in-store dining.
Restaurant are dying at a record rate—but insurance companies won’t bail them out
In the early days of the pandemic, Rosa Thurnher did what every restaurant owner did and leaned into the impossibility of the circumstance: She learned basic code and pivoted to takeout, applied for grants and a Paycheck Protection Program loan for her Mexican restaurant, El Ponce in Atlanta. She signed up to turn out $10 meals for charity to give hours to her cooks, held fundraisers, and sourced personal protective equipment and takeout boxes. “It was a full-time job just attending all the webinars I did,” she remembers, almost fondly. “First-world problems, right?”
How pizza won the pandemic—and Sweetgreen got left behind
The best meal I had all pandemic cost $1.14 and took about 90 seconds to make. It was a Margherita pizza inhaled in the car on a desolate day in late April. I know the precise cost because my husband is the chef who made it: 61 cents for a few slices of fresh buffalo mozzarella, 24 cents for the San Marzano tomatoes and salt, a quarter for enough basil leaves to supply the rest of the menu’s needs for free, and just 11 cents for the dough, made from a mix of top-shelf imported Italian flours. …
Restaurants are pivoting to drive-thrus—but it’s a foreboding economic indicator
If you’re looking to find somebody who is optimistic about the future, you might want to ask a McDonald’s franchisee. According to the latest survey of that group by Kalinowski Equity Research, they’re more upbeat than they have been in over a decade. The caveat is that they’re optimistic about the future of McDonald’s.
And Mickey D’s, which saw Q3 U.S. sales rise 5% and shares rise over 16% for the year, isn’t alone. …
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Upscale restaurants want to sell you a fancy dinner — to cook yourself
$275: That’s how much you’ll pay for a chicken dinner meal kit from the famous Manhattan upscale restaurant Eleven Madison Park, as reported in Bloomberg Quint. (Not included in the price: delivery or cooking.)
Eleven Madison Park’s offering is only the latest in a string of fancy meal kits offered by high-end restaurants. New York eateries Carbone and Masa offer $500 and $800 meal kits. …
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Thanks to the pandemic, restaurants from Starbucks to Shake Shack want to make it easier to pick up fast food from your car
74%: That’s the percentage of Americans surveyed who said they had visited drive-thrus at fast-food restaurants during the pandemic either the same amount or more often than usual, according to a survey by location technology company Bluedot. Given the risks that indoor dining poses for the spread of the coronavirus, drive-thrus seem to be the ideally designed solution for picking up your burger and fries with a minimal amount of human contact.
Fast Company reports that fast-food chains have noticed this trend and are racing to set up and upgrade drive-thrus to cater to more customers who want to get…
The hottest accessory for fall? The outdoor heater. If you can find one, that is. As Bloomberg reports, they are now sold out in New York City, where restaurants are desperately clinging onto al fresco dining to keep their businesses afloat, even into the colder months. Writer Zara Stone predicted the heater shortage in Marker back in August, when retailers were seeing up to 400% jumps in sales, year over year. …
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The restaurant chain’s flagship location has seen sales fall by 94% during the pandemic
$282,500: That’s how much weekly sales have declined at everyone’s favorite unlimited-breadstick restaurant chain Olive Garden’s Times Square location. It’s a 94% drop, going from $300,000 a week before the pandemic to about $17,500 a week now, the CEO of parent company Darden said on a call with investors, as reported by CNBC. While Times Square was formerly the chain’s best-performing location, New York City’s ban on indoor dining during the pandemic turned the flagship three-story restaurant into a much less profitable takeout-only operation.
NYC indoor dining will resume tomorrow at 25% capacity, but the option to dine in may…
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With office corridors vacant, the lunchtime chain hops on the subscription train
$9.99: That’s the cost of a monthly “Classic Coffee Pass” subscription from Pret A Manger at its 72 U.S. locations.
As urban corridors become ghost towns, lunchtime retailers are becoming increasingly creative. The British fast casual chain’s new pass gets you “unlimited” coffee, ice coffee, or tea (or you can upgrade for $19.99 a month for posher espresso variations). The concept, a company executive told the Wall Street Journal, emulates Netflix and other subscription entertainment models, whose popularity spiked during lockdown: “That’s really what we want to recreate with our coffee subscription.” Perhaps another less sexy inspiration comes from the…
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Many restaurants that closed down temporarily are now gone forever
15,770: That’s how many restaurants listed on business review platform Yelp have permanently closed since March 1. That accounts for 60% of the 26,160 total closures of restaurants on the platform. Plus, 44% of the 5,454 closed bars and nightclubs listed on Yelp have permanently shut as well.
Yelp appears to be one of the only available sources of data on restaurant closures caused by the pandemic. Eater NY reported last week that while it has documented at least 150 permanent closures in New York City since March, the actual number of bars and restaurants forced out of business in…
