Bielat Santore & Company Releases Seventh Episode in Podcast Series
New Jersey Liquor Licenses: Reforms to Inactive Licenses. Commercial real estate brokerage firm Bielat Santore & Company has released Episode 7 of its Owner’s Edge Podcast Series. The episode provides restaurant operators, license holders, developers, lenders, and municipal officials with an authoritative breakdown of New Jersey’s major liquor license statutory overhauls. New Jersey recently reformed its retail alcoholic beverage licensing framework twice within less than three years. These legislative updates ended the long-standing practice of indefinite dormancy for inactive “pocket” licenses, established structured activation timelines, and opened new intermunicipal transfer mechanisms designed to drive economic redevelopment…
Request the hard copy “NJ Liquor License Law Reform” at info@123bsc.com
We Know Exactly When the Rush Hits
Why don’t we know who’ll be there to handle it? It’s 11:45 on a Tuesday. The lunch rush is fifteen minutes out. Two people called out this morning, one is stuck in traffic, and a text just came in from a third who isn’t coming at all. The dining room is going to fill up anyway. None of that is a surprise, though. The rush shows up every day at the same time. What you can’t count on is having enough people there to handle it. Almost every operator I know can tell you what next Saturday is going to look like. They know when the lunch rush lands. They know the slow Tuesday, the holiday that fills every table, the local event that reshapes a whole week. Demand, it turns out, is one of the most predictable things in the business. Staffing for it is one of the hardest, and the pressure making it worse isn’t letting up. Sales are harder to grow, food costs keep climbing, and labor costs just went up again — this month a couple dozen cities and states raised their minimum wage, with the floor now near or above $20 an hour in parts of California and Washington and just under $20 in D.C. Every operator I talk to is looking for savings wherever they can find them. The bar for investing in anything new is, does it take work off my plate, and does it make the place run a little smoother? When I hold everything up to that bar, I keep landing in the same place: labor. And it keeps coming back to that same gap. Demand is predictable but staffing is not, and the reasons staffing is so hard usually had nothing to do with the schedule itself. Start with the people doing the work…
America’s Restaurants Face a Dilemma
How to sell food in the GLP-1 era. Fewer orders and higher costs are squeezing restaurants big and small as people on the weight-loss drugs eat and drink less when dining out. Six months ago, Deborah VanTrece, the chef and owner of Twisted Soul Cookhouse & Pours in Atlanta, noticed she was running out of containers for diners to take leftovers home. “It wasn’t a few bites left over. It was half a plate.” Ms. VanTrece recalled. “I was like, ‘Did our portions change?’” No. It was that more customers were on GLP-1 weight-loss medications. Restaurants, from cozy, upscale establishments to national fast-food chains, are figuring out how to adapt menus for the 11 percent of adults, or roughly 30 million Americans, using drugs like Wegovy, Ozempic and Zepbound. People on these medications are eating out less and spending less when they do. “We always ask guests about meals that aren’t fully consumed, and they are very forthcoming in letting you know it’s ‘the shots,’” Ms. VanTrece said. The number of people taking these medications is expected to rise, and as consumers seek more protein to protect muscles (GLP-1s can reduce muscle mass), the response would seem fairly straightforward: Put more protein on the menu, and cut portion sizes. But adding protein to a plate can be expensive; beef prices, for one, remain at a record high. Businesses have to determine whether consumers would be willing to pay $5 or $7 more for a few additional grams of chicken or beef in their meal. And does half a sandwich or a half-size portion of Barbecue Duck Confit mean it will cost 50 percent less? Not likely, as restaurants must still cover their rent, their labor, and their own rising food expenses…
AI Can Help Restaurants Scale Their Point of View
Not just their operations. Anyone who has worked on a Friday night in a restaurant knows how quickly small tasks pile up. Someone answers the phone while checking the reservation book. Someone else is counting what is left in the walk-in. A manager is trying to understand why one menu item suddenly took off while another barely moved. At the same time, guests are waiting to be welcomed, helped, and remembered. This is where the conversation about AI in restaurants should begin. Not with replacing the people who create hospitality, but with removing the work that keeps them from being present. AI can become the operating backbone behind a restaurant, handling routine coordination and connecting the signals the business already produces. It can manage reservations and waitlists, confirm bookings, help prepare ingredient orders and surface useful patterns in menu performance. The point is not to make the restaurant feel automated. It is to give the team a clearer view of what is happening so they can make the guest experience feel more personal. Rolling silverware is essential side work and nearly anyone who has worked in a restaurant knows it needs to be done. But there’s plenty of side work that functions more like paperwork than anything. Reservations are a simple example. A restaurant can spend hours answering the same questions, confirming bookings, managing cancellations, and updating a waitlist. Those tasks matter, but they do not require a manager’s full attention every time. AI can handle the routine exchanges and bring the exceptions to a person. A large party with an unusual request, a regular asking for a particular table or a guest who needs help after a cancellation should not disappear into an automated process. The system should know when to step aside. The same principle applies to ingredient ordering…
The Cost of Immigration Uncertainty in the Restaurant Industry
Shifting work-authorization deadlines leave restaurant employers struggling to comply. As Temporary Protected Status for Haitian workers recently reached its latest court-ordered deadline, much of the national debate has been understandably focused on immigration law, humanitarian conditions, and executive authority. Those are consequential issues. But far less attention has been given to what happens inside the businesses expected to translate a rapidly shifting government decision into lawful action in weeks, or even days. Consider the compliance timeline employers have faced in recent weeks alone. After the Supreme Court’s June 25 ruling cleared the way for TPS termination, USCIS posted guidance on July 1 identifying July 10 as the work-authorization expiration date. On July 10, the Department of Homeland Security extended authorization through July 24. On July 22, a federal appeals court pushed the date to July 27. Three different deadlines in three weeks. However one views the underlying TPS decision, employers should not have to make highly consequential personnel decisions while the applicable compliance date is moving in almost real time. This is not an argument that government should freeze existing policy in place, or that any particular TPS designation should continue indefinitely. Effective enforcement and workable legal employment pathways are not competing objectives. A credible system requires both. The more fundamental question is whether government is administering its decisions in a way that allows responsible employers to comply…
Restaurants Embrace the Role of ‘Creator’ to Get Seen
There’s seriously good news for restaurants right now: Consumer love for independent brands. But as any business owner will tell you, a surge in interest brings a whole new set of challenges. With social media now serving as a primary way for consumers to discover brands, local restaurant owners find themselves playing the role of content creators on top of every other hat they’ve got to wear. At the same time, they’re navigating an economy where buyers are more carefully evaluating every dollar they spend. For our latest Small Business Now report, we surveyed more than 5,000 small business owners (including restaurant operators) and consumers across the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand to understand the current landscape. We discovered that to stay visible while managing the daily hustle of running a business, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are fundamentally rewriting their job descriptions to embrace the role of “creator” — and leaning on AI to get it all done. Social Media Discovery Means Everyone’s a Creator Now. It seems like everyone’s a creator now, and it’s not just because they want to be social media stars. It comes down to how today’s consumers shop. Social media platforms have officially overtaken search engines as a top digital discovery tool, with 49 percent of global consumers finding new small businesses on social media compared to 40 percent using search engines. Where customers want to spend their money has shifted dramatically over the last few years. Consumers are actively turning away from giant restaurant chains to spend money at smaller locally-owned spots. You don’t need a huge budget or an army of employees to capture the wave of consumers who want to spend money dining out…
Don’t Be Cute, Just Execute
How restaurants can grow same-store sales. The same-store sales performance across the industry can best be described as “choppy” of late, particularly amid a heavy value environment. The ability to achieve growth for this metric is both an art and a science, and it requires a sharpened focus on the fundamentals. Or, as Mo’Bettahs CEO Rob Ertmann describes, “you don’t need to be cute, just execute.” Its worthy advice given that Mo’Bettahs is riding 18 consecutive years of positive same-store sales. And it was one piece of many Ertmann shared during a panel at the recent Restaurantology event in Salt Lake City, hosted by Savory Fund, alongside Savory CEO Clay Dover, and ZenMango CEO Arjun Sen. Sen and Ertmann shared their tactics on winning over consumers who have more dining-out choices than ever. For Sen, the lure is to make sure your concept is differentiated and “demonstrably better,” and that you’re communicating that to customers. For Ertmann, the secret to winning consumers is “consistency, value, and just an overall great experience.” “How you win the next guest is to win over the last guest who was in your restaurant,” Ertmann said. “Word of mouth — having a brand that people are talking about, sharing to others — that’s how we win them over. There are all sorts of marketing tactics to perk people’s interest, but it starts with winning over the last guest walking into the restaurant.” That said, you still have to get that last guest into your restaurant in the first place, and more concepts are relying on discounting to do so as consumer pressures continue to mount…
Did You Know?
How a restaurant linen service bill grew from $865 to $1,503 a week. The call usually does not begin with the restaurant linen service contract. It begins with the profit-and-loss statement. Someone in accounting or operations notices that linen rental expense is far above expectations. In one restaurant account I reviewed, the weekly linen service invoice began at $864.97 and reached $1,502.65 about four years later. That is $637.68 more per week, a 73.7% increase. Annualized, the expense grew from $44,978 to $78,137 – an additional $33,159 every year. The restaurant did not knowingly approve one dramatic increase. The cost accumulated inside ordinary weekly invoices until the P&L forced someone to ask, “Why is this so high?” For a franchisee or multi-unit restaurant group, the same pattern across several locations can multiply the damage…
Employee Tip
Career Opportunities in Restaurants. New research from the National Restaurant Association finds that restaurant employees overwhelmingly see the industry as a place to build skills, advance professionally, and pursue meaningful long-term careers. In fact, among current employees working their primary job in the industry, 89 percent feel there’s an opportunity for career advancement and 96 percent are satisfied with their industry work experiences. Among current restaurant employees working their primary job in the industry, 86 percent say they are likely to continue working in the restaurant and food service industry until retirement. Ninety-one percent would recommend a restaurant job to a friend or family member…