Labor
Is The Restaurant of the Future Already Here?
QSR Magazine 11/17
We’re all scrambling to materialize the so-called “restaurant of the future.” What COVID-19 trends are fleeting? Which aren’t? Will customers clamor for the same safety essentials months from now? Have protocols and tech dehumanized the experience? Does it even matter?
Pasadena’s Miso Robotics Partners With White Castle For Flippy, the Burger-Flipping Robot
Pasadena Now 11/16
After a successful pilot program, White Castle restaurant chain is partnering with Pasadena-based Miso Robotics to use that company’s robotic fry cook at 10 locations.
Food Industry Policy
How dining reservation apps are helping restaurants prepare for winter
Modern Retail 11/17
As coronavirus cases skyrocket — and the weather gets colder — dining reservation apps are trying to offer new services to help restaurant partners stay afloat.
Opinion: Restaurants need more flexibility to stay in business, operate safely
The Orange Coutny Register 11/16
The election may be over, but the coronavirus pandemic is not. While some Californians may have settled into this new reality, restaurant owners are struggling more than ever. Indoor dining remains forbidden in most counties. The counties that do allow indoor dining have strict capacity limits. Some city officials, including those in San Diego and Long Beach, have done what they could to expand outdoor seating by allowing sidewalk and parking lot dining.
Here’s Another Reminder to Stop Using Delivery Apps
Grub Street 11/16
If you were interested, say, in founding a tech company, you might follow this simple blueprint: Create a solution to a problem that doesn’t actually exist. Take the food-delivery start-ups, which have sprung up over the last decade in order to solve the great crisis of, uh, restaurants getting food to customers who don’t want to leave their homes. Grub Street would like to propose a novel solution: Call restaurants directly when you order their food.
Worries realized as Fresno restaurants face COVID-19 dining restrictions for holidays
The Fresno Bee 11/16
Since reopening its dining room in September amid the coronavirus pandemic, Cracked Pepper Bistro in northwest Fresno has been operating in a kind of limbo. Customers are just now getting comfortable with the idea of dining out again, so staffing and food costs have been a challenge as the restaurant deals with limited capacity and the inability to accurately predict how many customers might be coming in on a given day.
On the Side
Newsom says he made ‘bad mistake’ attending pricey party
AP News 11/17
California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday apologized for what he called “a bad mistake” in attending a birthday party that broke the very rules that he has been preaching to slow the spread of the coronavirus.
Here’s why you should get a restaurant meal for Thanksgiving this year
San Francisco Chronicle 11/16
I’m sure it’s no surprise to readers of this newsletter that I’m not the world’s biggest booster of Thanksgiving. This fall, as the rates of COVID-19 infections in California have ballooned from our previously flattened curve, the sentimental logic of gathering for a holiday that celebrates colonization has felt even more tenuous than usual. But things are different this year.
This Oakland Food Truck Is Betting Big on Deep-Fried Chicken Feet
Eater SF 11/16
Sometimes, the prospect of opening a new food business feels like an exercise in market research — in figuring out what menu items might appeal to the broadest possible audience. Other times, you make deep-fried chicken feet a featured item at your new food truck for no other reason than because that’s what you loved eating when you were growing up.
