Top 10 Annoying Restaurant Design Flaws

By Phil Vettel, The Chicago Tribune

The food can be transcendent and the service clairvoyant, but bad restaurant design can ruin any dining experience. We’re talking specifics, not “too noisy” or “too cold.” Here are the things that bug us. Feel free to add your own; if we get enough suggestions, maybe restaurants will start paying attention.

Wobbly tables. Fix ‘em. Every busboy should the old matchbook-shim trick. Continue Reading »Top 10 Annoying Restaurant Design Flaws

Fast Food Loses the Fiberglass Decor

Noreen O’Leary, BrandWeek.com

With its slate floors and subdued lighting, Arne Jacobsen-inspired egg-chairs and printed wall panels by French architect Philippe Avanzi, a certain lunch spot in Manhattan’s uber-hip Chelsea district fits right in with the nearby boutiques and art galleries. Less predictable is the place’s name: McDonald’s. Continue Reading »Fast Food Loses the Fiberglass Decor

Can You Really Predict the Success of a Marriage in 15 Minutes?

By Laurie Abraham, Slate.com

An excerpt from Laurie Abraham’s The Husbands and Wives Club.

“My goal is to be like the guy who invented Velcro,” marriage researcher John Gottman once told an interviewer. “Nobody remembers his name, but everybody uses Velcro.” Gottman’s own road to Velcro-level fame started with a 1998 article in the Journal of Marriage and the Family. He and his colleagues at the University of Washington had videotaped newlywed couples discussing a contentious topic for 15 minutes to measure precisely how they fought over it: Continue Reading »Can You Really Predict the Success of a Marriage in 15 Minutes?

Recipe of the Week

Moroccan Chicken

This chicken dish is succulent, tender, and full of flavor. The sweet tanginess of the sauce and the tender chicken create a very tasty and colorful dish with amazing aromas.

Oscar Winners Try to Keep Whale Off Sushi Plates

By Jennifer Steinhauer, The New York Times

It is sport among black belt sushi eaters here to see just how daring one’s palate can be. But even among the squid-chomping, roe-eating and uni-nibbling fans, whale is almost unheard of on the plate. It also happens to be illegal.

Yet with video cameras and tiny microphones, the team behind Sunday’s Oscar-winning documentary film “The Cove” orchestrated a Hollywood-meets-Greenpeace-style covert operation to ferret out what the authorities say is illegal whale meat at one of this town’s most highly regarded sushi destinations. Continue Reading »Oscar Winners Try to Keep Whale Off Sushi Plates

Portable Food Courts Latest Trend

By Nicole Santa Cruz, ThisBrandX.com

Food trucks aren’t new to Eric Rivera. But when the native Angeleno heard of a new mobile food court downtown, he drove all the way from Downey to try it out.

“I’ll be back,” Rivera, 41, said after feasting on a pulled-pork taco. His dining room was a 30-foot table with plastic chairs set up near four food trucks parked in front of the loading docks off Traction Avenue and South Alameda Street. Continue Reading »Portable Food Courts Latest Trend

Share Your Worst and Best Dining Experience!

Tell us what made your best dining experience so exceptional? Or what made your worst one so unpleasant? What keeps you going back to that one place, or repels you from another?

We want to know your answers! These details reveal some of the best and worst restaurant business practices out there and can provide valuable lessons for everyone in the foodservice industry to remember.

Email your comments to Kimberly@mymfn.com or blog us here. Your reply may be shared with our readership in future E-newsletters and/or in our bi-monthly print issue of My Foodservice News.