One good reason to pay your restaurant bill in cash: Tipped employees get that money right away without having to worry about being docked fees for card-processing. Another good reason: A scammy server can’t artificially inflate your credit card tip with some crafty work of the pen. [More]
restaurants
Dessert Is Good For Your Taste Buds, Bad For Restaurants’ Profit Margins
By 2.11.15
Most restaurants offer dessert, but depending on what time of day it is, they might not want you to actually order it. Profit margins on desserts aren’t great, and restaurants would rather you left your table to more paying customers or ordered something more profitable if you’re going to stick around and take up space. [More]
GrubHub Now Also Wants To Deliver Food To Your Door
By 2.5.15
Online food delivery services like GrubHub are just storefronts that allow users to easily choose from an array of eateries, with the delivery of your food left up to the restaurants while GrubHub gets a commission. But GrubHub is now testing out a new format where it is actually the one bringing the food to your door. [More]
Restaurant Bonus Gift Card Promotions Mean Discounted Meals
By 1.30.15
Sure, gift card bonus deals are meant to induce you to buy even more gift cards, maybe keeping the smaller one for yourself. While giving gift cards can be problematic, In the case of a restaurant or store that you already plan to visit or visit regularly, gift card deals area a great way to take advantage of these promotions. [More]
Olive Garden Revamps Menu, Invites Food Snobs To Come Whine About It
By 1.29.15
Olive Garden has never pretended to be a center of fancy cuisine or healthy eating. Its selling point isthe quantities of food available, including and especially breadsticks coated with garlic salt. Olive Garden is currently trying to rebrand itself, introducing a new logo and adding new ideas to the menu, like burgers and tapas. Is that enough to impress food snobs? Of course not. It’s Olive Garden. [More]
Pop-Up Restaurant Has 60K People Waiting On A List To Eat Twitching Seafood Covered In Ants
By 1.14.15
In one of those, “Someone has got to be jerking us around” bits of pretentious restaurant news, today we caught wind of a pop-up restaurant in Tokyo that has 60,000 people on a waiting list to eat things like dead-yet-still-wriggling-because-of-needle-in-brain langoustine covered in ants. What? We know. But really. [More]
Shake Shack To Go Public, Become Subject Of Endless “I Ate There Before…” Rants
By 12.29.14
If you live in a city that doesn’t have a Shake Shack, you probably have a friend (or a Facebook acquaintance) who has remarked on how much better the food is there than at other burger joints. Now comes the news that Shake Shack is going public and planning to continue its growth, meaning you may finally be able to judge for yourself, but that the aforementioned friend will now regularly refer to how he or she used to wait in line for hours when there was only one Shack blah blah blah. [More]
Tokyo Restaurant Banning Couples On Christmas Eve So Singles Don’t Have To Remember They’re Lonely
By 12.12.14
Are you in the mood for love? Simply because you’re near the reason for that pitter-patter of delight and that longing ache to caress the face of your significant other, as if you could soothe the worries of the world from his/her dear brow? Well cut it out. No one needs to be reminded they’re single, especially on Christmas Eve, and one Tokyo restaurant wants none of it this year. [More]
Harvard Business Professor Apologizes For $4 Overcharge Feud With Restaurant
By 12.10.14
Earlier today, we told you about the Harvard Business School professor who engaged in a lengthy back and forth with the owner of a couple of Boston-area restaurants over the issue of a $4 overcharge. Apparently the Internet didn’t side with the prof, who is now apologizing. [More]
When You Overcharge A Harvard Business Professor $4, Don’t Blow Him Off
By 12.10.14
One of the worst things a restaurant can do when it learns it’s overcharged a customer is to shrug it off and say “Oh, we’ll get around to fixing that.” This is especially true when that customer is a Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard. [More]
L.A. Restaurant Adds Gratuity Line For Kitchen Staff To Every Check
By 12.4.14
While it’s surely the mark of a good consumer to reward a server for taking orders and ferrying food to and from the kitchen, what about the people on the front lines who are making that cuisine happen? Though many restaurants pool tips to ensure that line cooks and other kitchen staff get a piece of the pie, some workers feel they’re not getting their fair share of gratuities. That environment has prompted one L.A. restaurant to add a line to all checks to make up for any tipping gaps. [More]
Would You Pay For A Restaurant Meal When You Make The Reservation?
By 12.2.14
It’s one thing to make a reservation at a restaurant and get charged for failing to show up, but would you be willing to prepay for your meal at the same time you make your reservation? Some businesses are betting that devoted diners will be willing to pay for their meals before they ever arrive at the restaurant. [More]
Restaurant Sorry It Offended People With “Roofie Colada” Drink
By 11.26.14
Here’s a suggestion for anyone running a business: When naming a product, you might want to think about not cracking a date-rape joke, as — amazingly — not everyone is amused by references to non-consensual forced intercourse. [More]
TGI Fridays Sued For Not Printing All Drink Prices On Menu
By 11.25.14
Given the vast number of available cocktails and beers available at most bars, it’s rare — if not impossible — to see a list of prices for everything you could drink. But in a recently filed class action suit, a man in New Jersey alleges that TGI Fridays is deliberately omitting drink prices to trick customers into paying more than they should. [More]
4.5 Years Later, Restaurant Owner Pleads Guilty To Serving Whale Meat
By 11.18.14
Way back in March 2010, we brought you the story of The Hump, a sushi restaurant in Los Angeles charged with violating the Marine Mammal Protection Act by serving the meat of the Sei Whale. The eatery has since closed, but the case against its owner has lingered, until yesterday, when he entered a guilty plea in federal court. [More]
Restaurant Accidentally Overcharges Customers Anywhere From $8K To $99K
By 11.12.14
Some Knoxville, TN, residents are fuming mad at a local chain restaurant after seeing that their debit and credit cards have been charged 1,000 times what they should have been for their meals, leaving people in the red for anywhere from $8,000 to $99,000. [More]
Florida Couple Tips Waiter $1,500 And Buys A Few Cases Of Beer For The Staff
By 11.12.14
There are some stories we’re sick of hearing about frequently — consumers behaving badly, data breaches and scummy scammers — and then there are those that only increase in delight the more often we encounter them. In yet another example of the generosity of strangers, a Florida couple tipped their waiter $1,500 and bought a few cases of beer for the entire staff to share. [More]
Diner Leaves Waitress $1,000 Tip On $15 Meal After Waiting For The Right Chance To Pay It Forward
By 11.7.14
Sometimes we see things on the Internet that inspire us to do really ridiculous things (cut to: actually attempting to open a wine bottle with a shoe, wine bottle shards flying everywhere). But then there are the times when the good stuff cuts through all the muckety muck of the daily grind, inspiring people to perform acts of kindness we might not otherwise have thought of on our own. Such was the case for one diner at a Colorado restaurant recently. [More]
