Restaurant Guides
Why Is the Cheesecake Factory Menu So Big?
More than 250 items, and it started at one page. The founder had never worked in a restaurant and built the menu so no chef he hired could hold him hostage.
Restaurant Guides
What Happened to Red Lobster’s Endless Shrimp?
The 20 dollar all you can eat deal was made permanent, lost 11 million dollars, emptied the freezers, and is now the subject of a 2026 lawsuit against the former owner.
Restaurant Guides
Why Did Red Lobster Go Bankrupt?
Everyone blames Endless Shrimp, which cost 11 million dollars. The real cause was a 1.5 billion dollar property deal in 2014 that left Red Lobster renting its own…
Restaurant Guides
Why Are Chipotle Portions So Small?
An analyst weighed 75 identical Chipotle bowls and found some stores serving 33 percent more than others. The problem was consistency, not a policy to serve less.
Restaurant Guides
Why Is Chipotle So Expensive?
Chipotle owns every one of its US restaurants instead of franchising, and food plus labor takes 55 cents of every dollar. Here is where the money actually goes.
Restaurant Guides
Why Is Dunkin Cheaper Than Starbucks?
The gap is over 30 percent on brewed coffee but much smaller on lattes, and the cup sizes flip the comparison between hot and iced. Here is what actually drives the…
Restaurant Guides
Why Is Dunkin So Popular in New England?
Dunkin started in Quincy in 1948 and saturated New England before national competition existed. New Hampshire has roughly one store per 6,600 residents. Florida has…
Restaurant Guides
Who Owns Popeyes?
Restaurant Brands International bought Popeyes in 2017 for about 1.8 billion dollars. Here is the full ownership chain and how founder Al Copeland lost the company in…
Restaurant Guides
Why Is It Called Popeyes?
Popeyes is named after a detective in The French Connection, not the cartoon sailor. It also started life as Chicken on the Run and failed before the name existed.
Restaurant Guides
Is Subway Tuna Real Tuna?
The no amplifiable tuna DNA test did not find fake tuna, it found the limits of DNA testing on cooked fish. Here is what the labs found and how the lawsuit ended.
Restaurant Guides
Why Is Subway Closing So Many Stores?
Subway has closed around 3,400 US stores since 2021. The reason is not scandal, it is store economics. Here are the numbers and what is actually driving the closures.
Restaurant Guides
Why Do Japanese People Eat KFC on Christmas?
A store manager in Nagoya started it, a 1974 campaign made it national, and Christmas Eve is now the busiest day of the year for KFC Japan. Here is how and why it worked.