AC Media, Oslo (2026)

07/06/2026

The chatbot pitch is everywhere right now. Most of it doesn't move a P&L.

Here's what AI is actually doing inside the restaurants winning in 2026 — and the parts still selling air.

BACK OF HOUSE: Chipotle's Autocado halves avocado prep. Sweetgreen's Infinite Kitchen (built on the Spyce acquisition) pushes throughput +50% per store. Miso Robotics' Flippy is frying nuggets in 100+ White Castles. Pattern: pick one repetitive task, automate it cold, move on.

THE FRONT DOOR: Wendy's FreshAI (Google Cloud) takes drive-thru orders without a human at the box. Yum's Byte runs voice ordering at Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. Shake Shack went kiosk-first — ~73% of orders are now digital and kiosks average 10-15% higher ticket than human cashiers. The kiosk never forgets to upsell.

DEMAND & PRICING: Tatiana and Atomix in NYC use dynamic table pricing through Tock — prime slots cost more. OpenTable's no-show prediction has cut empty-seat rates ~15% at adopting restaurants. Toast's Sous Chef AI prunes the menu items losing you money. The same seat is no longer worth the same price.

STILL SNAKE OIL: Generic AI marketing — IG bots, automated review responders, ChatGPT captions. Forgettable output customers scroll past. Hospitality is the one thing AI can't fake. The trust signal is the human one. Don't outsource that.

The operators winning aren't asking what's the next AI tool. They're asking where's the next 5% of margin. Then deploying AI exactly there.

That's the question we walk in with.

→ See what AI can actually do for your restaurant: etaya.ai/restaurantgpt

28/05/2026

Why are you the owner? Most restaurant owners can't answer that honestly. And it's the reason they're stuck.

Patrick Lencioni asked one question in his book The Motive: Why do you want to be the leader? He found two answers. One builds restaurants. The other ruins them.

Reward-centered. You wanted the title. The status. The control over your own time. You thought owning the restaurant would be the reward.

Responsibility-centered. You took the role because someone had to do the hardest work. You knew it would cost you sleep, money, and comfort. You did it anyway.

Most owners start as the second. They drift into the first.

Lencioni named the five things reward-centered leaders refuse to do. Every one shows up in restaurants:

1. Build a real leadership team. Not a chef and a manager who don't speak.
2. Coach and manage your people. Not delegate, hope, and complain.
3. Have the hard conversation. The server you should have fired six months ago.
4. Run great meetings. Yours are skipped. Yours are dreaded.
5. Communicate constantly. The standards your team forgot exist.

You're not tired because the work is hard. You're tired because you're doing the wrong work. You're behind the line. You're answering the phone. You're running orders. Because it's easier than building the team that should be doing all of it.

Pick one thing from the list. The one you've avoided the longest. That avoidance is the difference between owning a restaurant and running one.

Reward-centered owners wait for the day the restaurant stops needing them. Responsibility-centered owners build the team that makes that day arrive.

The restaurant doesn't change. The owner does.

26/05/2026

He runs over twenty restaurants and nightclubs. The ones who copy him miss the point. He's not in the food business. He's in the IP business.

David Grutman. Founder of Groot Hospitality, Miami. Started in 2008 with LIV at the Fontainebleau — now one of the highest-grossing nightclubs in the world.

What he's built since: Komodo. Papi Steak. Story. Gekko. Strawberry Moon. The Goodtime Hotel. Swan. Sexy Fish Miami. Casadonna. and more. Some with partners: Pharrell. Bad Bunny. David Beckham. Marc Anthony. Each one is a brand. Not just a restaurant.

Most restaurateurs build single locations. Their value lives in the day-to-day. The moment they step away, the business stops. Grutman built a portfolio of brand IPs. Each venue is its own asset — with name recognition, transferable experience, replicable concept.

A restaurant is a job until it has IP. IP is what makes a concept open in another city. IP is what makes a celebrity want to attach their name. IP is what makes investors pay multiples on your revenue. IP is what you own when you stop showing up.

He didn't open his second restaurant. He launched his second brand. Then his third. His fourth. His twentieth. The discipline isn't volume. It's making each one stand on its own.

Ask yourself an honest question. If you closed your laptop tonight and never reopened your business email — what survives? A restaurant survives a week without you. A brand survives forever.

What are you building?

08/05/2026

You're not behind on AI. Your competitors are. Quietly.

AI isn't replacing chefs. It's replacing the things keeping owners from sleep — the schedules, the reviews, the forecasts, the reordering, the forty-seven admin tasks nobody hired you to do.

Five places AI is already running better restaurants:

1. Demand forecasting — knowing exactly how busy Tuesday will be.
2. Schedule generation — building the rota in five minutes, not five hours.
3. Review monitoring — never missing a 2-star, never sounding generic.
4. Phone agents — answering hours, taking reservations, freeing the host.
5. Menu engineering — telling you which dish is leaking margin.

A typical operator burns 20+ hours a week on tasks AI does better. At $50/hour of owner time, that's around $52,000 a year. Most AI tools cost a fraction of one server's salary. You're not failing to adopt. You're paying yourself to do the wrong work.

What AI will never touch: the food, the hospitality, the team culture, the Friday-night vibe, the look on a guest's face when something goes right. That's still you. AI just clears your runway so you can focus there.

The restaurants getting ahead aren't using AI for everything. They're using it for the right things. The ones who automate the human moments lose. The ones who automate the busywork win.

You don't need to learn AI. You need to know what to delegate to it. The owners who do are home for dinner with their kids. The ones who don't are still entering schedules at midnight. Pick one.

04/05/2026

He served a $2 hot dog at the best restaurant in the world. It became one of the most famous moments in fine dining this century.

Will Guidara took over Eleven Madison Park in 2006, at 26. The restaurant was good. He didn't want good. He wanted to make it the best in the world. By 2017, EMP was named the #1 restaurant on the planet.

One night, a couple from out of town mentioned they were leaving New York the next day. They said they'd loved everything except — they never got a real New York hot dog. Will overheard. He sent a runner to the corner cart, paid two dollars, brought back a dirty water dog. The kitchen plated it. It was served as the next course of the tasting menu. They were stunned.

The hot dog wasn't a stunt. It was the visible result of an invisible system. Will spent years building a culture where every staff member was empowered — and trained — to create that kind of moment. The magic didn't happen by accident. It was engineered.

He calls it the 95/5 rule. Manage 95% of your costs, processes, and operations ruthlessly. So you can be unreasonable with the other 5%. The 5% is where memory lives.

There is a difference between service and hospitality. Service is what you do. Hospitality is how you make people feel. Most restaurants are stuck on service. The ones people talk about cross into hospitality.

Your guests aren't telling stories about you. It's not because the food isn't good. It's because nothing happened that made them want to.

You don't need a more expensive menu. You need one moment a guest can't stop telling.

30/04/2026

He was born unable to walk normally. He arrived in New York homeless. He left a Michelin star on his restaurant wall for eight years straight.

Vikas Khanna grew up in Amritsar, India. Born with misaligned legs, he wore braces until he was thirteen. While other kids ran outside, his grandmother — Biji — took him to the langar at the Golden Temple, the kitchen that feeds thousands for free every day. She taught him cooking was about people, not plates.

In December 2000, at 29, he moved to New York with almost nothing. He slept at Grand Central Station. He worked thirty-one different jobs. He nearly starved. He didn't quit.

In 2010, he opened Junoon — a fine-dining Indian restaurant in Manhattan. Within its first year, it won a Michelin star, held for eight consecutive years. In 2024, he opened Bungalow on the Lower East Side — one of the most-talked-about openings in New York that year.

Then March 2020. India locked down with four hours' notice. Tens of millions of migrant workers were trapped. Vikas couldn't fly back. He started cooking instead.

He called it Feed India. From New York, he organized volunteers across more than 125 Indian cities. By the end of 2020, more than fifty million meals had been delivered to migrant workers, the elderly, and the homeless.

You opened your restaurant for a reason. At some point, the spreadsheets started arguing with that reason. The cost of meat. The labor. The reviews. None of it ever stops. But the people who walk through your door tonight didn't come for any of that. They came to be fed.

Cook for the person. Not the plate.

26/04/2026

For years, Italian diners would leave his restaurant and throw his food in the trash on the way out.

It's now been named the best restaurant in the world — twice.

Massimo Bottura grew up in Modena, Italy — the home of balsamic vinegar. In 1995 he opened a twelve-table restaurant on a quiet street. He called it Osteria Francescana. His goal was to honor Italian tradition by reinventing it. Italy did not agree.

For nearly a decade, the restaurant barely survived. Italian critics refused to write about him. Diners walked in, took one bite, and left in disgust. Some threw his modernist pasta in the trash. His own team begged him to make "normal" food. He refused. Every time.

One night, a sous chef dropped a lemon tart as he plated it. Half the dessert smeared across the ceramic. Instead of remaking it, Massimo looked down and said: "Serve it." He named the plate "Oops! I Dropped the Lemon Tart." It became one of the most-copied dishes in fine dining.

In 2011, Osteria Francescana won its third Michelin star. In 2016, it was named the #1 restaurant in the world. Then again in 2018.

You've been told to tone it down. Make the menu more normal. Serve what everyone else serves. Those changes would probably work. Short-term. But they'd sand off the thing that could one day make people drive an hour to find you.

The guests you're really building for haven't walked in yet. They don't know your name. They're waiting for someone brave enough to serve them something they haven't had.

Don't water it down before they arrive.

24/04/2026

His father went bankrupt twice running luxury food tours in Europe. Danny grew up in St. Louis watching it happen, and learned young how fragile hospitality is, and how powerful it can be when it works.

After college, he took a job selling anti-theft tags. He hated it. Every weekend he disappeared into restaurants. He saved every spare dollar and went to Italy, working in trattorias, watching how Italian owners made every guest feel at home. When he came back to New York, he knew what he had to build.

In October 1985, at 27, he opened Union Square Cafe. The neighborhood was rough , most New Yorkers avoided it. But his real edge wasn't the location. It was a menu that changed daily, built from the farmers market across the street. Nobody was doing that yet.

After a few years, he noticed something. Guests remembered how they felt more than what they ate. So he wrote down the ratio: the food is 49% of the experience. The way you make people feel is 51%. He called it Enlightened Hospitality, and built his whole priority order around it: employees first, guests second, community third, suppliers fourth, investors last. Most restaurants rank these backwards.

Forty years later, Danny has built Union Square Cafe, Gramercy Tavern, The Modern, and Shake Shack, which started as a hot dog cart in Madison Square Park and went public on the NYSE in 2015. Along the way, some of America's best chefs, Tom Colicchio, Michael Romano — came up through his kitchens.

His most practical teaching for operators: Always Be Collecting Dots. Every shift, gather one detail about each guest. What they ordered. Where they're from. What made them laugh. Write it down. Use it next time. It turns strangers into regulars.

17/04/2026

In 1993, a college kid at LSU handed in his business plan for a restaurant that only sold chicken fingers. His professor gave it one of the lowest grades in class.

Banks turned him down. So he worked 90-hour weeks in a Louisiana oil refinery as a boilermaker. Summers, he flew to Alaska to work on commercial fishing boats. For three years, he saved every dollar.

In August 1996, he opened one small spot near LSU. Chicken fingers. Fries. Coleslaw. Toast. One secret sauce. He named the place after his yellow Labrador, Raising Cane.

Thirty years later: 1,000+ locations. Over $5 billion in sales. Passed KFC as the #3 chicken chain in America. Todd Graves is now worth $22 billion.

Still the same menu. Still the same sauce. Still named after his dog.

The operators who last don't do more. They find the one thing their city remembers them for — and protect it with everything.

What's the one thing you'd protect?

16/03/2026

The restaurant industry is having its electricity moment. 🔌
100 years ago, factories ran on one giant steam engine.
Everything depended on it.
If it stopped, everything stopped.
Then electricity came.
Every machine got its own power source.
Factories became 10x more productive overnight.
The same shift is happening in restaurants right now.
Most owners today have 15–20 tabs open just to understand their own business.
POS. Reviews. Inventory. Reservations. Social media. Delivery apps.
And YOU are the system connecting all of them.
You're not running a restaurant.
You're running the software that runs the restaurant.
That's the real problem.
The goal isn't more tools.

It's one system that connects everything, and acts on your behalf.
→ Inventory running low before Friday service? Handled.
→ Bad review just came in? Responded to automatically.
→ Tuesday looks slow? The system already knows why.

The restaurants that figure this out first will have a structural advantage that's almost impossible to close.

We built a free 4-minute assessment that shows you exactly where your restaurant's systems are leaking revenue right now and implement the restaurant operating system effectively.

https://www.anthconsulting.com/restaurant-growth-os

AC Media

07/06/2026

28/05/2026

26/05/2026

08/05/2026

04/05/2026

30/04/2026

26/04/2026

24/04/2026

17/04/2026

16/03/2026

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