SOCIAL MEDIA: 5 Steps to Instagram-Worthy Restaurant Lighting
Having an Instagram-friendly restaurant is more than just making food-porn dishes. You also need the right lighting in your establishment so you and your guests can take amazing photos that’ll have that Instagram appeal. Here are five tips for making sure your lighting is on point.
DOWNLOAD: The 2018 MLB Postseason TV Schedule
The MLB Postseason starts tonight with the Wild Card. Make sure you know when and what station with our free MLB Postseason TV schedule download.
DID YOU KNOWS…
The National Brewery That Almost Was
In 1815, the US almost started a plan to build a national brewery. English-born Joseph Coppinger wrote a letter to Thomas Jefferson espousing the importance of a national brewery and how it could unite the country. Coppinger enclosed a plan for the brewing company with his letter, along with a treatise he wrote on brewing and malting. Jefferson turned the plan down, citing that every state already had beer production and didn’t need federal encouragement.
All-Consuming Fortnite
Last week, Epic Games launched the sixth season of Fortnite, adding a number of new features to the tremendously popular online multiplayer game. The update adds new locations, pets and a bunch of Halloween-themed content to the game played by 125+ million people across the globe. After its launch in 2017, Fortnite quickly became a global phenomenon, attracting millions of players and earning hundreds of millions in in-game revenue each month. As the following chart shows, Fortnight players tend to spend a lot of time with the game. In many cases it even interferes with real life duties, as 35% and 21% of players admit to having skipped school or work, respectively, to play Fortnite instead.
Guns in America
October 1st marked the one-year anniversary of the Las Vegas shooting, the single deadliest mass shooting in modern American history. A man opened fire from the Mandalay Bay Resort hotel into a crowd at a country music festival killing 58 people and injuring hundreds. In the subsequent months, another pivotal mass shooting rocked the American debate surrounding guns and gun violence, this time taking place at a high school. This is an overview of statistics on guns and gun violence in America.
IS IT A NEW ERA FOR SPORTS BARS?
Why it matters to you: Advice for re-orienting your sports bar is good even if you aren’t one.
With the skidding about Buffalo Wild Wings has done during their transition from Wall Street darling to privately held entity, much has been made as to whether the ”sports bar,” as it is classically known, might be seeing its sunset. BWW has had repeatedly lower same store sales over the past few quarters and suddenly the idea of the sports bar had become a dead concept consigned to the fate of long pats concepts like Howard Johnson’s and Sizzler. Fortunately, FSR Magainze spoke to two of our most successful subscribers -- Arooga’s and Glory Days Grill – for their recent article.
The author’s premise was that sports bars need to remake themselves. One restaurant consultant even quipped in the piece, “If a sports bar wants to be busy, it should market itself exclusively to female clientele. You’ll get guys automatically.” Unfortunately, this simply isn’t true. The notion that operators in the sports-themed genre are all exclusively serving chicken wings and Budweiser is to believe a deep ignorance about how innovative our subscribers are and how creative they can been when driving their businesses. Sure, the advice the article is suggesting is sensible and accurate. The problem is that it applies to ALL restaurants and not exclusively sports-themed ones.
The only redemption the article has is its focus on knowing your current market and delivering what it wants. So, what are you doing to stay relevant? Please let us know so we can show the folks at FSR Magazine you aren’t a cliché and shouldn’t be mischaracterized as one.
[Source: FSR Magazine]
IT’S A NEXT GEN THING
Why it matters to you: How is the NRA (National Restaurant Association) apprentice program doing?
A couple of years ago, the National Restaurant Association (NRA) in conjunction with the American Hotel & Lodging Association and the US Department of Labor started an ambitious program to deliver better prepared and qualified managers to the industry. The program, thus far, appears to be a rousing success, boasting a 94% retention rate. The program trains existing employees to be managers in all aspects of the hospitality industry.
Currently, the program has over 1200 apprentices and seems to be delivering for the individuals that are accessing it. “The apprenticeship program definitely helped me learn more management skills that made me feel more comfortable with my end goal,” said Cassidy Hubbard, a sous chef at Iron Hill Brewery in Newark, DE. If you want to learn more about the program, check out these four steps to employing your next apprentice. Remember, we are in a War for Talent and anything you can do to win should be on the table, including looking outside your company for support.
[Source: Nation’s Restaurant News]
