Restaurant Reset

When a system goes down in a restaurant, the crew makes do, because the fish still has to get fried. Tim Newton spent 30 years on the technology side of that equation. When he took on field operations at Long John Silver's too, he found out how much feedback had been piling up behind the dam.

Tim is CTO and Head of Brand Operations at Long John Silver's, after years running technology infrastructure at Papa John's. A Marine Corps veteran with an air traffic control background, he tells Andy how LJS gets crews ready for Lent, its eight-week Super Bowl, how he sells franchisees on digital menu boards that don't pencil out on a spreadsheet, and what a hurricane taught him about putting people before systems.

They also get into letting AI learn a restaurant's data systems the way a new data engineer would, why voice AI takes stress off the drive-thru order-taker, and why Tim stopped trying to be the smartest person in the room.

In this episode:

• What changed when IT and field operations started reporting to the same person

• Why crews work around broken systems, and the feedback that gets lost

• Changing how the restaurants see the corporate office

• Selling franchisees on digital menu boards without a hard ROI

• Bringing franchisees into decisions through structured governance

• How LJS preps crews for an eight-week Lent rush, down to dedicated stations

• What the Marine Corps and air traffic control taught him about pace

• What a hurricane taught him about people before systems

• Why he'd let AI learn the source systems before building a data lake

• Voice AI at the drive-thru and the smile at the window

• Why he stopped trying to be the smartest person in the room

Subscribe to Restaurant Reset on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. New episodes every week for operators who want to run a better business.

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

01:36 Welcome Tim Newton

02:58 Running IT and operations at the same time

06:22 Changing the reporting line

08:34 Perception is reality in the field

13:28 Selling franchisees on digital menu boards

17:57 Bringing franchisees along

20:15 An eight-week Super Bowl

22:57 Lessons from the Marine Corps and air traffic control

25:08 What a hurricane taught him

32:10 Letting AI learn the data systems

36:21 Can you trust what AI tells you?

39:14 Voice AI at the drive-thru

43:02 No longer the smartest person in the room

Restaurant Reset is brought to you by Genius™ (Link globalpayments.com/genius) from Global Payments, the restaurant point of sale system that can power orders, payments and services in any type of food and beverage setting.

In 1988, Ron Swidler was waiting tables at a northern Italian spot in Chicago when two guys starting a hotel design firm sat in his section. He kept coming back with the water pitcher so he could hear more of their plan, and he ended up as their first hire. Thirty-eight years later, he's the CEO of The Gettys Group.

Ron spent years as the company's futurist before taking over as CEO in 2024. He tells Andy what has to be true for a local to walk past a hotel front desk to eat at the restaurant, why the experience can fall apart with one dropped knife, and where restaurant tech helps the guest versus where it just cuts labor.

They also get into why AI tends to land on the middle ground, how to design generosity into a restaurant without giving away the house, and the Ted Lasso trust equation Ron leads by.

In this episode:

• What waiting tables taught him that still shows up in every restaurant he designs

• The blindfold test for whether a hotel restaurant belongs where it is

• Why there's no direct line between F&B build-out spend and a hotel's success

• Designing a room that works for guests and servers at the same time

• QR menus, pay-at-table, and which tech has earned its keep

• Why hotels have lost the goodbye, and the hello with it

• The Gemini-built design brief, and why AI finds the middle ground

• What hospitality students in Lyon see that veteran operators have stopped seeing

• Generosity with commercial discipline, and why it doesn't have to be expensive

• Imagination plus accountability, and proving the CEO job doesn't have to be lonely

Subscribe to Restaurant Reset on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. New episodes every week for operators who want to run a better business.

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

01:41 The table that started his career

06:01 Hotel restaurants locals want to eat at

08:42 The blindfold test

09:29 Where F&B spend actually pays off

12:46 Designing for guests and servers

14:40 When service falls apart

16:43 QR menus and restaurant tech

21:16 Hotels have lost the goodbye

24:18 What a rendering can't tell you

28:13 Why AI finds the middle ground

31:38 What hospitality students see that operators miss

34:13 Designing generosity without giving away the house

39:39 Imagination plus accountability as CEO

43:48 The Ted Lasso trust equation

Restaurant Reset is brought to you by Genius™ (Link globalpayments.com/genius) from Global Payments, the restaurant point of sale system that can power orders, payments and services in any type of food and beverage setting.

For decades, the drive-thru clock was a wire loop buried in the pavement, timing two points: the menu board and the window. Eric Lam's cameras now watch something like 55 million cars a year, and they measure what that loop never could: the full wait, from the moment a car pulls into the lot to food in hand.

Eric grew up taking apart POS terminals at his dad's company, and his team is now rolling camera vision out across Culver's. He tells Andy why two stores with the same volume can have a 30% gap in wait times, why the first version of the product overstepped with the crew, and how to put cameras in a drive-thru without them feeling like Big Brother.

They also get into the failed bets that led him to the drive-thru, what cameras could handle in ten years, and the TEDx talk he'd give: How Harvard Made Me Less Ambitious.

In this episode:

• The first two things that surprise an operator when camera vision goes live

• Why stores with the same volume can have very different wait times

• Giving GMs the data without telling them how to run their kitchen

• "Our drive-thru is different," and why the customer doesn't care

• Labor positioning, the bottleneck operators swear isn't theirs

• Throughput and total experience time, the two numbers to watch

• Why the cameras discard the video, and how that builds trust with crews

• What breaks when you scale computer vision from a pilot to 1,000+ stores

• The bakery and postal projects that taught him to pick the right use case

• Prioritizing happiness, and advice for the burned-out GM

Subscribe to Restaurant Reset on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. New episodes every week for operators who want to run a better business.

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

00:21 The drive-thru clock buried in the pavement

02:12 Building trust in the cameras

03:39 Same volume, different waits

07:32 Why they stopped telling GMs how many burgers to cook

09:01 "Our drive-thru is different"

11:40 The most common bottleneck

13:23 The two numbers to watch

16:15 Avoiding Big Brother

20:40 Scaling to 1,000+ restaurants

26:56 Picking the right use case for computer vision

30:55 What's next inside the restaurant

38:30 How Harvard made him less ambitious

41:12 Advice for the burned-out GM

43:35 Cameras in 2036

Restaurant Reset is brought to you by Genius™ (Link globalpayments.com/genius) from Global Payments, the restaurant point of sale system that can power orders, payments and services in any type of food and beverage setting.

In 2008 Roy Choi was out of work, months into a job search, with a family to support. One night he told his wife he was going out at midnight to sell tacos off a used truck. She could have told him to go to sleep and keep looking in the morning. She didn't, and Kogi Barbecue went on to change how America eats on the street.

At the first Genius World conference, Leah Rasori, Chief Marketing Officer at Global Payments, sat down with Roy for a live fireside chat. Roy is a James Beard Award winning chef, best-selling author, and the co-founder of Kogi, and this past year he became the first celebrity partner for Genius.

What follows is about as far from a keynote as a room full of restaurant operators is likely to get. Roy admits on stage, for the first time publicly, that he doesn't think the math of his business works. He explains why most of his company's energy goes into things that never show up on a P&L, why he waited eight years to open a second Best Friend, and what he thinks a company the size of Global Payments owes the small operators who have no safety net underneath them.

In this episode:

- The midnight decision that started Kogi, and the one person who could have stopped it

- Why Kogi's real problem in 2009 wasn't cash flow, it was building the blueprint mid-flight

- Selling kimchi out of his mom's car trunk at five years old, and the 24-hour clock he never turned off

- Putting 50 to 70 percent of the company's energy into things no spreadsheet can measure

- The admission he had never made publicly: on paper, his business doesn't work

- Why he took eight years to open restaurant number two, and how he thinks about 1 to 2 versus 2 to 5

- What small operators actually need from their technology partners, and why time is the thing nobody gives them

- Why the word "genius" has been loaded for him since he was a kid

Subscribe to Restaurant Reset for conversations with the operators and executives actually running the restaurant business. Listen on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

01:05 Andy sets up the Genius World fireside chat

02:23 Roy takes the stage

02:50 Rapid fire: tacos, tea, and rice

05:03 2008: laid off, and the midnight taco run

06:38 What actually threatened Kogi as it grew

07:37 Fixing the plane engine while it's still flying

10:35 His mom, the kimchi, and the trunk of the car

14:26 KPIs, market research, and moving without data

15:26 Investing in the intangibles

17:19 "I don't think the math of our business works"

19:02 Best Friend in Vegas, and 1-888-ROY-CHOI

21:01 Why moving slow is okay

23:51 What operators need from a company like Genius

28:36 What the word genius means to him

Restaurant Reset is brought to you by Genius™ (Link globalpayments.com/genius) from Global Payments, the restaurant point of sale system that can power orders, payments and services in any type of food and beverage setting.

In June 2005, before the iPhone existed, Noah Glass started a company that let people order food by text message. Some of the very first orders came from his mom and his grandmother. Twenty-one years later, Olo powers digital ordering for roughly 850 brands across 90,000 locations, and more than 100 million guests order through it every year.

Olo went public, then was taken private by Thoma Bravo last September. Noah and his family reinvested 75% of their proceeds back into the company, because he believes Olo is in a new founding moment. That moment is the Olo app: one place to order from the restaurants you love, at real menu prices, with zero commission charged to the restaurant.

Noah walks Andy through why the Olo app works now when it couldn't in 2008, why menus on marketplace apps run 15 to 30% higher than the restaurant's own, the three metrics that matter for any digital business, and why he believes technology is how hospitality scales past the 150 people any one person can remember.

In this episode:

• Why the Olo app launches with 40 million guest accounts and no cold start problem

• The hidden 15 to 30% markup on marketplace menus, and the guest fee designed to push people to order direct

• Partnering and competing with the same companies, and restaurant tech's "Red Wedding"

• What selling the company taught him about founder control and boards

• The three metrics that matter: number of guests, frequency, and average ticket

• Vanity metrics, the discounting spiral, and beautiful digital experiences that don't convert

• Dunbar's number and what hospitality at scale actually looks like

Subscribe to Restaurant Reset on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. New episodes every week for operators who want to run a better business.

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

00:21 Ordering food by text in 2005

02:46 Launching the Olo app and Olo Network

06:23 Solving the cold start problem

08:01 Who owns the guest data

12:06 Zero commission and real menu prices

13:59 Why Olo charges guests a network fee

18:02 Partnering with your competitors

25:07 Selling Olo and reinvesting 75%

30:17 What the Portillo's board taught him

35:55 The three metrics that matter

41:22 Vanity metrics

44:30 Beautiful experiences that don't convert

45:33 The discounting spiral

52:16 Dunbar's law and hospitality at scale

Restaurant Reset is brought to you by Genius™ (Link globalpayments.com/genius) from Global Payments, the restaurant point of sale system that can power orders, payments and services in any type of food and beverage setting.

A seafood chain's menu looked completely normal online. Then Loman pulled it out of the point of sale and it broke their ingestion tool. Every item had a modifier. Every modifier had a sub-modifier of every other modifier, ten levels deep. Somebody built that on purpose, years ago, and nobody has touched it since.

Christian Wiens is founder and CEO of Loman, an AI phone agent that has now handled millions of calls across roughly 1,500 restaurants. Before this he worked in cybersecurity, which is where he learned what a false positive costs you and why he would rather lose a deal than oversell what the product can do. He tells Andy Grindstaff exactly what breaks these systems, and it is almost never the AI.

It is the data. A customer asks for a roast beef three way, a thing they have ordered that way for twenty years, and it appears nowhere in the point of sale. Nested modifiers nobody can explain. Middleware adding a hop that turns one error into a four-vendor investigation. Christian's team built a proprietary cleanup module rather than asking owners to fix their own menus, and he will personally spend an hour rebuilding one because he counts it as customer acquisition cost.

The back half gets into where this is all going. Agents calling agents. Why voice is not going away as long as humans are humans. And the question Andy keeps putting to operators, which is whether the technology should replace a person or free the people already on the floor to do the part a machine cannot.

In this episode:

• The seafood menu that broke the system, and what was actually inside it

• The roast beef three way problem, and why the AI had no chance

• What had to be built around the model before it could be trusted on a real call

• Building trust with the owner, and separately with the caller

• What cybersecurity taught him about false positives and overpromising

• Where the chain really fails, and why middleware is usually the culprit

• Why Loman cleans the menu instead of asking the restaurant to

• Build-your-own-bowl concepts, and why they are the hardest

• Why he will spend an hour fixing a menu himself and call it CAC

• Agents booking with agents, and what that does to the phone

• How an operator should actually measure whether the technology worked

Subscribe for more conversations with the operators actually running the restaurant.

Restaurant Reset is available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Restaurant Reset is brought to you by Genius™ (Link globalpayments.com/genius) from Global Payments, the restaurant point of sale system that can power orders, payments and services in any type of food and beverage setting.

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

01:14 Meet Christian Wiens and Loman

02:19 What had to be built around the model before it could take a call

07:11 The roast beef three way that exists nowhere in the data

09:48 Building trust with the owner and with the caller

15:50 Why the phone was the lowest hanging fruit

16:50 What cybersecurity taught him about false positives

20:18 Where the tech chain actually breaks

21:55 Middleware, and why they push for direct integrations

23:50 Menu structure as the big gotcha

24:52 Why Loman cleans the data instead of the restaurant

26:35 Build-your-own-bowl concepts

29:07 “The menu looks fine”

29:49 Spending an hour rebuilding a customer's menu

31:19 Agents calling agents

33:50 Why voice is not going away

39:27 AI should make hospitality more human

40:08 How an operator should measure whether it worked

44:35 The moment he knew they were onto something

45:16 Where to find Loman

Jennifer Dodd took over Main Squeeze Juice Co in 2024 walking into a brand where franchisee trust had been obliterated. Four months later sales were up 35%, and they held it for over a year without a single base price increase. She walks Andy through how she rebuilt that trust, the demographic patterns she has been reading since 2007, and why she believes the competition restaurant operators should fear is the convenience store down the road.

In this episode:

• (01:02) The red mop wig outside a Wendy's at 15, and the microbiology student who already understood why food changes people

• (08:16) Taking over a brand with fractured franchisee trust, and what she actually did in the first 30 days

• (12:18) Why she paid for the digital menu boards and the installation herself, and asked franchisees for nothing but the space

• (16:58) A 35% sales lift in four months, sustained for over a year, with no increase to base prices

• (18:19) Why a thirty-store brand runs its own production, inventory, and loyalty software in house

• (23:36) The 2007 statistic about working mothers that told her the modern restaurant industry had already been built

• (27:29) How that same pattern-reading led her to call functional wellness years before it exploded

• (30:15) Why she thinks convenience stores, with the best real estate in the country, are the threat operators are not watching

• (33:44) The trend she says will age badly, and the D-Day weather story she uses to explain what AI cannot see

• (42:15) Her closing advice for future leaders, starting with a Theodore Roosevelt line about how mediocrity actually happens

Subscribe to Restaurant Reset for conversations with the operators and executives actually running the restaurant business. Listen on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Restaurant Reset is brought to you by Genius™ (Link globalpayments.com/genius) from Global Payments, the restaurant point of sale system that can power orders, payments and services in any type of food and beverage setting.

Joseph Szala has publicly graded three restaurant rebrands. Domino's worked. Long John Silver's worked. Cracker Barrel did not. His read is that the logos had almost nothing to do with any of it. Cracker Barrel sterilized the interiors, lost the rocking chairs and the old man on the sign, then let a rebrand take the blame for a shift that was already underway. Domino's ran an ad where the CEO admitted the pizza was bad and promised to fix it, and bought itself years of goodwill in the process.

This week, Andy sits down with Joseph Szala, who has spent almost twenty years pointed at restaurants, most of it talking operators out of the thing they came to buy. He founded the branding agency Vigor in 2003, narrowed it to restaurants only, and sold it in 2021 after eighteen years. Today he is Partner and VP at 3Owl, which builds websites and digital ordering for around fifty multi-unit brands, and he runs his own branding studio, Bullhearted. He has written five books, including Mass Behaving on brand archetypes, now in its second edition, and Quiet Killers, which he says is the reason he wanted to come on this show.

He sits on the brand side and the commerce side of the same problem, which means he has watched brands buy a rebrand to avoid fixing the kitchen and buy a platform to avoid fixing the org chart. His answer to the question every struggling operator eventually asks, is a rebrand going to fix this, is the most useful thing in this conversation.

In this episode:

• What losing the rights to his old blog in the Vigor sale taught him about which parts of a brand are worth fighting for

• Why a rebrand is almost never the fix for a failing brand, and what actually is

• Cracker Barrel vs. Domino's vs. Long John Silver: what separated the rebrand that backfired from the ones that worked

• "Slop is human": what AI-generated content reveals about the quality control we were already skipping

• The math he ran on the AI-designed barbershop flyer everyone was mad about

• Who should own brand voice when the order-taker is a language model

• Survivorship bias, siloed teams, and why he would put "tech" at the end of every C-title

• Why the digital guest experience is the most important thing a restaurant brand sells, and still gets treated like a brochure website

Subscribe to Restaurant Reset for conversations with the operators and executives actually running the restaurant business. Listen on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Restaurant Reset is brought to you by Genius™ (Link globalpayments.com/genius) from Global Payments, the restaurant point of sale system that can power orders, payments and services in any type of food and beverage setting.

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

02:41 The name he did not mean to let go of

04:41 Why he now thinks the name sucked

05:58 Is a rebrand ever the actual fix?

06:56 What is usually wrong instead

08:37 Branding is shared by everyone in the organization

09:12 Three rebrands, and what separated them

10:40 What Domino's got right

12:39 Cracker Barrel, the interiors, and the rocking chairs

14:29 Survivorship bias and the copycat problem

16:17 Nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM

17:57 How restaurant tech stacks actually get chosen

18:55 What happens when leaders take the vendor's number at face value

21:59 Buying tech that scales with the next 25 units

23:48 AI as an accelerator, not a solution

27:34 The barbershop flyer math

29:38 Where he will not let AI near the numbers

35:51 When your order-taker is a language model

39:59 What to audit first

45:59 Why he would put tech at the end of every C-title

47:07 The digital guest experience, and the lift brands leave on the table

Suzie Tsai runs one of the fastest-growing Korean fried chicken brands in America, and most days her job is saying no. Bonchon's CEO walks Andy through the filter she runs every decision through, from franchise deals to vendor pitches, and why patience beats urgency almost every time.

In this episode:

(03:52) Why her first official act as CEO was restoring two Korean characters to the Bonchon logo

(14:03) Why she came up through consumer insights instead of ops or finance

(15:59) What a thousand hours of listening to guests reveals that operators consistently get wrong

(24:37) The decision filter she applies to franchise candidates whose financials are flawless but whose answer to "why Bonchon?" is only about the economics

(27:42) Deals she personally signed off on and now questions ("who approved this?" It was her)

(33:41) Why the fastest way to lose her in a pitch meeting is leading with technology instead of the problem

(34:07) Her blunt verdict on most vendor pitches: restaurants don't need more technology, they need fewer friction points

(46:08) How "main and main" real estate, not Asian trade districts, became Bonchon's growth playbook in small-town America

Subscribe to Restaurant Reset for conversations with the operators and executives actually running the restaurant business. Listen on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Restaurant Reset is brought to you by Genius™ (Link globalpayments.com/genius) from Global Payments, the restaurant point of sale system that can power orders, payments and services in any type of food and beverage setting.

A guest ordered mac and cheese from California Pizza Kitchen, got a container of cheese sauce with no noodles, and posted it to TikTok. Within days it was everywhere. CPK's answer wasn't a statement from corporate it was their head of culinary, mid-photo-shoot and openly annoyed, being handed an iPhone and told to film a deadpan training video teaching his own cooks how to make it right. The punchline: because one guest got half a mac and cheese, everyone got half off mac and cheese. The video passed 12 million views and over a million likes, and doubled the brand's social following.

Paul Pszybylski is the man in that video, and only the third person ever to run culinary at CPK in 41 years. He came to it sideways dropping out of college for a line cook job in the French Quarter, Le Cordon Bleu, pastry under Wolfgang Puck at Spago Chicago for $8 an hour, then a decade in Kraft's Glenview test kitchen developing everything from salad dressings to Oreos to the CPK frozen pizzas he'd eventually inherit from the other side of the table. In 2006 he served as a United Nations ambassador teaching Western culinary skills at a nonprofit school north of Hanoi.

Today he's the rare culinary leader designing one idea to flex across sit-down restaurants, airports, international franchises, and a frozen business with Nestlé worth north of $230 million CPK now sells more frozen pizzas than restaurant pizzas, and its top frozen market is Charlotte, North Carolina. He sits between marketing and operations and speaks both languages, which is exactly why his story about betting the company on hand-stretching every pizza is the most useful thing in this episode.

In this episode:

The mac and cheese TikTok, the deadpan training video, and what "run toward it" actually looks like in real time

Why telling Rick and Larry "no" almost cost Paul the job and the reframe that saved it

Scrapping a 30-year dough press to hand-stretch every pizza: marketing said "let's go," ops said "we'll never keep up"

The West Coast Burger and the crispy chicken sandwich: what happens when a dish is too good for the kitchen it lives in

How to design one flavor idea for a hearth oven, a frozen line, and a franchisee in India

Why ops buy-in comes before creative ambition, every time

Say hi to everyone from the dishwasher to the GM the Rick and Larry habit Paul still practices 16 years later

His honest advice to young cooks: "You gotta be a little nuts"

Subscribe to Restaurant Reset for conversations with the operators and executives actually running the restaurant business. Listen on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Restaurant Reset is brought to you by Genius™ (Link globalpayments.com/genius) from Global Payments, the restaurant point of sale system that can power orders, payments and services in any type of food and beverage setting.