Restaurant Reset

Most of the restaurant industry sells self-ordering kiosks on one number: labor saved. Brandon Barton thinks that's exactly the wrong pitch. As CEO of Bite, whose software runs kiosks for Portillo's, Chopt, Krispy Kreme, Big Chicken, and Arby's inside Love's Travel Stops… he argues that a screen isn't a cost cut. It's a hospitality channel, and it can out-serve a slammed cashier on a Friday night.

Brandon earned what he calls his "masters degree in Enlightened Hospitality" running beverage at Danny Meyer's Tabla, then carried that education into tech at Avero, as the first non-tech hire at Resy, and now at Bite. In this conversation with Andy, he makes the skeptic's case for digital hospitality and gets specific about what separates a kiosk guests love from one they tolerate.

This one is for operators: the reasoning is practical, the takes are honest (including which vendors are "lying" about their numbers), and the playbook is usable Monday morning.

Highlights:

Why "telling someone your order" was never the hospitality and where the human should go instead

How to design for "graceful failure" so a screen can apologize like your best server

The one question to ask Shake Shack's team before betting your career on a category

What Danny Meyer drills into you that no management book can teach

How to read the next AI pitch and spot the vaporware behind the 20% check-lift claim

The three fixes for a five-location operator whose kiosks feel cold

Subscribe to Restaurant Reset for practical conversations with the people reshaping how restaurants run. Watch on YouTube, or listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. New episodes drop regularly. Hit follow so you don't miss one.

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.

Christopher Sebes has already been handed the restaurant industry's lifetime achievement award. Most people take that as a cue to slow down. At 72, he started his third career instead.

On this episode of Restaurant Reset, host Andy Grindstaff sits across the mic from the man who hired him a decade ago, the founder who built the platform Andy now runs. What follows is part career retrospective, part masterclass: how Sebes went from managing five-star hotels in Africa to building restaurant tech's first Windows point of sale, carried a company through Chapter 11 without his team ever feeling the panic, and beat far bigger competitors with a single rule.

Underneath the war stories, it's a conversation about the one thing that compounds over 50 years in business: trust. And why, in a low-margin, high-churn industry, it may be the only moat that lasts.

In this episode:

Why Sebes started a brand-new AI company at 72, and how he decides what's worth learning next

The $20,000-a-day math that kept his company alive through bankruptcy

The one rule that beat Micros and Aloha: "always do what you promise"

How to project calm as a leader when the business is quietly on fire

The only question restaurant operators should ask about any AI tool

What really happens to your product after an acquisition

His advice to anyone stuck in a job they can't stand

Subscribe to Restaurant Reset for conversations with the people shaping the future of hospitality.

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.

Loyalty used to be a competitive edge for restaurants. Now it's table stakes, and the question executives are asking has flipped from "how do we launch a program" to "how do we prove this thing makes money." The uncomfortable answer, according to loyalty expert Olga Lopategui, is that most of them can't.

Olga is the founder of Restaurant Loyalty Specialists and a former Moscow oil-and-gas lawyer who spent 15 years inside the marketing machines at Pizza Hut, KFC, and TGI Fridays before building her own firm. This year she sat down with more than 50 senior loyalty leaders at America's biggest chains for her "Restaurant Loyalty Frontier" report.

What she found is the cleanest Restaurant Reset story there is: vendors advertising 15% lifts that shrink to 4% under real math, "personalization" that's mostly batch-and-blast, and programs running untouched for a year while nobody checks if they work.

In this episode:

Why a lawyer's skepticism makes her distrust every vendor ROI number

How to spot a loyalty program that's quietly failing in week one

The real reason 3 of 4 brands still send everyone the same email

What "set it and forget it" actually costs a restaurant over a year

Why 80% of your guests are anonymous, and why the app won't fix it

Where AI genuinely helps a loyalty team, and where it burns your database

The one number a small operator with no analyst should track this quarter

If you run a restaurant, lead marketing, or own a loyalty program you can't quite prove works, this one's for you.

Subscribe to Restaurant Reset for new episodes every week.

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 1985, two of the most successful trial lawyers in Los Angeles walked away from the law, mortgaged their homes, and opened a pizza restaurant on the quiet side of Beverly Drive. Their fancy menu bombed almost instantly. The chef they hired from Spago lasted a month. And then a barbecue chicken pizza turned California Pizza Kitchen into one of the most influential restaurant brands in American history.

Rick Rosenfield co-founded CPK with Larry Flax and ran it through every ownership structure a restaurant company can have: a PepsiCo "blank check" that nearly broke it, a founder-led buyback, a Nasdaq IPO, a boardroom showdown he triggered himself, and a $470 million sale. On this episode of Restaurant Reset, he sits down with Andy to mine that 40-year arc for the lessons today's operators actually need.

This is the conversation behind his forthcoming memoir, and it goes places his other interviews never have: the month CPK almost died, what a capital partner reliably misunderstands, and why culture, not product, is the only thing that ever lasts.

In this episode:

Why the high-concept menu failed and a single pizza became the #1 seller worldwide for 40 years

The night the founders cried in the back office, and how they rebuilt with no chef

How PepsiCo's "blank check" turned into the worst period of Rick's career

The store-by-store numbers that exposed a problem the whole board had missed

Why CPK refused to franchise domestically for 25 years

The ROCK values, and the people playbook that still works in 2026

Rick's honest verdict on the second-act concepts that didn't survive

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.

Everyone in restaurant tech is racing toward AI ordering and automation. The customer data tells a different story. Only 9% of consumers say they'd rather order from an AI voice than a person, and the number one frustration is still the same one it's always been: the order being wrong.

In this solo episode, Andy Grindstaff walks through a Global Payments consumer survey on how people actually want to order, pay, and wait in 2026. Andy has spent his career at the intersection of restaurants and the technology that runs them, and he reads the data the way an operator would, with no vendor spin. The throughline is simple: get the fundamentals reliable before you layer anything clever on top.

From the drive-thru line length where customers give up, to why a quarter of your customers still aren't using your app, to the loyalty math hiding inside a fast experience, this one is a useful gut check for anyone investing in restaurant tech right now.

Highlights:

Why only 9% of consumers prefer AI ordering, and the one condition that makes people comfortable with automation

How a failed AI order becomes a "double failure" that costs more than the manual process

Why 1 in 4 customers aren't using restaurant apps, including the younger ones you'd assume are

The drive-thru threshold where most people leave, and why a fast visit today buys patience tomorrow

Why order accuracy still beats every shiny new feature on the roadmap

What 40% of consumers are doing differently because of rising prices

New episodes of Restaurant Reset every week. Follow 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.

Mike DeJong ran 5 Nothing Bundt Cakes bakeries at the same time. From the outside, it looked like a growing empire. From the inside, he was working more hours, opening more locations, and somehow making less money. He calls it the operator trap, and he's blunt about how it closed on him: he had built a job, not a business.

The wake-up call came on a tarmac in Mexico. His manager quit by phone. His phone was blowing up. And the realization that hit him wasn't about the manager… it was that he'd turned his phone on in the first place.

Mike walks Andy through the full sequence: what the trap actually feels like before you recognize it, the moment he found himself 60 days from bankruptcy on a location he thought had gone passive, and the specific steps he took to turn it around: including the hire that eventually let him run a bakery outside Seattle while living in Mexico.

In this episode:

How Mike went from burning out at five locations to building two more without being on-site

The 60-day bankruptcy near-miss: what metrics he stopped watching and why

The three operator types (Architect, Hunter, GSD) and the order of hires that follows

Why 75% of his staff quit during the turnaround and why he called it an opportunity

The one metric he watched daily: sales per labor hour

The mindset shift that changed everything: facts vs. stories

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

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.

Troy Hooper's career looks impossible to explain: culinary school at 17, licensed yacht captain, 15 years fixing broken restaurant businesses, and now scaling Pepper Lunch from 5 North American locations to a planned 1,200 by 2030. What holds it together is one conviction he's carried through all of it: master the thing you're best at and build relentless systems around everything else.

In this episode, Troy breaks down what the founder who's still doing the line, the scheduling, the social, and the payroll is getting wrong and why the operators who can't let go at 10 stores will never see 100. He also shares the most counter-intuitive move Pepper Lunch made: removing cashiers and replacing them with kiosks.

Whether you're running three locations or three hundred, this conversation is a masterclass in what it actually takes to grow a restaurant brand without losing what made it work in the first place.

In this episode:

How Troy diagnosed the #1 problem in every broken restaurant he ever turned around and it wasn't the food

Why Pepper Lunch does zero prep inside the building, and how that makes 570 stores actually scalable

The kiosk decision that accidentally made Pepper Lunch's brand more human

What "working in the business vs. on it" looks like in practice and the first thing Troy says founders should hand off

Why 95% of Pepper Lunch's operational changes come directly from franchisees

Troy's take on AI vs. robotics: which one restaurants are dramatically under-investing in right now

The simple advice Troy got from a mentor that he says is the single biggest unlock for operators at any stage

Subscribe to Restaurant Reset 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 Palladino spent 22 years as a beat cop in the Bronx before a line-of-duty injury rerouted his life into restaurants. What he brought with him (accountability systems, data-driven performance tracking, and a cop's instinct for what kills an operation) became the engine behind Nick & Sam's Steakhouse, one of the highest-grossing independent restaurants in the country. They made $26 million a year from a single Dallas location, growing 9% annually for over two decades.

Now he's starting over again with Palladino's Steak & Seafood inside Grand Central Terminal, opening at 60 the way most people play it safe. If you want to understand what it actually takes to build something that lasts in this industry, this is that conversation.

In this episode:

Why a growing base of regulars can be a sign your restaurant has stopped growing and the ratio Joseph used to track it

The first-timer SOP Joseph built to guarantee every new guest walked out a convert

How he applied the NYPD's CompStat accountability model to his dining room floor

Why he ran two-table waiter stations when every financial model said to run more

The 9/11 Thanksgiving moment that turned a struggling Dallas steakhouse into a city institution

What made him walk away from a $26M institution after 23 years and why he's betting on New York City now

New episodes of Restaurant Reset drop every week. Subscribe 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.

Andy Grindstaff has spent his career at the intersection of restaurants and technology. He worked at restaurants long before he helped build the tech that runs them at Genius.

In this solo Q&A episode, he answers your questions directly.

The DMs. The emails. The real stuff people have been asking since the show started.

And the questions are good. Andy covers why AI projects keep failing in restaurants (it's not the AI), what "clean data" actually means if you're a smaller operator, whether tech vendors are doing to restaurants what private equity does. And yes, someone asked him to explain what Genius actually is like they own two Tex-Mex locations and have never heard of Global Payments.

No guest this week. Just Andy, your questions, and some straight talk about what restaurants actually need from the technology companies serving them.

What We Cover:

Why restaurant tech doesn't need to be cutting edge… it needs to work, reliably, every shift, for the people using it

The data problem that's quietly killing most restaurant AI initiatives before they start

Employee satisfaction → guest satisfaction → profit: why the chain starts where most operators aren't looking

Where restaurant tech is actually heading in the next 3–5 years (and what Andy thinks is overhyped)

And a little about what Andy does when he's not building restaurant tech: training for a 100-mile ultra trail race with his wife

If you're running a restaurant, evaluating technology for your operation, or building products for this industry… this one's worth your time.

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.

Zack Oates is the founder and CEO of Ovation, the guest experience platform used by thousands of restaurant locations across the country to collect feedback, recover unhappy guests, and build the kind of loyalty that actually shows up in revenue.

Before all of that, he went on a thousand dates, wrote a book about it, and turned the whole thing into a keynote called Dating Your Customers. It sounds like a bit, but the framework holds up.

In this conversation on Restaurant Reset, Zack lays out the data behind something most operators have never heard framed this way: the guest who had a bad experience and got properly recovered is worth more to your restaurant than the guest who never had a problem in the first place. Not a little more. Five times more in a year. Twenty-four times more when you factor in reviews and referrals. There's a name for it. It's called the service recovery paradox, and the numbers behind it are hard to ignore once you've heard them.

What We Cover:

Why 70% of first-time guests never come back to a restaurant, and what operators who know this statistic actually do about it

The service recovery paradox: why a properly recovered complaint is worth 24x the value of an average guest

How Zack went from a thousand dates to a keynote on guest experience, and why the operating manual for dating and the operating manual for restaurants are basically the same document

Why your P&L tells you where you're at, but your guest experience tells you where you're going

The one thing that distinguishes operators who are building generational brands from operators who are just trying to turn a profit this quarter

Why AI is now 10% better at recovering unhappy guests than humans, and what that means for how restaurants staff and scale

The reason Google filters out any restaurant below four stars, and what that practically means for your visibility

What the best GMs in the country all have in common, and why it has almost nothing to do with their restaurant experience

Why brands that start with the guest outlast brands that start with the P&L, and the PE firms that keep getting this backwards

If you're a restaurant operator trying to understand why guests aren't coming back, a GM looking for a framework for handling complaints, or anyone building a brand that's supposed to last, this episode is worth your time.

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.