Hello!

Danny Meyer went viral last week for posting to X: “When did a 6:00 dinner reservation become the new 8:00, most prized table of the night - and will it last?”

He highlighted three possible reasons for the dinnertime shift — an increased number of home entertainment options, remote workers jumping at the opportunity to get out of the house, and more people using 8-10 pm as a window to catch up on email.

If I could add one other possible reason: sleep trackers. If you’ve ever tracked your sleep after an 9 p.m. ribeye, you know what I’m talking about.

3 Numbers

5%

McDonald’s new royalty rate, up from 4% and the first rate hike for the company in three decades. Preexisting franchisees will be grandfathered into keeping the 4% royalty, yet the National Owners Association (a McDonald’s franchisee advocacy group) strongly criticized the royalty increase, citing declining inflation-adjusted cash flows at franchised locations.

$30 million

Price paid by FAT Brands for Smokey Bones, the first barbecue concept to be added to the Fatburger parent company’s portfolio. After a blazing 2021 — in which FAT Brands spent over a billion dollars on Twin Peaks, Fazoli’s, Global Franchise Group, and Native Grill & Wings — the brand collector has slowed things down a bit, opting to buy “just” Nestlé Toll House Café in 2022. Smokey Bones is expected to add $10mm to FAT’s adjusted annual EBITDA.

248,000

Store employees at Starbucks, including — for a few months — new CEO Laxman Narasimhan, who moonlighted as a barista while preparing to run the company, according to a new profile in the Wall Street Journal. During his apprenticeship, Narasimhan burned his hand, made an egg bite explode in front of a customer, and had some issues running a credit card through the POS (been there). He also told the Journal that he came away from the experience with key operational improvements to streamline the increasingly difficult-to-run cafés.

Could influencer-owned restaurants be the future?

One of today's more fascinating restaurant concepts sells a product that was trendy over a decade ago — frozen yogurt.

16 Handles was founded at the peak of the frozen yogurt craze in 2008, and it claims the title of New York's first self-serve fro-yo shop. Last year it was purchased by its largest franchisee, 28-year-old Wall Street vet Neil Hershman, who partnered in the deal with YouTuber Danny Duncan.

Duncan has grown a mostly male, mostly young following with stunt and prank-filled content that (to my Millennial eyes at least) bears a strong resemblance to MTV-era Jackass. He's amassed over 1.5 billion views on his channel, and his appeal extends to the non-online world — in one of youth fashion's stranger developments, his "Virginity Rocks" clothing line is extremely popular with the under-18 set, and when Duncan held a meet-and-greet at the 16 Handles grand opening in Naples, FL, he brought in a massive crowd. Duncan brings to the brand both eyeballs and marketing skill, while Hershman has already proven his operational chops as a successful franchisee.

Indeed, 16 Handles seems to be following an increasingly lucrative playbook — one that has already disrupted the consumer-goods industry: Product + influential content creator + savvy operator = success.

To paraphrase Scott Galloway, attention is the new oil, and when gifted attention-getters combine with experienced operators, the result can be lightning in a bottle:

• Rihanna become a billionaire from cosmetics and apparel, not music.

• The jewels of the Kardashian empire are shapewear and makeup brands.

• After less than a year on the market, Logan Paul and KSI's PRIME Hydration is now the 6th-largest sports drink brand in the U.S.

And then there's MrBeast, whose growing Feastables brand may have started taking market share from none other than Hershey.

About MrBeast (aka Jimmy Donaldson): he and Virtual Dining Concepts have to get the credit for showing what's possible with an influencer-backed restaurant chain. What happened in 2020 shouldn't be overshadowed by today's legal messiness: MrBeast Burger would have been a phenomenon even without the Covid-era surge in delivery. At its peak, operators were making upwards of $7,000 a day on virtual MrBeast sales. He brought in 10,000 people to the American Dream mall for the first brick-and-mortar store opening. Donaldson’s enormous pull + VDC's innovative approach (and robust restaurant experience) made for a powerful duo.

As for 16 Handles, the new-and-improved chain seems to be clicking. Sales are up double-digits year over year, and the 35-unit company is punching well above its weight in terms of industry buzz, which undoubtedly will help attract new franchisees. Duncan's celebrity brought people in for the Naples grand opening, but execution is what will keep them coming back — and a quick scan of Google and Yelp reviews would indicate the operations are sound.

So perhaps influencer-backed restaurants are the future. And if they are, it's worth mentioning that while the content platforms may have changed, celebrity-backed restaurants were once very popular: Roy Rogers, not Arby's, was once poised to be America's foremost provider of roast beef, and Kenny Rogers Rosters was more than just a brief Kramer obsession — at its peak it had over 400 U.S. locations. What’s old is new again, and the ability to get people’s attention will always be in demand.

Name That Chain!

You get three hints to guess this week’s mystery chain:

• This concept is one of America’s largest family-owned restaurant chains, at over 2,000 units.

• The founders took an unconventional educational path to starting a restaurant chain; one has a PHD in electrical engineering, while the other has a master’s in applied mathematics.

• Long associated with mall food courts, now only 3% of its locations are in malls.

WHAT IS THIS MYSTERY CHAIN? (The answer lies at the bottom of the email.)

Quick Hits

• Might need to make a McNugget run in the near-future… McDonald’s announced this week the release of two new dipping sauces: Sweet & Spicy Jam (featuring cayenne pepper and Szechuan pepper, with an apple cider vinegar finish) and Mambo Sauce (a sorta barbecue/sweet-and-sour blend beloved by anyone who’s ever enjoyed wings in Washington, D.C.).

• Humans 1, Robots 0… Anthony’s Coal Fired Pizza CEO Carl Bachmann said last week that the chain has decided to get rid of its AI phone-answering system, nicknamed “Becky,” because the software program had too many prompts and steps, and any labor savings were offset by alienated and frustrated customers.

• A public Panera… again? Panera is reshuffling its board in preparation for an expected IPO, adding Krispy Kreme CEO Michael Tattersfield — who helped shepherd Krispy Kreme to its 2021 return to the stock market — to its board. Panera went private in 2017 and saw a SPAC deal fall through in 2022; it’s been making noises about filing an IPO since early this year.

• Burger King locations sold out of bankruptcy… BK franchisee Meridian Restaurants Unlimited successfully sold 70 of its 91 remaining locations earlier this month, netting $17 million in the auction. Burger King itself was the biggest buyer, picking up 32 units for $4.7 million.

• Alt-meat annus horribilis… San Francisco-based alternative meat startups Hooray Foods and Nowadays — both of which sold to retailers and restaurants —announced this month that they’re shutting their doors, joining plant-based sausage maker Meatless Foods, which ceased operations in June. The alternative-meat space is dealing with a drop in consumer demand; category leader Beyond Foods reported a sizable revenue drop in its Q2 results.

#Content Recs

• Beard Meets Food attempts to break the slice record at Gordon Ramsey’s bottomless pizza restaurant (which, at £17 for two hours of bottomless pizza, appears to be a hell of a value).

• A group of Gen Z tech dudes sarcastically named their NYC brownstone “Mehren’s Steak House” on Google Maps, and, after posting several in-jokey 5-star reviews, guests actually started showing up for dinner. What happens next is well worth the read.

• Inside Austin’s KG Barbecue, a buzzed-about new joint at the vanguard of the fusion cuisine we never knew we needed… “Texas-Egyptian.”

• Iraq’s most beloved restaurant is a Golden Corral-inspired, American-themed buffet founded by a father-son duo of Dutch restauranteurs, serving steak, sushi, and spaghetti to hundreds every night. Maybe Thomas Friedman was right after all.

Finally — in an attempt to spur the imaginations of fast-food R&D departments across America — each week I’ll highlight an international LTO that should warrant at least some menu consideration in the States. This week: the “Infinite Destroyer,” a Subway sandwich currently available just at the University of Tokyo. This behemoth features 25 slices of roast beef, veggies, wasabi, and soy sauce, and, like all great Japanese monster tales, I feel like there’s a pretty intriguing origin story here.

See ya next week.

Trivia answer: Panda Express