Restaurant Technology Podcast

Cali BBQ Media

Restaurant Technology is a weekly business news series hosted by Cali BBQ Media Founder Shawn Walchef. Keep up to date on the latest stories, insights, and thought leadership in the modern restaurant technology landscape. restauranttechnology.substack.com

  1. Oct 11 ·  Bonus

    I Talked to Danny Meyer About Changing Your Grip and Building for Essentiality

    It took me nine years of prep and nearly 1,500 interviews before I got a chance to sit down and talk with the legendary restaurateur Danny Meyer. You have to work everyday to reach your dreams. Here’s my story about how this one became reality: In 2017, we launched our first podcast Behind the Smoke from a small office across the street from Cali BBQ in Spring Valley, California. We had a few mics, a basic camera setup, and a whiteboard filled with the leaders I dreamed of interviewing. Right at the top of the whiteboard was written “Danny Meyer”, the founder of Union Square Hospitality Group. I had first read his book Setting the Table back in 2008 when opening my restaurant. The lessons I learned from it were ingrained in me. In 2019, as we were beginning to grow Cali BBQ Media, I pulled that book off the shelf to re-read it yet again. On page 104, right next to a passage about building an “aura of authenticity” at Gramercy Tavern, I wrote a note in pen: Behind the Smoke w/ Danny Meyer. I knew I wanted to interview him, but I also knew I wasn’t ready yet. Earning that seat was going to take time, consistency, and relentless preparation. By 2026, the dream became reality. I watched the sun rise over the San Francisco Bay as we drove into the city. Walking into Bourbon Steak in Union Square alongside my Cali BBQ Media team, who were running cameras, audio, and producing behind-the-scenes content, we prepared to film an episode of the Restaurant Influencers podcast and a separate Q&A for the print Entrepreneur Magazine. Seeing our crew set up in that room was a testament to what happens when you build a team that shares the vision and executes at the highest level. In times like this I think of the people who’ve been with us during the journey that led to this interview. Partners like Toast and PepsiCo who believe in us and the multiplying power of storytelling and hospitality. Those companies and the people within them understand deeply the importance of building a culture that matters. Danny often says culture is an aspiration, not a destination. During our conversation, I asked him how he defines it. “Culture is ‘the way we do things around here,’” he told me. “You can have a culture with no intention, but you can’t have a great culture without intention.” He calls it an aspiration because you never truly arrive. There will never be a moment where the culture is completely “fixed,” and that’s okay, as long as the intention is to keep moving forward. As founders try to scale that culture, Danny shared a crucial metaphor about knowing when to let go: changing your grip. When you learn to play tennis, you’re taught a basic grip to get started. But if you want to get better, if you want more velocity and topspin, a coach will tell you to change your grip. At first, it feels uncomfortable to make the shift. “That is the exact same thing we have to learn as leaders,” Danny explained. “The way we have always led might have been good enough to get us here, but as you scale the business, you absolutely need to change your grip. Sometimes you have to loosen your grip and let other people hold the racquet.” In his book, Danny tackles the realities of scaling and facing the fear of failure head-on. A few years after Setting the Table celebrated never closing a restaurant, he had to close his beloved Tabla in New York. Instead of hiding from that reckoning, he openly shared what he learned. Having closed Cali BBQ locations myself and chosen to document those hard choices publicly, I know how rare that honesty is among founders. Real leadership like that which flows from Danny Meyer is about having the courage to keep moving forward. “Especially in a hard economy, what we are all selling is hope,” he said. “In tough times, hospitality is the answer to what could possibly go right...” He pointed to the very last chapter of What Could Possibly Go Right?, the concept of essentiality. “Can we create businesses that genuinely make people’s lives better?” he asked. Collecting Dots to Connect Dots Danny talks about ABCD: Always Be Collecting Dots so you can Always Be Connecting Dots. One of the most meaningful dots in this 18-year story belongs to the late Mike Mills, the legendary pitmaster and founder of 17th Street BBQ. Back in 2018 in Texas, Mike and his daughter Amy sat down with me for an interview on Behind the Smoke. During our conversation, Mike and Amy spoke with admiration about their relationship with Danny Meyer, reflecting on how Danny brought authentic barbecue to New York City through the Big Apple Barbecue Block Party and what he meant to the entire hospitality industry. Sitting across from Danny at Bourbon Steak eight years later, I played that clip of Mike talking about him. Watching Danny react to hearing Mike’s voice again, 6 years after he died, brought a rush of emotion into the room. It was a raw, beautiful reminder of how interconnected our industry truly is. That emotional momentum carried straight into page 186 of Danny’s new book, What Could Possibly Go Right?. In 1984, Danny saw Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George on Broadway. One song stayed with him for four decades: “Finishing the Hat.” That song is about an artist creating something on a canvas that used to be blank. When Danny reopened Union Square Cafe in 2016, he read those lyrics to his team on night two. To Danny, that’s opening a restaurant: imagining a place, building it, and letting people create memories in a room that used to be empty. I had marked page 186 in my copy with one word: GIFT. On Monday morning of interview week, I texted my friend Nick Osnaya at Left Coast Printing Pros. I was interviewing a dream guest, so could he make me a custom hat by Wednesday at noon? Five letters, one question: WCPGR? (What Could Possibly Go Right?, the name of Danny Meyer’s book.) Wednesday afternoon, the hats arrived, and I boarded my flight for the interview. After playing the Mike Mills clip, I read Danny that passage from page 186 and handed him the custom hat. He put it on. We both had tears in our eyes. “God bless you,” he said. “I will cherish that.” Then he signed my book: “Thank you for your passion for hospitality & culture.” My conversation with Danny Meyer started with his book that I read in 2008. It wove through my interview with Mike Mills in 2018. It grew into a note in the margins when we launched a media company. And it culminated in sitting across from Danny in 2026. That is an 18-year timeline of collecting dots before they ever connected. You have to build relationships when there’s no immediate opportunity. You have to empower a media team to capture the journey. You have to record, publish, learn, and repeat. You have to ask for what you want. So tell me: What’s on your whiteboard? This newsletter edition is sponsored by Cerboni Accounting and Financial Services. To learn more about how Cerboni Services helps restaurant operators build year-round financial roadmaps, visit cerboniservices.com. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit restauranttechnology.substack.com

  2. Sep 23

    5 Lessons I Learned From Interviewing the Top CEOs in Hospitality

    Running a restaurant will consume you if you get trapped in the daily firefight. Between broken ice machines, labor shortages, food cost spikes, guest complaints, and vendor delays, it is easy to spend 100% of your energy just trying to make it to last call. At Cali BBQ, we’ve been grinding on the restaurant side for 18 years. On the media side, we’ve been at it for almost a decade. And for the first 5 years of running Cali BBQ Media, we made zero dollars. It wasn’t until we figured out how to build real digital hospitality and monetize media that we started securing major brand partnerships with companies like Toast, Pepsi, Restaurant365, Uber, Google, and Ring. The top leaders in hospitality do not just survive the day. They play the long game. Restaurant owners cannot afford to think like traditional restaurant owners anymore; we have to operate like media companies, technology adopters, and community builders. Here are five hard-earned lessons from sitting down with the CEOs, founders, and operators shaping the future of our industry. 1. Dream Big (And Stay Grounded on the Floor) If you want to access the top minds in your industry, you have to be willing to pitch a vision that sounds ridiculous to average thinkers. When Cali BBQ switched point-of-sale systems from Aloha to Toast in 2020, I told Will Eppard, Toast’s sales director in San Diego at the time, that I was going to interview the cofounders of Toast. He laughed. Because at the time, it sounded absurd. We were a local BBQ joint running a media experiment that hadn’t generated a dime in profit. Two years later, after interviewing then-CEO Chris Comparato, I was invited to speak on a customer panel in front of 1,300 Toasters at their sales kickoff. Right after that keynote, I sat down with co-founder Aman Narang (now CEO) to record an episode of Restaurant Influencers. That moment started with a massive goal and years of small, daily actions. What stood out from Aman was the mindset behind the tech: the best technology leaders obsess over their customers’ problems. Toast was built by founders sitting inside restaurants, watching ticket bottlenecks in real time, and writing code to solve operational pain points. Dream as big as possible, but stay obsessively close to the operator. 2. Play the Long Game (Relationships Compound) The high-value interview, the strategic partnership, or the major brand deal almost never happens on the first ask. It often doesn’t happen on the second or third ask either. Sometimes it takes 25 touchpoints across multiple years. When we went heavy into ghost kitchens during the pandemic, we took major risks. Through that entire buildout, I told the team at CloudKitchens that eventually I was going to sit down with Travis Kalanick, co-founder of Uber and founder of CloudKitchens, to talk about why a barbecue brand was building a media company. Eventually, it happened. Travis didn’t just grant the sit-down, he turned the tables and interviewed me in front of his entire CloudKitchens all-hands team. That door opened because we stayed consistent when there was no instant payout. In media, tech, and restaurants, trust compounds over time. Keep showing up, keep getting better, and play the long game. 3. Real Leaders Want to Share the Struggle One of the biggest misconceptions in business is that top-level CEOs are completely unreachable. Some are guarded, but the most impactful leaders actually want to share their origin stories, their struggles, and what they’re building. That was my experience with Jordan Boesch, co-founder and CEO of 7shifts. We originally reached out because our restaurant needed to upgrade from legacy scheduling software like HotSchedules to a modern, cloud-based workflow. That initial operational reach-out turned into Jordan appearing on Digital Hospitality, Rising Tides Live, and Restaurant Influencers published by Entrepreneur Magazine. We’ve reconnected in person multiple times at the National Restaurant Association Show in Chicago. What makes Jordan stand out is his openness. He regularly talks about product missteps, hard customer feedback, and the relentless work required to scale software. Great leaders are always seeking raw feedback from operators in the trenches to build better products. 4. Earn Visibility Before You Need It Nobody starts on the keynote stage. Everyone starts small, makes embarrassing mistakes, and figures out the playbook on the fly. Look at Troy Hooper. Before building Kiwi Restaurant Group and scaling Pepper Lunch across North America as CEO of Hot Palette America (and now Strategic Advisor to the Board), he was showing up daily on Clubhouse during the pandemic. He was giving away advice for free, testing ideas, and building relationships on LinkedIn and Instagram before the massive expansion deal was ever on the table. Now he hosts his own show The Pineapple Perspective and shows up weekly on Rising Tides Live. Modern leadership is not granted by a title on a business card, it is earned by showing up consistently before anyone gives you a platform. Be visible, be useful, and build in public long before the crowd arrives. 5. Build Your Own Media Engine The single biggest lesson from interviewing world-class hospitality leaders is simple: Great leaders create their own media. They stop waiting for local newspapers, food critics, or trade magazines to tell their story. They build the digital infrastructure themselves. If you do not control your narrative, third-party delivery apps, review sites, and algorithms will control it for you. Omnichannel content (short-form video, podcasts, LinkedIn updates, YouTube series) is how you build trust at scale. Media is how prospective franchisees understand your vision. It is how top-tier talent discovers your culture before applying. It is how vendors, investors, and guests connect with your brand before ever stepping through the front door. The difference between good operators and industry-defining leaders is not that leaders have secret answers. It is that they are better at asking hard questions, telling honest stories, and staying visible long enough for scale to find them. That is how a single barbecue restaurant in San Diego transformed into a media company. That is how cold DMs turned into key partnerships, and how those partnerships turned into brand revenue. If you’re an operator navigating tech shifts, bad leases, or figuring out how to build your brand online, reach out on DM @Shawnpwalchef. Stay curious. Get involved. Ask for help. -Shawn This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit restauranttechnology.substack.com

  3. Sep 11

    We Opened 3 Ghost Kitchens. They Failed. But Why?

    We opened three ghost kitchen locations during the pandemic. And every single one of them failed. Writing that still stings. Restaurant operators don’t want to talk about the locations that bombed, the capital that vaporized, or the decisions that looked brilliant on a whiteboard but were brutal on a P&L. But at Cali BBQ and Cali BBQ Media, our guiding principle is to build in public. If we only talk about our wins, we aren’t helping anyone else survive and scale in this industry. We bet on ghost kitchens because San Diego County has over 3 million people, and asking everyone to drive to our original Spring Valley location for craft barbecue was a broken growth model. The thesis seemed strong: make the ribs, tri-tip, and wedding beans at our master kitchen, ship it out to 200-square-foot distribution nodes across the county, and let delivery apps handle the last mile. At under $50,000 per location, it looked like a low-risk expansion play. The demand was there, but the unit economics were a total trap. We were paying premium rent for small spaces designed purely for fulfillment. There was no storefront, zero foot traffic, and no physical place to build true local culture. Worse, we didn’t own the customer, the delivery platforms did. You can put QR codes in bags and push content on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram all day, but when a platform takes 20 percent to 25 percent of your gross sales and holds your customer data hostage, the math catches up with you fast. Take December 2022 at one of our ghost kitchen locations: * Delivery Commissions: $3,391.03 * Food Cost: $4,069.23 * Labor: $3,687.11 * Rent & Utilities: $5,320.00 * Fees & Maintenance: $906.92 Gross Revenue: $13,564.10 Net Monthly Loss: -$3,810.19 Yes, we were making negative money. Orders were flying out the door, but we were burning cash. Volume without margin isn’t growth, it’s a slow death. We shut all three locations down after doing our best to make them work. It hurt, but the experiment wasn’t a waste. It’s important to look for lessons from failure. Those ghost kitchens taught us how to treat barbecue as a hub-and-spoke distribution model. The prep workflows and staging systems we perfected during that failure became the exact blueprint we used to open at Snapdragon Stadium and the 32nd Street Navy Base. Today, we feed thousands of fans at concerts, SDSU football games, and 55,000 military personnel on base—not through third-party apps, but through high-volume institutional partnerships and digital hospitality. Failure gave us a sustainable model. We wanted to be the greatest ghost kitchen operator in the country, but losing that bet made us better operators, better storytellers, and a stronger business. If you’re an operator who has taken a hit on a new technology, a bad lease, or a failed experiment, don’t hide it. Reach out to me on DM @Shawnpwalchef to tell me what what you learned. Like my Grandfather taught me: Stay curious. Get involved. Ask for help. -Shawn This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit restauranttechnology.substack.com

  4. Aug 21

    Every Restaurant Has An Orange Tree Story. What’s Yours?

    Most restaurant owners think they do not have a story to tell on social media. They are too busy to post. They’re worried that food costs are up. Labor is tight. The ice machine is broken. Someone called out. A vendor is late. There’s always an excuse to not post. So when people like me say, “You should tell more stories online,” it feels like one more thing on the really big to do list. But storytelling does not have to start with a camera crew, a viral idea, or a polished brand campaign. It can start with an orange tree. At Cali BBQ, there is an orange tree outside the restaurant. On the surface, it is just a tree. It is not the barbecue smoker. It is not the menu. It is not the tri-tip or any of the things that look obvious from the outside the business. It’s a tree that holds our history. It connects back to family. My Bulgarian grandfather bought the property in the late 1970s. He and my uncle planted fruit trees, flowers, and built a fountain. Years later, Cali BBQ opened in that same spot. The business became a sports bar destination, survived hard years, made mistakes, opened ghost kitchens, closed ghost kitchens, and kept going. And the orange tree continued to survive. Later, during the pandemic, Cali BBQ started to transform into what we started calling “the Amazon of BBQ.” We added new smokers, changed the back patio, and needed more space for trucks and operations. The practical business decision was obvious: remove the orange tree. But my wife Rosi said no. She fought for the tree because it meant something. It was tied to family, to Bulgaria, to gardens, to memory, to the life around the restaurant that existed before the current version of the business. The business needed to grow. She was right, the tree needed to stay. It’s a part of our story. Most owners miss this. They think their story has to be just about the product. Now here’s a thought exercise for you to try: What object inside your restaurant carries more meaning than a stranger would ever know? Whatever you thought of just now is a story that should be told. It might be a photo on the wall. A recipe from a grandparent. A table that has been there since day one. The point is not the object. The point is the meaning attached to it. That is my Orange Tree Theory. Restaurant owners spend so much time inside the four walls that they forget to step back and see what the business actually represents. The orange tree is a reminder to change perspective. Get outside the building. Look at the restaurant the way a guest, a family member, or an old friend might see it. I’ve told my orange tree story on stages, in videos (like the one you can watch at the top of this post), and in conversations with other restaurant owners. Now people fly into San Diego, visit Cali BBQ, and ask if they can take a picture with the tree. That’s because the story gave the right people a reason to care. This is a lesson for every restaurant owner and small business owner trying to figure out social media. You do not need to invent a brand story. You already have one. You just need to find your Orange Tree. Then tell people why it matters. -Shawn (@shawnpwalchef) This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit restauranttechnology.substack.com

  5. Jun 27

    EVERY RESTAURANT HAS A STORY: The Food and Family Behind Aristos

    Most people go to Greece for the water. It has this beautiful postcard blue that doesn’t look real until you’re standing in it. The water is memorable, for sure but something I’ll remember much more is a restaurant owner I didn’t expect to meet, who couldn’t get a word out as his eyes filled with tears. But before we get into that story and lesson, I want to tell you how we ended up here. Greece was our vacation after a whirlwind work trip with Toast in London and then Dublin. We planned a lot of those trips in advance but when we got to our vacation spot we left our fate in the hands of humans and code. Every AI tool I poked at, from Claude to Gemini to ChatGPT, to ask where the best seafood on the coast was, kept spitting back the same name: Aristos. Our rental host also told us to go there, too. The tour boat company even said we had to try it. Artificial intelligence and human intelligence, pointing at the exact same door. Here’s what I think: When the algorithms and the locals agree, you go. We came into Ormos Panagias by boat. No reservation, no plan, just salt and diesel in the air and somebody grilling close by. A kid caught our line and tied us off a few steps from Aristos Restaurant like he’d done it ten thousand times, because he had. A table opened the second we walked up. The kind of timing you stop questioning. Our chairs sat right in the sand. The Aegean Sea kept rolling in beside us like it was part of the service. While we waited on the food, there was a paper placemat on the table. An old black and white photo of a harbor, a few boats, a village built into the rock. A few lines of text under it. I read it the way you read anything in front of you when you’re hungry and happy. Then they walked us into the fish cooler and told us to pick, and I forgot all about it. Local fish. Grilled shrimp. Sushi. Calamari. It was as good as anything I’ve ever tasted. But the food is never the story. The food is the bait. I’ll be honest. This was a family vacation. Barefoot, board shorts, zero plans to work. We did not come to Greece to shoot restaurant interviews. But when a story is sitting right in front of you, you do not let it walk out the door. You investigate. You pull out the phone in your pocket and you tell the thing that needs telling. So somewhere in the meal I told our server the truth. That I’m a podcaster from California who shows up in restaurants and pulls the stories out of the people running them. I asked if the owner was around. A few minutes later, Aristos walked over. Not from an office. There was no office. He was on the floor, running tables, working the room with his wife, one eye on a son expediting plates out of the kitchen. Two generations on the floor. One lunch service. Nobody hiding behind a desk. He gave me a few minutes. Walked me across the little street to the building where it actually started, the original room from 1971. He stopped me in front of a framed black and white photo on the wall and said, this is where it all started. And I froze. Because I knew that photo. It was the same one from the placemat on my table. The harbor. The boats. The village in the rock. I’d been holding his family’s origin story in my hands an hour earlier and didn’t know it. Grandpa, barba Mitsos, who started the whole thing in 1971 by teaching his village how to fish. Hard work, simplicity, and love. That was the recipe, printed right there. The same photo on the wall of the first building. And in front of every single guest, every single meal. With this much attention to detail everywhere I looked, that was no accident. So I had to ask him why. He told me about 2003. The promise he made his mother that he’d protect what they built. The hospitality. The standards. All of it. That photo wasn’t decoration. It was the contract. To his late mother. To his grandfather. Signed and re-signed every time a guest sits down and finds it waiting at the table. So I told him what I actually believed. That his grandfather and his mother would be proud as hell of what he’s built. And the man couldn’t speak. The tears came first. Not sad ones. Tears for the fifteen-hour days. For carrying somebody else’s promise like it was his own spine. For building something good enough that the next generation actually wants it. I got a little wrecked too. Standing there barefoot in my board shorts, the Aegean a few feet away, the original building at my back. Salt water on both sides of me, the sea and my own face. Because this is the whole reason I do the work. Technology changes. Algorithms change. Platforms show up, disappear, and take your reach with them. But the great ones still get built the way they always have. One family. One guest. One meal. One promise kept. Every restaurant has a story. A beginning. A contract. A family commitment. Most of them just never tell you. Aristos hands you his before the food even arrives. And here’s the part that sticks with me. The machines and the humans both sent me to the same place. But only one of them could tell me why it mattered. AI found me the meal. Aristos gave me the story. And all it took to capture it was the phone in my pocket and the instinct to never let an opportunity like that pass. If you’re going to Greece, go to Aristos Restaurant. I’ll tell anyone who’ll listen. Not just because it’s one of the best seafood meals of my life. Because once you hear Aristos tell it, you know exactly what’s on the menu. They’re serving legacy. -Shawn Every time you share one of our posts, you’re helping inspire other people to take their hospitality to the next level. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit restauranttechnology.substack.com

  6. Jun 13

    Taste of Dublin 🇮🇪

    This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit restauranttechnology.substack.com

    Taste of Dublin 🇮🇪

  7. May 31

    The Future of Tech is Agentic: How Toast IQ Already Saved Us $4,000 in Labor

    PRODUCTS DISCUSSED: * Toast IQ - learn more * Toast IQ Grow - learn more * Toast Seamless Checkout - learn more * Toast Finance - learn more When I talk to product innovators and executive leadership to break down the latest technology innovations, I always have a specific mission: extract real-world operational ROI. We spent time at the National Restaurant Show capturing explainer videos and other interesting stories on the floor with the exact people building these sorts of tools. What we learned from Toast at the Show marks a fundamental shift for independent restaurants. If you want ROI, here’s a story for you. Toast IQ: The $4,000 Labor Saving Use Case Historically, my restaurant Cali BBQ in San Diego opened at 10:00 AM for NFL Sundays, but recently shifted to 11:00 AM. We were actively debating whether we should switch back to 10:00 AM to capture early breakfast traffic. In the past that would have been an easy yes. Open an hour early, just in case. Why not? The answer was right in front of us, we just didn’t know how to look for it. We learned an important and valuable lesson when we looked at the actual data provided by Toast. Massive data analysis and lots of time used to be required to project labor costs versus historical sales. Instead of building manual spreadsheets, we opened Toast IQ and asked it to analyze the move. * The Speed: In less than a minute, the AI parsed our historical multi-location Sunday data. * The Decision: It mapped out historical labor costs against projected morning revenue gaps and clearly advised us not to open the extra hour early. * The ROI: By trusting that data-driven insight, we kept our doors closed until 11:00 AM and saved $4,000 in unnecessary labor costs right out of the gate. One of the greatest pain points for modern restaurant owners is that we are absolutely drowning in data, but we don’t have the time to act like data scientists. We’re busy. No wants to spend hours drilling down into fragmented analytics dashboards just to figure out a basic operational scheduling shift. Toast IQ solves this by putting a conversational, natural-language AI assistant directly inside the Toast Web dashboard. Instead of digging through legacy reports, you just ask it a question in plain text. Toast also spotlighted Toast IQ Actions. The AI can now execute changes directly from the chat interface. You can update menu pricing, add immediate upsell prompts (which drive checks 35% higher on average), or toggle item availability via text. To support diverse back-of-house teams, it natively understands and replies in multiple languages, including Spanish, Chinese, and Korean. We are moving past the era of the passive point-of-sale system that simply collects data and forces you to analyze it. The future is Agentic — with tech infrastructure that actively runs your marketing, automatically prompts your high-margin menu upsells, forecasts your cash flow, and handles administrative execution. Toast IQ Grow: Automating Your Marketing Burden Marketing is usually the very first thing independent owners drop when the kitchen gets slammed. Toast used the show floor to highlight Toast IQ Grow for operators who are simply too busy running a restaurant to act as full-time digital marketer. This is an all-in-one growth suite that pairs Toast’s core marketing ecosystem (Email, SMS, loyalty, gift cards) with their brand-new AI Marketing Agent (Beta) and a dedicated human Marketing Success Manager for a flat monthly rate. Powerful software + smart AI + human oversight. That’s a powerful equation. We watched a tech demo with Jake from the Toast team showing how an empty content calendar can be completely populated in minutes. You simply type a goal into the chat. Something like: “Drive more weekday traffic; plan one email and one Instagram post per week to push traffic Tuesday through Thursday.” Because the marketing tool is natively connected to your POS, the AI automatically cross-references your guest base, your highest-margin menu items, and your slow windows to generate high-retention campaigns. The Numbers: * Emails sent using the AI Marketing Agent are driving 7%+ more sales attributed directly to link clicks compared to campaigns created by humans alone. * On average, restaurants utilizing the combined human-and-AI managed service see an 8% increase in total sales compared to cohort venues, with top-performing operators hitting 40%+ revenue growth. Seamless Checkout: Erasing End-of-Meal Friction The “dropped check dance” at the end of a full-service meal is painful for guests and a massive margin-killer for table turns. Everyone hates waiting 15 minutes to catch a server’s eye just to pay a bill. We looked at a handheld terminal demo with Alexandra from the Toast team to break down their new Seamless Checkout feature, which completely eliminates this bottleneck: * A guest inputs and saves their credit card on file when booking a table via Toast Tables or Resy. * The server runs service completely as normal via their handheld terminal. * When the guests are ready to split, the server brings up the reservation on the Toast handheld, verifies the card is on file, and confirms the charge. * The guest signs, tips right on the screen, and walks out. Guests still retain the complete flexibility to split the bill or change to a physical card if they want, but for regulars and business diners, it creates an ultra-premium, frictionless exit that turns tables faster and keeps a busy service lane moving. Toast Finance: Proactive Cash Flow Management Waiting until the 20th of the next month for an accountant to hand you a statement to see if you actually made money is a stressful way to live. We synced up with Michel Rbeiz, Senior Vice President and General Manager of FinTech at Toast, to talk about how they are tackling cash flow anxiety. Michel walked us through the Toast Finance interface, which aims to make manual book reconciliation obsolete. * Unified Financial Picture: The platform continuously pulls together all internal Toast processing accounts and external connected commercial bank accounts into a single dashboard updated in real time. * Self-Reconciling Books: Built with AI to automatically categorize sales and expenses on the fly, offering proactive cash flow forecasting. * Rapid Access to Capital: If the system detects a tight cash window or an immediate expansion opportunity, the dashboard displays pre-approved Toast Capitalbalances. The live demo showed pre-approvals (up to $200,000) accessible within 1 to 2 business days without traditional banking red tape. Takeaway Walking away from the show, one truth stands out above all else: The era of the passive, data-collecting point-of-sale system is dead. The future belongs to platforms that don’t just show you a spreadsheet of your operational mistakes, but actively execute marketing campaigns, automatically prompt high-margin menu pairings, forecast your cash flow hurdles, and give you immediate conversational answers to save you thousands of dollars in labor on a Sunday morning. Your tech infrastructure has to work just as hard as you do. It’s time to stop chasing the artificial intelligence hype and start implementing tools that help you Make Busy Happen. Are You Built For Busy? Do you want to try out Toast? Send me a DM and click this link so I can help get you set-up with the right people. Note: Shawn Walchef is a compensated spokesperson for Toast. Savings claim self-reported by customer, based on executing on Toast IQ’s suggestions resulting in labor and food waste savings over an 18-week period. Individual results will vary. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit restauranttechnology.substack.com

  8. May 16

    Welcome to the World Cup of the Restaurant Industry: Live in Chicago 2026

    Tips for Surviving The Restaurant Show I caught up with our good friend Michael Ungaro from San Pedro Fish Market (Kings of Fish Media) right as the Show opened to get his top tips for navigating the weekend: * Get your badge early: Do not wait in the brutal lines at the convention center. Try to print your badge at your hotel lobby or get to McCormick Place incredibly early before the crowds hit. * Wear comfortable shoes: You are walking 12 football fields across three different halls—Lakeside, South Hall, and North Hall. Treat this like an athletic event. * The Uber Trick: When the show floor closes, don’t even try to call a rideshare to the main entrance. You’ll be stuck waiting for hours. Walk a few blocks away from the main hub first, then call your ride. * Document the journey: Take photos of the people you meet and grab their digital business cards. The relationships you build in these hallways can become lifelong friendships. The energy right now at McCormick Place for the 2026 National Restaurant Show is completely off the charts. If you are in the restaurant business, hospitality, or digital media, like me, this isn’t just another industry trade show. This is our World Cup. To give you an idea of the sheer scale of what’s happening in Chicago this week, we are talking about 53,000+ hospitality leaders, 2,200 vendors, and 12 football fields of pure innovation spanning three massive halls. It is impossible to overstate how massive this event is. A huge shoutout to the National Restaurant Association Show team for partnering with Cali BBQ Media to help us bring this raw, unfiltered look to our community. We have two full media teams on the ground, and we are tracking down stories across every aisle. While we are exploring the entire floor and capturing everything from new industry trends to deep tech, we have a few key anchor partnerships we are shouting out today. The Toast Booth #7012: We hit the ground running this morning and made a big stop to visit our close partners at Toast. They are the technology backbone of our actual restaurants at Cali BBQ, and they are the title sponsors of our Restaurant Influencers podcast series. We checked out their latest tech innovations and talked with their team about how operators can use technology to build more profitable, efficient businesses. The F3 Tech Booth #5870: Our friends at F3 Technologies have generously opened up their booth space to serve as one of our live content and podcast studios for the weekend. We are recording episodes right from the floor. If you are walking the halls, keep your eyes open—we might just pull you into the booth to share your story with the world. As we always say: Be the show, not the commercial. Magic Happens in the Hallways One of the greatest lessons I’ve ever learned as a restaurant owner is that you have to get out of your four walls. Growth happens when you put yourself in rooms like this, because you never know who you are going to meet. Right as the doors opened, we ran into Damien and Dan, two operators who traveled all the way from British Columbia, Canada. They told us they watch our content and came to the show for the very first time to find a next-gen POS system and check out new equipment. They bought a bar and nightclub a year and a half ago and are gearing up to launch their full restaurant concept. Naturally, we told them to head straight to the Toast booth and tell them Shawn sent them! That is the exact ROI of this show: connecting people, sharing resources, and lifting up the community. Meet Up With Us: 4:30 PM @ The Sign We don’t want to just connect with you through a screen, we want to meet you in real life. Every single day of the Restaurant Show, we are hosting a casual gathering for our community of restaurateurs, tech founders, creators, and storytellers. * When: 4:30 PM Daily * Where: Right by the big National Restaurant Association sign in the North Hall Come hang out, talk shop, network, and be part of the Rising Tides community. Because a rising tide lifts all ships. Make sure to subscribe to our Restaurant Technology Substack and follow along on social media @shawnpwalchef and @calibbqmedia so you don’t miss a single update, video drop, or interview from the floor. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit restauranttechnology.substack.com

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Restaurant Technology is a weekly business news series hosted by Cali BBQ Media Founder Shawn Walchef. Keep up to date on the latest stories, insights, and thought leadership in the modern restaurant technology landscape. restauranttechnology.substack.com

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