Restaurant Reset

Genius For Restaurants
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The restaurant industry is stretched thin. Margins are tight, labor is scarce, and guests want more for less. I’m Andy Grindstaff, and after years in both operations and restaurant tech, I’ve seen what works. Restaurant Reset is for leaders who know the old playbook is broken. We’ll share real stories, practical systems, and proven ways to run a tighter, smarter, more profitable operation. The industry isn’t dying. It’s evolving. Let’s reset.

  1. 4d ago

    He Built Online Ordering Before the iPhone | Noah Glass CEO @ OLO

    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.

  2. Sep 29

    The Owners Who Keep Their Staff Are Growing Faster | Christian Wiens, Loman

    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

  3. Sep 15

    Why Main Squeeze's CEO Won't Tolerate Mediocrity | Jennifer Dodd

    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.

  4. Sep 1

    A New Logo Won't Save a Failing Chain | Joseph Szala

    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

  5. Aug 18

    Why Bonchon's CEO Keeps Saying No to Tech Vendors | Suzie Tsai

    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.

  6. Aug 11

    He Changed the Way California Pizza Kitchen Makes Every Single Pizza | Paul Pszybylski

    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 timeWhy telling Rick and Larry "no" almost cost Paul the job and the reframe that saved itScrapping 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 inHow to design one flavor idea for a hearth oven, a frozen line, and a franchisee in IndiaWhy ops buy-in comes before creative ambition, every timeSay hi to everyone from the dishwasher to the GM the Rick and Larry habit Paul still practices 16 years laterHis 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.

  7. Aug 4

    How Bite's CEO Turned a Danny Meyer Education Into a 5-Star Kiosk Experience | Brandon Barton

    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 insteadHow to design for "graceful failure" so a screen can apologize like your best serverThe one question to ask Shake Shack's team before betting your career on a categoryWhat Danny Meyer drills into you that no management book can teachHow to read the next AI pitch and spot the vaporware behind the 20% check-lift claimThe 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.

  8. Jul 28

    How the "Godfather of Restaurant Tech" Survived Every Platform Shift for 40+ years | Christopher Sebes

    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 nextThe $20,000-a-day math that kept his company alive through bankruptcyThe 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 fireThe only question restaurant operators should ask about any AI toolWhat really happens to your product after an acquisitionHis 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.

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About

The restaurant industry is stretched thin. Margins are tight, labor is scarce, and guests want more for less. I’m Andy Grindstaff, and after years in both operations and restaurant tech, I’ve seen what works. Restaurant Reset is for leaders who know the old playbook is broken. We’ll share real stories, practical systems, and proven ways to run a tighter, smarter, more profitable operation. The industry isn’t dying. It’s evolving. Let’s reset.

Information

  • Creator
    Genius For Restaurants
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    36
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Genius For Restaurants
  • Show Website
    Restaurant Reset

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