Restaurant Reset

Why Restaurants Keep Choosing the Wrong Tech (with Andy Grindstaff)

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 [http://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.

Why Your Worst Guest Experience Is Your Biggest Revenue Opportunity with Zack Oates @ Ovation

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 [http://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.

The Software Engineer Who Built a Michelin-Starred Restaurant Empire (By Letting Chefs Be Themselves)

Roni Mazumdar is a software engineer from RPI who was working at Johnson & Johnson in 2011 when his father, a former fruit cart vendor and retired NYPD traffic cop, was getting close to retirement. Roni didn't want his dad to feel irrelevant. So he found a listing on Craigslist and they opened a 28-seat Indian restaurant together in New York's Lower East Side. His father ran the front of house at 75 years old. The Prime Minister of Malta dined there. And that tiny restaurant, Masalawala, became the first chapter of Unapologetic Foods, the restaurant group Roni has built into one of the most acclaimed Indian dining brands in America. Today, Unapologetic Foods is home to multiple celebrated restaurants, including Semma, which earned a Michelin star by doing something radical: letting Chef Vijay Kumar cook exactly the rural South Indian food he grew up eating. Bloomberg BusinessWeek named Roni one of the people who defined global business in 2021. What We Cover: The Immigrant Shackles: Why Indian restaurants spent decades adding heavy cream, softening spice levels, and asking "mild, medium, hot, or Indian hot?" and what that cost the cuisine What Hospitality Really Is: The fruit cart, the divorce, and why Roni's father understood something no MBA program can teach The Superpower of Authenticity: How Roni builds restaurants by letting chefs be fully themselves, and why that's the strategy, not a side benefit No Rules, No Apologies: What Roni learned watching his father break every hospitality rule in the book (and build the most loyal regulars in the Lower East Side) The Money Trap: Why the biggest restaurant mistakes start with the transaction, and what to lead with instead Take the Leap: Roni on what the accolades don't show you: the debt, the fear, and why the path to success runs straight through failure, not around it If you've ever wondered what it takes to build something that genuinely doesn't apologize for who it is, this conversation is required listening. Restaurant Reset is brought to you by Genius™ (Link globalpayments.com/genius [http://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.

How Andrew Smith Built a $750M Restaurant Investment Platform by Doing the Opposite of Every PE Firm

Andrew K. Smith is the co-founder and Managing Partner of Savory Fund, one of the most active restaurant investment platforms in the country. 13 brands. Owned, operated and scaled up to 575 restaurants in 29 states. Over $3 billion in cumulative sales. 40,000+ jobs created. But the story of how he got here starts with his wife Shauna. In October 2008, while the financial world was collapsing, she opened a Kneaders Bakery in Lehi, Utah. Andrew, a three-time tech CEO at the time, told her it was the dumbest idea in the world. She crushed it from month one. A few months later, he called her and said he wanted in. Her response: "Perfect. My dishwasher just called out." That's how a tech CEO ended up in the dish pit. And how the idea for Savory Fund was born. In this conversation on Restaurant Reset, Andrew goes deep on the thesis he's been pounding the table on for 18 years: that restaurants are essential services, not consumer. What We Cover: - Why Andrew says restaurants are essential services, not consumer (and what that misclassification costs operators raising capital) - How three tech exits and a bakery in Utah turned him into one of the most respected restaurant investors in the country - Why the old PE "financial engineering" playbook is now setting restaurant brands on fire - The Savory model: $4M-$15M checks, 65 in-house specialists, and a first-90-days playbook that does almost nothing on purpose - Inside the Mo'Bettahs journey from 6 locations to 63 to the 2025 F&B Deal of the Year - Why scaling from 10 units to 30 is exponentially harder than you think, and what breaks first - The hard truth Andrew tells every young founder who wants a shortcut to what he built - The one founder red flag that makes Savory walk away from a deal every time - How he and Shauna have stayed married 27 years while building two billion-dollar businesses together - Why restaurant failure looks more common than it actually is (and the real closure numbers after year 7) If you're a restaurant operator thinking about raising capital, a founder wondering whether your brand is ready to scale, or anyone building anything and trying to do it the right way, you should definitely listen to this episode of Restaurant Reset. Restaurant Reset is brought to you by Genius™ (Link globalpayments.com/genius [http://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.

The Rick Rubin of Restaurants: How to Build a Restaurant Empire by Making Chefs the Stars with Kevin Boehm

Kevin Boehm co-founded Boka Restaurant Group in 2002 with a single restaurant in Chicago. Today, Boka operates 30+ restaurants across Chicago, Los Angeles, and Brooklyn, serves 2.5 million guests a year, and generates more than $250 million in annual revenue. Boka restaurant has held a Michelin star for 15 consecutive years. Kevin and his partner Rob Katz won the James Beard Award for Outstanding Restaurateur in 2019. He also co-founded the Independent Restaurant Coalition during COVID, helping secure $28.6 billion in federal relief for independent restaurants. He co-founded BIÂN, a 35,000-square-foot private wellness club in Chicago. He appeared as himself on Season 3 of The Bear. And in November 2025, he published his memoir, The Bottomless Cup, which Bloomberg named one of the best books of the year. This is a masterclass in what it means to build a restaurant group the right way. What We Cover: • The Chef Partnership Model — Why Kevin and Rob built Boka around chefs as stars, not just as employees. How they find chef partners, evaluate them, and structure creative and operational responsibility. • The Chef Audition Process — The exact science behind how Boka has started the partnership process with "a couple hundred" chefs and only gone all the way with about 14. (Spoiler: it starts with "do we think you're smart and do we like you?") • The Restaurateur as Producer — Kevin's Rick Rubin analogy for the restaurateur-chef relationship: "Rick Rubin isn't going to tell Paul McCartney how to write a song, but he might have a great idea Paul can execute." • The Argument That Changed Everything — The exact moment Kevin and Rob realized they had to stop growing and build infrastructure first. "We knew we had to go backwards to go forwards." • Michelin Pressure and What It Really Takes — Why maintaining a Michelin star for 15 straight years is harder than most people realize, and what that kind of sustained excellence actually demands. • Fear of Being Discovered as a Fraud — How "faking it" in the early days drove Kevin to learn faster than anyone around him, and why he built his identity from 20 different mentors. • Whiteboard Yourself — What Kevin would tell his 23-year-old self: get a therapist, study Buddhism, stop drinking, and stop thinking there's a finish line. • 3 Pillars of a Good Life — Kevin's simple framework for knowing if he's on track: purpose, people, and unedited footage. • The Independent Restaurant Coalition — How Kevin went from grieving restaurateur to testifying before Congress and helping secure $28.6 billion in relief. With zero political experience. • Accept People as They Are, Place Them Where They Belong — Kevin's framework for building teams without projecting unrealistic expectations. Kevin Boehm doesn't just build restaurants. He builds platforms for chefs, platforms for careers, and now, with The Bottomless Cup, a platform for honesty about what success actually costs. Restaurant Reset is brought to you by Genius™ (Link globalpayments.com/genius [http://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.