restaurants
(20)
Urban Plates Wants Your Dinner Habit. The Asking Price Is $5.
The California restaurant chain pairs scratch cooking with a paid discount club. Behind the bargain is a story of ambitious expansion, a pandemic retreat, and a more practical way to win the next meal.
Luna Grill Wants Your Weeknight Dinner
The Mediterranean chain is selling relief from the shopping, chopping and washing up. Its next test is making a family kitchen work at the scale of 62 restaurants.
The $25 Bowl That Won a $43 Million Bet: How Big Way Hot Pot Made Sharing Optional
Big Way Hot Pot stripped the communal ritual down to a golden bowl, a wall of ingredients and a scale. Twenty-two stores later, the lesson is less about soup than making choice easy to buy - and hard to copy at scale.
How Murphy Hospitality Group Turned One Island Into a Hospitality Flywheel
The Murphy family started with two people doing every job in one PEI restaurant. Four decades later, their cleverest product is not a steak, a suite or a pint - it is the way all three sell one another.
The Retail World Runs on Guesses. MarketDial Sells Proof.
A pair of Salt Lake City founders - one ex-VC, one ex-McKinsey - built software that lets chains like Kum & Go, Dick's, and Woolworths test a store idea in a few dozen locations before betting the whole business on it. Then they took the incumbent to court.
The Family Office That Bought a Dallas Street and a Giant Eyeball
How a billionaire's family office quietly bought up 16 addresses on one downtown Dallas street - then filled them with a hotel, a dozen restaurants, a fashion flagship, and a 30-foot eyeball.
The $15 Lunch That Learned to Think Like a Chef
Mendocino Farms turned the office sandwich into a seasonal, chef-driven product - then built a 100-store growth machine around the part fast casual often forgets: hospitality.
Dave & Buster’s Is Really a Game Company With a Kitchen Attached
The burgers bring people to a table. The flashing midway, reloadable Power Cards and promise of one more game keep the economics moving. Inside a national eatertainment chain, play is the main course.
The Steakhouse Where Dinner Comes to You - Until You Say Stop
A two-color coaster, a procession of skewers and a 47-year-old Brazilian ritual became a 122-restaurant growth machine. Fogo de Chão is selling abundance, control and a night out that behaves nothing like an ordinary steakhouse.
Altamarea Group
Ahmass Fakahany walked away from the top of Merrill Lynch to open a seafood restaurant across from Central Park. Two decades later, Altamarea Group runs more than 25 dining rooms on three continents.
Panera Bread
The chain that turned soup, bread and free refills into a national habit - and is now betting that a $12-a-month coffee subscription is the future of lunch.
Twin Peaks Restaurants
How a Texas mountain-lodge sports bar turned cold beer, scratch kitchens, and franchisee ambition into one of the highest-grossing brands in casual dining.
Momos
Momos is an AI customer platform for multi-location restaurant and retail brands. It unifies customer service, reviews, reputation, listings, feedback and local marketing into one system so operators can respond to guests, catch problems in real time, and turn reviews and feedback into repeat visits. Founded in 2021 by former Uber and Grab operators, Momos powers tens of thousands of locations across brands including Shake Shack, Baskin-Robbins, Just Salad and Guzman y Gomez.
Papa Gino's
Papa Gino's is a New England pizzeria chain known for its thin-crust pizza, pasta, and subs. Founded in East Boston in 1961 by Italian immigrant Michael Valerio and his wife Helen as a by-the-slice shop called Piece O' Pizza, it grew into a regional institution across Massachusetts and neighboring states. After a 2018 bankruptcy that shrank the chain dramatically, it was bought by Wynnchurch Capital and now operates roughly 78-79 locations, leaning on its New England roots and a 2026 partnership with Patriots quarterback Drake Maye to win back fans.
Slang AI
Slang AI builds an agentic voice AI platform purpose-built for restaurants and hospitality. Its 'Superhost' answers every inbound call 24/7 with warmth and precision - booking and modifying reservations, fielding private-dining and event inquiries, recognizing returning guests, and routing high-value requests to staff. The platform serves 2,000+ restaurant locations, has handled roughly 25 million calls from 10 million unique guests, and reports 95%+ guest satisfaction, helping operators stop missing calls and recover lost revenue.
PathSpot
PathSpot is a New York-based health and safety company for the food service industry. Its flagship HandScanner uses visible-light fluorescence spectroscopy to detect invisible contaminants on employees' hands in about two seconds, flagging the molecules that carry norovirus, E. coli, Salmonella, Listeria and Hepatitis A. Around that scanner the company built SafetySuite, a connected hardware-and-software platform covering temperature logging, digital task lists and food labeling. PathSpot operates in more than 10,000 food service locations worldwide.
SparkPlug
SparkPlug is a San Francisco-based incentive management platform that turns frontline retail and restaurant employees into a brand's most effective sales force. By integrating directly with point-of-sale systems, it automates sales contests, goals, and commissions - often funded by the brands and vendors whose products those employees sell - and pays rewards out automatically. The company works with thousands of retail locations and hundreds of brand partners, betting that the people closest to the customer are the most underused influence in physical commerce.
Ottimate
Ottimate (formerly Plate IQ) is an AI-powered accounts payable automation platform that captures, codes, verifies, and pays invoices end-to-end. Founded in 2014 to fix the back-office mess inside restaurants, it now serves CFOs and AP teams across hospitality, healthcare, construction, retail, and grocery.
Workstream
Workstream is an HR, hiring and payroll platform built for the deskless economy - the 80 million Americans who clock in by the hour at restaurants, gyms, car washes and franchises. Founded in 2017 by three immigrants in San Francisco, it uses texting, voice AI and automation to cut time-to-hire by roughly 70% for chains like Burger King, Jimmy John's and Chick-fil-A franchisees.
Zavo
Zavo is building the AI-powered operating system for restaurants and hospitality businesses. Founded in May 2025 by Can Zehebi and Ilkan Gezer and backed by Y Combinator (F25), Zavo replaces the patchwork of disconnected tools most restaurant operators rely on - separate POS, payments, reservations, and marketing software - with a single unified platform that uses agentic AI to automate finance, operations, and customer engagement. With 800+ businesses on the platform less than a year after launch, Zavo is moving fast in a market dominated by legacy incumbents.