Use summer ingredients to lighten up your menu As the temperature rises, it’s time to cool things down. Give your customers the opportunity to lighten up with pizzas that are fresh, colorful and deliciously summer-fresh. There’s no need to put pe...

Patio service requires right employees, finesse Patio dining. Some restaurant operators say their business wouldn’t be the same without it. Barbara Reeve, general manager for the Tivoli Restaurant in New Milford, Connecticut, is one of them. The th...

Q: On the busiest Friday night ever our pizza oven died. It became completely inoperable. We lost tons of business and many of our customers left disappointed and probably visited our competition to get their pizza that night. We are trying to figure...

When it comes to expansion, think outside the strip mall Opening the second Pizzeria Piccola location, at Mitchell International Airport in Milwaukee last month, was a success — despite enduring a smaller footprint and catering to a new audience. T...

Fun and flavorful salads heat up summer profits With the summer months upon us crisp, cold salads are a must-have menu item. “When it’s hot outside, salads are one of my favorite foods to eat,” says Spencer Johnston, executive chef at The Churc...

Should pizzerias serve breakfast? Tristan Kohler is the owner of a 24/7 Domino’s Pizza franchise in Dayton, Ohio. His pizzeria is the only Domino’s Pizza in the United States with a breakfast daypart. “We began offering breakfast pizza two year...

Unique flavors can make iced tea a profit booster Iced tea has its place in America. It has its own holiday in America, even. While the official first day of summer happens weeks later, National Iced Tea Day fittingly kicks off the season on June 10....

Setting a payscale and integrating incentives With four Blue Moon Pizza stores spread about the Atlanta area, Kelvin Slater cannot make every pizza and touch every table. It’s why Slater feels so compelled to draw and hold on to first-rate employee...

Pizza Today visits the Florida panhandle for a fun-in-the-sun tour of pizzerias JOEY’S ON THE BEACH In March, thousands of college students and families alike flee colder climes to enjoy Spring Break on the Florida panhandle. We decided to do t...

Make this summer sweet with gelato Gelato –– that dense, creamy, wonderful Italian frozen dessert –– is not the exotic, foreign entity it once was. But although it has found its way onto restaurant menus across the country, it still offers me...

The wait is finally over. It has been nearly four months since I first noticed construction two blocks from my apartment in a relatively quiet Brooklyn neighborhood. It’s not that we don’t have pizza nearby — there are at least two slice shops ...

Save the date: Slice of Hope 2012 takes place Friday, October 12. The Hot 100 Independents (our list of The new Pizza Today America’s most successful indy operations) control roughly $491 million in revenue. Vermont has 204 pizzerias iPad and A...

Save the date: Slice of Hope 2012 takes place Friday, October 12. The Hot 100 Independents (our list of The new Pizza Today America’s most successful indy operations) control roughly $491 million in revenue. Vermont has 204 pizzerias iPad and A...

Why are pizza dough recipes/formulas expressed in percentages rather than in amounts? The easiest way to express a dough formula is in what is referred to as baker’s percent. The amount of each ingredient is expressed as a percent of the total flou...

Recently I did a brief survey of some of my pizza pals across the nation. My suspicions proved true — business on Monday is generally half of Friday’s sales. So, can I take a ‘dog’ day and make it a star? Sometimes it is just plain hard or im...

Make your own salad dressings to up the wow factor in-house There are two times of the year that salad sales in restaurants spike. The first spike is a short-lived one, and that’s the first week in January when people are making their New Year’s ...

As the pizza category shows its resilience and continues to pick up steam, there is little doubt that Domino’s Pizza has had a heavy hand in igniting the industry-wide turnaround. The company’s bold product revamping and hugely effective advertis...