Bennett Glace
- Editorial Lead and Primary Contributor, The Strategic Sourceror
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Articles by Bennett Glace
Pets in the Workplace: Take Our Survey
2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic upended office life as we knew it. Employers nationwide closed their doors to adhere with social distancing guidelines and scores of non-essential workers became accustomed to working remotely. While stuck inside, a host of at-home employees brightened up their new offices by purchasing or adopting pets.
Raising Restaurant Menu Prices: Dos and Don’ts
Managing a restaurant is more expensive and unpredictable than ever before. Food costs alone have risen 29% for the average restaurant operator over the last four years. Factor in labor costs (up 31%) and other expenses and you’ll understand why restaurant menu prices are on the rise across the country. And don’t forget about the looming threat of massive tariffs.
How Restaurant Catering Sales Can Boost Your Bottom Line
Restaurant catering sales are booming. This is quite a departure from where we were just a few years ago. “During the pandemic, catering was way down, because events were way down. Nobody was congregating in person,” says App8 CEO Elias Hage. “But in the last two to three years, the growth of the catering space has actually been accelerating, and a lot of that has been driven by the return-to-office trend.” Through his work with App8, Hage is helping restaurants seize this trend.
How to Start a Food Truck and Find Success in Food Halls
In the restaurant industry, location is everything – so why settle for just one? Food trucks present an opportunity to manage a mobile restaurant that brings dishes directly to hungry customers. The $1.8 billion industry has come a long way since the first hot dog carts and taco trucks began dotting the map. Today, you can find just about anything on a food truck menu and you can’t go many places without seeing one. They’ve even inspired TV series like Food Network’s The Great Food Truck Race.
What's an Average Restaurant Marketing Budget?
Conventional wisdom says that the average restaurant marketing budget should fall between 3 and 6% of total sales revenue. But the full answer is a bit more nuanced than that. Factors such as the size and age of your business, the location of your restaurant, and your short-term and long-term business goals can all have a direct impact on how much of you should be spending on marketing at any given time. Moreover, today’s restaurant marketing landscape is densely populated.
Using Restaurant Tech To Offset Rising Food Costs
Menu prices are on the rise. It’s one of the reasons the average American is eating at restaurants less often. Rising food costs have taken a toll for years. Operators are paying 7.6% more than they were last year and 29% more than they were four years ago. Many operators don’t see any other option but to pass costs on to their customers. Fortunately, there is an alternative.
On-Demand Restaurant Staffing Tools Help With Worker Shortages
For years, Christopher Grossman, executive chef and operating partner of The Chastain, struggled to keep his dishwasher position filled. That all changed when Grossman started using an on-demand restaurant staffing app. “I never thought I’d be using a temp service, but staffing has never been as hard as it’s been,” says Grossman. That challenge is only growing today.
The Top 3 Restaurant Industry Challenges Today
The restaurant sector has never been a place for the faint of heart. Still, today’s unpredictability and volatility have exacerbated age-old food industry challenges. Operators are now looking at what could be their most challenging year since the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Digging Into Today’s Top Restaurant Industry Challenges What’s keeping operators up at night? Quite a lot.
How Restaurants Are Dealing With Rising Egg Prices
While few restaurant operators miss the challenges of COVID-19 closures, many may be nostalgic for that era’s ultra-low egg prices. When restaurants were shuttered to dine-in patrons and egg demand was low, operators could purchase them for as little as $8 or $9 per case of 180. Those days are long gone. Inflation and the Avian Flu: Ingredients for an Existential Crisis For years now, inflation has wreaked havoc on both restaurant owners and their customers.
How to Set Up Your Restaurant for Success in 2025
Let’s face it – 2024 was a tough year for the restaurant business. Operators struggled with the usual challenge: labor shortages, high turnover, slim profit margins. But then these challenges were magnified by surging costs, increasingly value-conscious customers, and a spate of high-profile food contamination incidents. Most restaurant operators are more than happy to turn the page to a new year. So now that the new year is upon us, what can we expect as an industry?
Experts’ Tips for Retaining Restaurant Employees
Though retaining top-notch employees presents challenges in any industry, the restaurant sector has earned its reputation for especially high turnover. The pandemic only exacerbated the issue, putting additional strain on a workforce already accustomed to packed schedules and limited benefits. To understand how industry leaders hold on to their employees, we spoke to a panel of ten experts.
9 Instagram Post Ideas to Promote Your Restaurant
Every day, guests snap photos of your dishes and decor to share with their followers on Instagram. There’s no reason you shouldn’t set up an account and start sending out posts of your own. In addition to giving long-time fans a new way of engaging with your restaurant, promotion on Instagram exposes you to a huge audience of potential new customers. QSR Magazine reports that nearly 50% of diners have visited a restaurant they first learned about on social media.
Restaurant Marketing Strategies to Set You Up For Digital Success
Establishing a positive online presence for your restaurant can be challenging enough, but maintaining this presence on a day to day basis can be a full-time job. Restaurant reviews are a huge piece of the puzzle when it comes to mastering digital marketing for restaurants. Learning how to manage your restaurant reviews effectively, however, takes time, energy, and some digital media savvy.
'I Was in a Film Starring Laura Dern': Caveh Zahedi’s Self-Sabotaging Self-Portrait
From 2005 to 2012, the Gotham Awards handed out a trophy for the Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You. Its first winner, a filmmaker known for what he calls radical honesty, couldn’t help but acknowledge how the award’s name, “sound[ed] like a back-handed compliment.” Maria Bello’s Rupert Pupkin-style mispronunciation (“Cavuh Zayeduh, I think”) couldn’t have helped.
Go With the Glow: Neil Young’s 'Human Highway' - Split Tooth Media
“They just want me singing ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ for the rest of my goddamn life…” So says Timotheé Chalamet’s version of Bob Dylan in one of the trailers for A Complete Unknown (2024), James Mangold’s upcoming Dylan biopic. That predictably hacky line offers a pat summary of Dylan’s thoughts during one of the signpost moments of his biography.
5 Benefits of Mobile Payments for Restaurants
A growing number of operators are enjoying the benefits of mobile payment in restaurants. Aside from the convenience of letting customers make digital payments in this increasingly digital world, mobile payment advantages for restaurants include faster, easier and more secure transactions. Restaurants that adopt mobile payment solutions tend to see improvements in areas like turnover time, shift productivity, and sheer profitability.
(pod)Casters of Horror: A Journey Through 'Masters of Horror' Season 1 (2005-06)
Split Tooth mainstays Jim Hickcox and Bennett Glace made a near-fatal mistake when they took a drive down a winding mountain pass. The pair barely survived an accident and they may soon wish they hadn’t. Jigsaw himself has a challenge for Jim and Bennett: record podcasts for each episode in Masters of Horror Season 1. The catch? They can’t talk for more than 20 minutes or the room will fill with poison gas.
Everything You Need to Know About Social Media Marketing for Restaurants
Having a strong digital presence is absolutely critical in today’s restaurant business. With more than 1 billion users on TikTok, 2.5 billion on Instagram, and nearly 3 billion on Facebook, chances are good that your audience is spending time online. This makes social media marketing absolutely vital to your restaurant’s visibility, reach, brand identity, and audience engagement.
5 Restaurant Advertising Strategies to Maximize the ROI from Your Marketing Budget
The restaurant marketing landscape is an increasingly complex and fragmented place. Today, most restaurant advertising strategies must include a healthy mix of social media ads, community sponsorships, search engine visibility, and traditional print media. There’s an awful lot to think about as you build out your marketing budget. It all begs the question, how big should my restaurant marketing budget be? And how can I be sure I’m really getting a meaningful return on my investment?
No More Reason to Stay: Joel Potrykus’ 'Vulcanizadora' (2024)
The typical Joel Potrykus lead looks and acts the part of the stoner. Save, that is, for the fact that we never see them smoke weed. Their indulgences tend instead toward the stuff of adolescent addiction: junk food and video games. Even the vandalism and pyromania in Potrykus’ feature debut, Ape (2012) look like juvenile delinquency. We’re introduced to Trevor Newandyke (Joshua Burge) spraying what first seems like profane graffiti.
5 Expert Tips for Recruiting Restaurant Staff
Recruiting restaurant staff can be costly and time-consuming. Your restaurant may spend a fortune every year placing ads for jobs, screening applicants, conducting background checks, and more. Many restaurants are already facing ongoing staffing shortages and high turnover rates. Under these circumstances, recruitment can be a source of ongoing frustration and financial strain.
How to Build a Restaurant Website that Drives Business
Your restaurant website is the first thing that many of your prospective customers will see. It’s important to make a good impression. So as you build your restaurant website, give careful thought to exactly how this website represents your business. Your website should be the centerpiece of your digital restaurant marketing strategy–an online space that drives business to your dining room or ordering system. It is absolutely critical that you design this site with several key features in mind.
Reframing and Reclaiming: Prismatic Ground 2024
The debut of Prismatic Ground in April of 2021 was the rare bit of good pandemic-era news. Founded by Inney Prakash, a Maysles Documentary Center programmer, the first iteration of the film festival not only disrupted the monotony of lockdown but represented an uncommonly democratic version of the festival experience. Instead of presenting a dramatically pared-down, geo-locked selection, Prakash practiced politically minded curation and followed through on his passionate rejection of borders.
7 POS Features Your Restaurant Should Be Using
Are you using your restaurant management system to the fullest of its capabilities? Most restaurants use some type of POS system to process orders and store sales data. But POS features for restaurants go well beyond these basic functionalities. Newer platforms are rich with features designed to improve your restaurant’s efficiency, productivity, and profitability. It’s up to you, however, to take full advantage of these features.
Restaurant Staff Training & Onboarding Tips To Reduce Turnover
When employees decide to leave their restaurant jobs, they’re often reacting to issues that began early on. Ineffective programs for onboarding and restaurant staff training can leave even veteran employees feeling lost, unfulfilled, and disengaged. It’s one of the primary culprits behind the industry’s infamous turnover problem. Though onboarding programs can make it easier to keep talent on board, most organizations still aren’t devoting enough attention to their employees’ early days.
Expert Digital Marketing Tips for Restaurants
Despite the handful of takeout menus that still wind up in your mailbox most weeks, digital marketing channels have become the standard for restaurant operators hoping to build and nurture devoted customer bases. The most-talked about restaurants earned their reputations by driving online conversations. More and more, they’re leveraging tools to refine their messaging, research customer behavior, and ensure they reach the right audiences, on the right channels, at the right time.
Streamlining Inventory Management to Increase Restaurant Profitability
Effective inventory management can increase restaurant profitability. But how can you streamline your inventory management strategy without sacrificing the qualities that make your restaurant unique? It all starts with a good, hard look at your menu. A streamlined menu is the key to a streamlined inventory management strategy. Trimming your menu improves inventory control, lowers food waste, and simplifies execution for overburdened back of house teams.
Tips to Improve Restaurant Efficiency
When it comes to restaurant planning and long-term management, efficiency is your only option. Tasty recipes, a savvy staff, and a heavy helping of curb appeal won’t help you if you can’t maintain efficient operations. Making decisions with efficiency in mind helps restaurant operators address many of the challenges inherent to their industry. High turnover, stiff competition, slim margins, waste – they’re always a threat, but they don’t have to keep you up at night.
8 Tips for Using Social Media Influencers to Market Your Restaurant
Social media is an essential restaurant marketing tool. Platforms like Instagram and TikTok provide a direct channel for engaging your customers as well as an affordable way to promote your restaurant and attract new business. Restaurants that know how to leverage social media effectively have a competitive advantage. Increasingly, influencers have become central to the social marketing strategies for restaurants.
Disrupting the Labor Model: Chef D. Brandon Walker's Personal Approach
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Chef D. Brandon Walker experienced what he called a “rough and tumble upbringing” after his father passed away when was just eight years old. Following brief stints in jail as a young adult, he found a passion for the kitchen and the structure that came with it. He would soon work alongside a range of celebrated chefs including Ludo Lefebvre and Sherry Yard, among others.
Getting the Most Out of Your Restaurant’s Loyalty Program with Technology
Though many customers may still have a few dog-eared punch cards taking up space in their wallet or hiding in the pockets of neglected coats, loyalty programs for restaurants have come a long way in recent years. Anybody can offer buy-ten-get-one deals or exchange a discount for your email address.
Expert Ways to Increase Your Restaurant’s Profit Margin
Whoever said “location is everything” wasn’t a restaurant owner. A great slice of real estate can go a long way in drawing attention and foot traffic to your restaurant, but it’s just one piece of the puzzle for operators. Successful restaurateurs must manage inventory, lead a team, balance tradition with innovation, and much more to thrive in an industry known for low margins, high turnover, and even higher expectations. How can restaurant owners keep the lights on and build a business that lasts?
6 Ways AI Can Improve Your Restaurant Operations
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is perhaps one of the biggest and most widely adapted technology trends of 2023. Like any new technology, however, it can be confusing figuring out how to use it and implement it effectively, especially in a restaurant. Luckily, we’ve done the hard work for you, so that you don’t have to. Before we dive into the ways AI can help improve your restaurant operations, let’s explore why you should pay attention to this new technology. What is AI?
5 Ways Technology Can Help Your Restaurant Save Money
Profitable restaurants have several features in common—healthy cash flow, strong team members, and data-driven decision making, to name a few. These features are the basic keys to survival in a fiercely competitive industry. But how do the biggest brands rise to the top? How do industry leaders increase restaurant profitability without compromising quality and customer satisfaction? The most successful restaurants are those that have learned to harness leading edge technologies.
Maximilien Luc Proctor: The Split Tooth Interview
Note: I should disclose that I’m not just a subscriber to Ultra Dogme’s Patreon but a past contributor to the site as well. That said, any bias evidenced here predates my debut for Ultra Dogme. Whenever someone contemptuously spits out the words “film twitter” (and it happens all the time) I know for sure that they don’t follow Maximilien Luc Proctor or count themselves among the community of filmmakers and cinema enthusiasts who’ve emerged around Ultra Dogme.
Things Dreamt Of: 'Whistle and I’ll Come to You' (1968), the First BBC Ghost Story for Christmas
Though I heard “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” probably ten thousand times throughout the first 20 years of my life, Andy Wiliams’ decision to rhyme “scary ghost stories” with “tales of the glories” always puzzled me. I don’t expect I was alone in that. Through that period, A Christmas Carol and its scores of adaptations were the only Yuletide ghost stories I could think of.
Christmas Horror Archives - Split Tooth Media
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Backyard Horror Archives - Split Tooth Media
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Make Your Own Kind of Music: Motern Media's 'Heard She Got Married' and 'Metal Detector Maniac'
Author’s Note: I spoil parts of the surprising endings of both films mentioned in the headline. If you intend to watch them — and I think you should — do it before reading what I have to say about them. Keep this page open and come back in a few hours. Tell your friends to do the same.
Avant Horror: Ernie Gehr's 'Serene Velocity' (1970)
Ernie Gehr’s seminal Serene Velocity (1970) is an experimental film in the truest sense. First, Gehr happened upon the right hallway during his brief stint as a summer lecturer at the State University of New York’s Binghamton campus.
Five Films by Ellie Epp: Stream Ultra Dogme's Latest Program
If you don’t live in New York with the income and free time for regular filmgoing or call the academic world your home, it’s typically a rare treat when you can discover a previously unknown master working outside the established cinematic canon. That is, of course, unless you’re a regular visitor to Ultra Dogme or, better, a Patreon subscriber.
All in the Family: The Major Films of Noah Baumbach
In a New Yorker profile by Ian Parker from April 2013, when that year’s Frances Ha was just beginning to usher in a new era for its era-defining star and co-writer, Greta Gerwig, Noah Baumbach, the film’s director/co-writer and Gerwig’s romantic partner for a provocatively indeterminate amount of time, presents a possible explanation for audiences’ inconsistency in the types of characters they’ll embrace and behavior they’ll accept.
Christopher Jason Bell: The Split Tooth Interview
Though its total runtime amounts to just over a few hours, Christopher Jason Bell’s body of work feels immense. Across a number of boldly experimental shorts and a pair of features, Bell has playfully wrestled with key moments in American history, turned a critical yet clear-eyed gaze at contemporary working class life, offered a stage for game performers to stretch the definition of ‘non-professional,’ and, best of all, blurred the lines between fact and fiction.
American independent film Archives
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Michael Glover Smith Archives
Want to support Split Tooth? All donations go to our writers fund.
'Mercury In Retrograde' Video Interview with Michael Glover Smith
Michael Glover Smith has long been a favorite filmmaker at Split Tooth, so we were thrilled to screen his 2017 film Mercury In Retrograde at the Movie Madness Miniplex in early May. For the event, Smith recorded an exclusive video interview about the creation of the film with Bennett Glace, which is being presented here for the first time on Split Tooth’s new YouTube channel.
He's a Rebel: Remembering Kenneth Anger and 'Scorpio Rising' (1963)
Kenneth Anger’s was perhaps the exact kind of life you’d expect from the author of Hollywood Babylon. It was that of both a consummate insider and a perennial outsider, one at the vanguard and of the old guard, kissed with Tinseltown magick and still cursed by the business side of show business. If even half of the stories he told about his Zelig-like journey through mid-century cinema were true then he may have been the single most interesting person ever to hold a camera.
How On-Demand Staffing Apps Are Helping Restaurants Fill Scheduling Gaps
At a Glance: Hiring apps as a quick-fix staffing solution: Many restaurant operators remain understaffed and are turning to on-demand hiring apps as a result. These apps are helping some operators fill available shifts in as little as 24 hours. Weighing the cost: Most on-demand hiring apps charge a fee per shift filled. To fill shifts quickly and consistently, restaurant operators also generally must offer a higher hourly rate than the market average.
How to Navigate and Negotiate Contracts with Third-Party Food Delivery Platforms
Disclaimer: This content is provided for general informational purposes only and is not intended to constitute legal advice. Readers should contact an attorney or advisor for advice specific to their circumstances. Delivery has become a necessary revenue stream for numerous restaurants, and if you’re operating outside of the fine-dining realm, a solid delivery program is all but expected from customers.
Beatty Zooms In: The Dick Tracy Specials
Both inevitable in our era of brand extensions and totally unprecedented in the history of cinema, Warren Beatty’s pair of Dick Tracy TCM specials offer an embarrassment of riches for anyone fascinated by their director-star’s peculiar career What if Clint Eastwood’s infamous chair speech had aired on cable in the dead of night instead of live for millions at the Republican National Convention?
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