Expedite

Someone once told me there’s riches in niches, that focusing on a small and specific audience is great business practice. This niche newsletter can not yet confirm nor deny that advice, but I do know that incremental business is valuable to even the largest and most successful corporations. On Tuesday, DoorDash announced plans to acquire Grubhub’s college campus business for $300 million.

photo credit: Photo by Dustin Satloff/USTA via Getty Images It’s clear that professional influencers have changed the restaurant industry for better or worse, but the role is in the spotlight again af…

Remember when OpenTable caused a bunch of drama when it updated its terms of service earlier this year? Allison Page, co-founder and chief product officer at rival SevenRooms publicly decried the changes; OpenTable defended them. A Seattle business leader even asked the Washington state Attorney General to review the terms to determine if they might unfairly restrict competition.

For the Love of Restaurants: An Insider’s Guide from Daydreams to Opening Night by Los Angeles restaurateur Adam Weisblatt is not about technology. Not even a little bit! But that’s the point. The book, which Weisblatt told me he wrote for chefs and other restaurant people who are considering opening their own restaurant, details the opening of Found Oyster, a small in size but big on vibes restaurant with great bar seating and a killer smoked trout dip served with Ritz crackers in East Hollywood.

Six months after buying single-location fried chicken concept Blue Ribbon Fried Chicken, the ghost kitchen / food hall / fast food / delivery / meal kit company last valued at $9 billion bought another NYC restaurant. It’s acquiring New York City’s Salt Hanks, a wildly popular single-location sandwich shop with a viral french dip sandwich. The sandwich will be available at some Wonder locations beginning this fall.

Square and OpenTable are taking on the competition with a new digital guest profile that combines a diner’s reservation history, dining preferences and transaction data. Together, the companies say, the data will power stronger loyalty programs and personalized marketing campaigns. And it’ll drive better guest experiences during service, surfacing relevant diner info on Square’s handheld, the tableside point-of-sale devices used by servers.

I’ve got restaurant funding on the brain after reporting an exclusive about InKind, the alt financing platform for restaurants that announced another $414 million of investment a week ago. It’s not venture capital or equity investment; the funds are earmarked to support thousands of restaurants via InKind’s model of offering a lump-sum investment in exchange for restaurant credits.

I am confident that at the time of its debut, the co-founders of SevenRooms did not expect to one day be acquired by a delivery app. SevenRooms launched in 2011, a couple years before its eventual acquirer, DoorDash, started taking orders for delivery. The restaurant technology industry’s evolution has surprised a lot of us. It worked out well for SevenRooms.

It’s all happening! (Slowly.) Starting today, diners (and drinkers) will find Tock’s 8,000 venues, including 1,200 wineries, inside the Resy app. It’s the first in a multi-step process that’ll sunset the Tock brand. Resy says the move will give Tock’s restaurants more visibility. It also boosts Resy’s venue count to 25,000. This is just the first step in a much longer process that will end with Tock’s sunset.

All data is training data when AI is involved. During Tuesday’s second-quarter earnings call, Toast CEO Aman Narang explained how the data his company collects — lots and lots of restaurant data thanks to the hard work of humans that work inside tens of thousands of restaurants — will help Toast build and sell AI-powered tools that know better than all of us. The company launched its first AI-powered agent as part of a marketing product, called Toast IQ Grow, in May.