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The government is scrutinizing delivery apps again. For the next month, the Federal Trade Commission is seeking public comment on a proposal that it says could prevent unfair and deceptive practices in food and grocery delivery. The consumer protection org wants people to weigh in on delivery charges, variable and contingent fees, and personalized (read: variable) pricing inside popular food and grocery delivery apps.

The delivery companies get grumpy when the government pokes around or attempts to regulate their business; that’s assured. But there’s one facet of the FTC’s proposal that’s going to reignite an old argument: Should restaurants charge more for menu items on third-party platforms?

Restaurants do this and platforms allow it. A restaurant’s position is clear: they paying a premium to sell menu items through the apps, so diners should pay a premium for the convenience of accessing them. Elevated prices help restaurants absorb commissions the platforms charge.

Now, the FTC seems concerned that these differences in price could be deceptive, spotlighting one of the few bits of leverage restaurants have on platforms that are otherwise largely outside of their control. In its call for public comment, the FTC asks:

“Do online food delivery platforms clearly and conspicuously disclose whether the prices of items ordered are the same as, or different from, the prices of the same items offered in the store or restaurant?”

To be clear: the FTC isn’t coming for restaurants’ pricing power. But they might be coming for platform-level disclosures that would highlight the sort of pricing discrepancies that’ll anger the apps. Think about it: If large apps are forced to “clearly and conspicuously” disclose that the same menu items are available for less money elsewhere — whether in-person at a restaurant or on a rival app or platform — they could lose business.

In the past, DoorDash (for example) has encouraged but not required restaurants to keep app prices close to in-store prices. In 2023, the company said so-called “significant discrepancies” in menu prices can result in a significant sales decline for restaurants, including a 78 percent reduction in reorder rates from customers. Inflated prices are among the top complaints from diners who order on the platform, they added.

Restaurants want (some) regulation.

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DoorDash’s White House stunt kinda backfired.

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This look at the future of hospitality is sponsored by Square.

In my work on my series, Counter Trends, for The Bottom Line by Square, I’ve talked to a lot of restaurant operators. But few are as personally inspiring as the women I recently spoke to — Molly Moon-Neitzel from Molly Moon’s Ice Cream in Seattle and Arshiya Farheen from Verzênay bakery in Chicago — who have built thriving values-driven businesses that are doing great while also doing good.

Each approaches their business with genuine care. Moon-Neitzel told stories about cherries picked by local preschool children that she used in her first batches of cherry-chunk ice cream (she eventually had to graduate to a larger, but still local supplier). And Farheen described clearly why hiring a female kitchen staff — most of whom are mothers and caretakers outside of work — has benefitted her pastry business. It’s not easy — both women spoke of the uncomfortable trade-offs required to stick to their values while working to turn a profit — but it’s clearly rewarding.

It’s also refreshing to me, a business journalist, to hear stories of success tied to leaning on strong values like supporting women and local farmers and a local community, knowing that good business doesn’t have to come at the expense of being a good human.

Molly Moon-Neitzel, an outspoken community activist, started her 11-location ice cream empire as a kind of experiment. After years of running a political non-profit, she was curious if she could also run a for-profit business that aligned with her values. The answer, almost two decades later, is: most definitely yes. When we talked late last year, the business was on track to pass $15 million in annual sales, including its retail stores and presence in 150 local grocery stores.

Identifying and sticking to strong beliefs and values — values like care and community that transcend polarizing culture and politics — is critical to Molly Moon’s success, she told me. (Speaking of polarizing, you should read the full story to fully absorb Moon-Neitzel’s fiery passion for her extra-salty salted caramel recipe!)

“I was loud about my values, and people would come in and tell me that they shared my values,” Moon-Neitzel said. “I was in community from the beginning.”

In Chicago, chef Arshiya Farheen started Verzênay after spending years in Paris training, then working, in prestigious French kitchens inside hotel Le Meurice and patisserie Arnaud Delmontel. She loved the rigor of the kitchens, the precision, the discipline, the pursuit of excellence, she told me.

“But,” she said, “I was often one of very few women in the room. And while no one explicitly told me I didn’t belong, there were subtle messages about endurance, about commitment, about who was ‘cut out’ for this life.”

That experience inspired her bakery’s operational structure today. She launched Verzênay as a stand inside a farmers’ market in 2014 and moved to a brick-and-mortar location seven years later. Most of the people who work inside its kitchen are women.

“I didn’t sit down and say, ‘I’m building a female kitchen,’” she said. Instead, she built the kind of kitchen she wanted to work inside. “Over time, that intention shaped the team naturally.”

It’s also led to great results: low turnover, high-quality customer service, and consistent product quality. Or, in Farheen’s words, “deep loyalty, care, and investment.”

“When someone feels safe and respected, they don’t just clock in and clock out,” she added. “They care about the details. They protect the standards, they protect each other.”

We hadn’t discussed much about her plans for growth or expansion, though in a separate interview, her husband told me Verzenay was expanding into catering and also nationwide shipping, selling cookies, jams, jellies, preserves, and gorgeous packaged bonbons to customers outside of Chicago.

“Our growth hasn’t been explosive for the sake of expansion. It’s been steady, rooted. And I believe that’s because the foundation is strong. When you build with intention, growth becomes sustainable not just financially, but culturally. For me, that’s success.”

Beli’s big difference is its methodical data collection and analysis, gathered while encouraging people to dine out. It invites users — restaurant-goers — to tap the app to keep track of where they’ve been, where they want to go, what they like, and more. But not too much. In fact, Thelen says, “If people are spending too much time on the app, we’re not doing our job.”

That’s an unconventional position for an app founder in an ecosystem that usually rewards time spent with a product or service. So unconventional, in fact, that Beli didn’t take outside investment until it proved its own thesis — that it could collect and analyze info about diner behavior without requiring a heavy lift from its users. Then, Thelen told me, investors more easily understood why time spent on the app wasn’t the best metric to understand its success.

I learned all of this during an onstage interview last week at the Boston University Hospitality Leadership Summit, which we recorded and released this week as the inaugural live episode of my podcast, the Simmer. I’ve wanted to talk to Thelen for a while — and I’ve tried! — but her company has also eschewed traditional press in service of quietly building what Thelen hopes will become “the largest repository of preference data in the world.”

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I know it’s going to be a good newsletter day when an interview subject says: “So this is kind of controversial, but I think it’s going to be good.”

Alex Sambvani is co-founder and CEO of Slang, a voice AI platform for restaurants that announced a $36 million Series B funding round in late February. The raise brings Slang’s total funding to $68 million and, per Sambvani, will fund more development, more product features, and more insights for restaurants.

Slang got its start answering the phone at restaurants; voice AI to free up a host inside a restaurant, answering the phone and offering guests (and potential guests) fast answers to common — and even not-so-common — questions. It now does this for over 2,000 restaurants, fielding over 25 million phone calls and counting. Slang integrates with platforms including OpenTable and SevenRooms with more to come [👀]; guests can initiate a reservation over the phone, and Slang will tap real-time availability to book the table and confirm via voice and text message.

Anyway, back to the potential controversy: a feature called host insights:

“We are starting to record and monitor host-to-guest communications using AI, Sambvani explained.

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Bilt Hospitality launched just as I arrived in Philadelphia for a work event last weekend. Bilt, a loyalty and payments company, announced its new restaurant-focused loyalty and experience play with a slick, five-minute video featuring 21 top chefs and restaurateurs. Twenty of the video’s stars are men; just one is a woman, restaurateur Elizabeth Blau, 16th in line.

A few people at the restaurant industry conference I attended in Philly mentioned the video — to be honest, more people clocked the lack of gender diversity than the message — and we collectively had more questions than answers.

Thankfully, Sam Bakhshandehpour, Bilt’s new president of local merchants and former CEO of Jose Andres Group, offered to explain it all to me (and my podcast co-host Brandon) late last week.

“These are all longtime friends and partners,” he told us during Friday’s interview, “these are all people that are leaders in our industry.”

It’s a simple premise, Bakhshandehpour continued: “How do we connect all the various touch points to our guests and go back to the essence of hospitality, which is owning the relationship and enhancing the guest experience?”

Bilt Hospitality calls itself an “orchestration platform” for good service at restaurants, funneling diners into seats via AI-powered “neighborhood concierges” and handing operators AI tools to help them create, extend, and facilitate the kind of extra-special moments every top restaurant name loves to share. It’s all built on Bilt’s core business: offering people points for paying their rent or mortgage. But the hospitality of it all has Bakhshandehpour talking about disjointed restaurant systems and seamless guest experiences — common tropes in restaurant technology.

So… what is it, exactly?

Bilt Hospitality sounds flashy — a restaurant tech product backed by a hot finance startup worth $10 billion (at the time of its last announced fundraise) — but the premise is actually pretty simple.

“Everything that Bilt is able to help a restaurant do, restaurants can already do,” restaurateur Will Guidara, onetime co-owner of Eleven Madison Park and author of modern hospitality volume Unreasonable Hospitality, said in Bilt’s launch video. “Bilt just makes it easier to do these things with more consistency for more people.”

Chefs and restaurateurs get it, Bakhshandehpour told me. They may not understand the particularities of how, exactly, the technology works to connect the dots between disparate systems, but they do understand the end result: better service.

In other words, if you’re lauded restaurateur Danny Meyer in Bilt’s launch video: “To think that hospitality can be anything other than ‘one-size-fits-one’ is a big mistake.”

Bilt launched as a loyalty platform in 2019, but found its real niche a few years later when it launched a credit card — the Bilt Rewards Mastercard — that offered cardholders points in exchange for their biggest expense: rent. It evolved to a payment platform that covers a quarter of the U.S. “multifamily rental” market. (I pulled all these details from a great 2025 Fast Company story about Bilt that also uses the term “points-based economy” which I both love and loathe.)

It has tremendous reach. During our interview, Bakhshandehpour told me that 6 million rental residences are connected to Bilt; it’ll soon add 5 million mortgages. This cohort is forecasted to spend $20 billion “in the neighborhood,” he said — meaning Bilt knows a lot about people, including where they live and, roughly as determined by the size of their housing bill, the kind of restaurant they might frequent.

Here’s more about what I learned from our conversation last week, which you can listen to in full on The Simmer. And if you, like me, are still wondering where all the women went, Bakhshandehpour told me twice to “stay tuned” for more content from Bilt Hospitality, including product-specific videos.

“You’ll be the first to know,” he promised.

Bilt Hospitality operates on a commission structure.

We had to ask twice to get this answer: Bilt Hospitality makes money via commissions and, presumably, incremental diners who wouldn’t have otherwise visited a restaurant. Bakhshandehpour didn’t offer more details, but did promise relevance.

“We’re delivering the right guests to merchants,” he said. “We’re targeting exactly the right type of guest and customer that they want. That’s where this commission structure comes from.”

Its networks start with housing.

You don’t have to live in a Bilt building or even be a Bilt Mastercard holder to be a Bilt member. But it definitely helps.

“No one owns housing,” Bakhshandehpour said during our interview, a sentiment that, taken out of context, sounds strange. But what he means (I think!) is that housing — rents, landlords, owners, mortgages — is inherently disjointed. But if Bilt can attach itself to a household’s greatest expense

“To own the neighborhood, you need to own dining,” he said. “The dining experience defines your neighborhood.”

The restaurant-specific stuff is powered by an AI concierge.

On the diner side, members can ask for recommendations and take action. Bakhshandehpour recounted a recent experience: “I told the AI I have a lunch interview on this date. Find me a restaurant near the offices in [New York’s] Meatpacking that is quieter yet has a warm and inviting vibe so I can actually speak. It recommended Frenchette at the Whitney and it said, Oh, by the way, Frenchette is not a Bilt restaurant partner. Here’s an OpenTable link for you to go make the reservation. I made the reservation, show up, table’s waiting.”

Restaurant operators can use the tech, too. “With the hit of a couple buttons, you can take care of 16 guests in five minutes,” Chicago restaurateur Kevin Boehm said on Bilt’s video.

It’s unclear exactly which “buttons” Boehm is talking about — but Bakhshandehpour explained: “From Kevin’s vantage point, he sits back and plays armchair hospitality — I think that was a phrase he actually used when we hung out. He can say, ‘Who are my key people coming in tonight? Oh, Kristen and Brandon are coming in. Awesome. Make sure that Chef touches the table and that we send them dessert from me. And here’s the note, I would like it to say, Why did you give me such a hard time on your podcast?1’ Boom. Now for Kevin to have done that previously, he would have to call or text the GM, relay that. Then they would have to relay that to the manager on the floor. Somewhere along the line, the odds are high that the manual process would break.”

🎧 Listen to our full interview on The Simmer:

Listen on Spotify

Listen on Apple Podcasts

I learned about Molly Irani’s hospitality and leadership book, Service Ready, last summer. For nearly a year, I’ve looked forward to the book’s release date — today! — knowing Irani produced a valuable, tactical, helpful book about hospitality inside the restaurants — now plural — that she co-founded with her husband, chef Meherwan Irani, over 15 years ago. And to be honest, I’m particularly excited that this book was written by a woman.

That’s because… if you’ve read a book about the craft of hospitality in the last 20 years, it was probably written by a man. No shade to Danny Meyer or Will Guidara, both appropriately lauded New York-based fine dining operators who are also authors of two prominent modern hospitality books. Setting the Table, Meyer’s volume on the power good service, was published in 2006, and Unreasonable Hospitality, Guidara’s next-gen take on the business of building a world-class restaurant, was published four years ago with a follow-up coming next month. Both explore the business of fine dining and the joy of giving customers more than they expect. (Once, in coverage for Fast Company, I called Guidara, who once worked under Meyer, his “heir apparent to the legacy of being nice.”)

In contrast, Chai Pani started as a single-location Indian street food restaurant in Asheville, North Carolina in 2009, launched quickly with the help of friends, family, and about $60,000. Since then, it’s expanded to Decatur, Georgia and Washington, DC. The team launched a second concept, Botiwalla, with locations in Atlanta, Georgia and Charlotte and Asheville, in North Carolina. Meherwan also launched a line of spices, Spicewalla, offering restaurant diners (and not-yet-converted diners!) spice blends for home use that are roasted, ground, and packed by hand.

It’s a remarkable business success story, made more remarkable when retold through the eyes of Molly Irani, a compassionate but resolute industry leader willing to share her story — both struggles and success — with the industry at large.

When we talked last week, Molly compared today’s book release to sending her child to kindergarten. “It’s a combination of: you’re really ready to set the thing free, and then on the day it’s terrifying,” she told me. “Now it’s more the feeling of, okay, we don’t actually get to control what happens next. It’s the same thing as parenting; we can’t control how much humanity our children are going to encounter… much to my dismay, by the way.”

It’s a fitting comparison. Molly leans into her role as a mother, both literally and figuratively, at Chai Pani. Her Instagram handle is @chaipanimom, an unofficial but appropriately-titled role inside the growing business that became a huge part of this book offering a kind of warm and welcome nurturing that doesn’t typically show up in business stories.

“I think women can see someone being referred to as mom in a business construct, and it’s… annoying,” Molly told me. “People sometimes feel offended by that, like we shouldn’t be expecting women to have to play the mother role to other people in their businesses.” (No lies there.)

The book opens with a recounting of Chai Pani’s 2022 James Beard Award win for Outstanding Restaurant, a major external validation of the team’s work in both the kitchen and the dining room. It’s also validation of the restaurant’s different way of operating, of building largely outside the brightest spotlights of America’s biggest cities and fine-dining centers. The Iranis and their team celebrate these differences with confidence, and it shows.

There are plenty of lessons in this book that I could bullet point out for any budding or evolving restaurant operator, but Molly does it beautifully on her own. Instead, during our interview we talked through some of the particularities of Molly’s restaurateur-turned-author journey, which I found both exceptional and easily applicable; her story is inspiring and practical at the same time.

I love handing the mic to strong, supportive, powerful women in restaurants! And I love that the next great hospitality book is written in Molly Irani’s handwriting.

Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Expedite: You managed to write a book that’s both personal and professional, which is so fitting for this story. How did it happen?

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Wonder, the restaurant / virtual food hall / multi-unit chain that evolved from a startup that made dinner inside tricked-out Mercedes Sprinter vans, is now running over 100 locations in multiple Northeastern states. Recently, the brand, which has raised over $1 billion in funding, announced big expansion plans in Texas, far from its New York roots in both distance and my restaurant success metric of choice: vibes.

Wonder’s first brick-and-mortar store launched in Manhattan, but its future is decidedly more suburban. In fact, suburban stores are the chain’s top performers, Wonder North America CEO Tony Hoggett told me in a recent interview. With up to 30 restaurant brands under one roof and a host of proprietary kitchen tech to cook it, it’s offering customers novelty and quality and meals delivered free and fast — or picked up conveniently on the way home.

Considering this, Texas is an obvious candidate for expansion.

“The Texas triangle has 23 million customers — Fort Worth, San Antonio, Austin and Houston — strong and growing suburbs, high car volume,” Hoggett said. People are ordering more food for delivery and pickup, he added, and population and earnings are growing.

“Our offer just isn’t reliant on high foot volume — meaning that’s the vast minority of our business,” Hoggett said. “The majority of our business is delivery and pickup, which really plays to the suburbs.”

It’s a good narrative for the brand, which faced scrutiny as it expanded in New York. In a January report, Bloomberg Joshua Brustein staked out an uptown Manhattan Wonder location during lunchtime. “During my hour there,” he reported, “Wonder completed 26 orders, including mine.” That’s… fine performance for a tiny restaurant, but Wonder’s premise relies on size, scale, and speed to succeed. Its tech-fueled kitchens are built to pump out meals; recent investments in robotics — like the $187 million it spent buying Sweetgreen’s salad bot last year — are meant to make it all move even faster.

“[Wonder is] slightly more systematized than a typical restaurant, which makes it look a lot more like a grocery store,” Wonder founder and CEO Marc Lore told me shortly after Hoggett joined the company. “The kitchen looks more like a micro-fulfillment center than it does a kitchen.”

Lore said Hoggett’s experience leading Amazon’s grocery business, which he did until he joined Wonder as chief operating officer in late 2024, aligns “really, really well” with the job at Wonder.

I caught up with Hoggett a couple of weeks ago, shortly after the company announced its plans for the Lone Star State, including stores in Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Austin, and San Antonio metropolitan areas.. Here’s what he has to say about Wonder’s brave new (sprawling) market and what it means for the future of the company.

Per usual, our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity. This time, I included our opening pleasantries because I thought I stumbled on the real reason Wonder chose Texas.

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A couple of years ago, Uber co-founder and former CEO Travis Kalanick gave a keynote speech at a niche industry conference called Food on Demand in Las Vegas. It was among the first public appearances from the executive in his role as CEO of CloudKitchens, a real estate and ghost kitchen company converting warehouse spaces into commissary kitchens for restaurants building delivery-only concepts, a business that was once predicted to reach a $1 trillion by 20301. In front of an eager audience, Kalanick laid out his growth and automation plans for the restaurant-adjacent company, invoking, as he is wont to do, Uber’s success.

“Can you do to the kitchen what Uber did to the car?” he rhetorically asked the audience. That was his plan, he said, for CloudKitchens and its associated companies, a robotics business called Lab37, restaurant operations platform Otter, and Picnic, an office catering platform. Together, these initiatives become, per Kalanick, “infrastructure for better food.”

But CloudKitchens was never a restaurant company… and, spoiler alert, it wasn’t about the food, either. It was a huge, expensive bet on disrupting the restaurant industry by force and scale backed by over a billion dollars in investment; a familiar playbook in early 2000s tech. The trouble is, it didn’t work. CloudKitchens operated in a kind of permanent stealth mode, its secrecy hiding complaints, stumbles, and struggles common to tech-forward “restaurant” companies trying to scale food like software.

Last week, Kalanick said he would roll CloudKitchens into a new venture called Atoms, adding automation in transportation and, of all things, mining, into its portfolio, alongside all the restaurant stuff. “It’s not entirely clear how he plans to tackle mining and transportation,” TechCrunch reported after the announcement. Honestly, it’s not all that clear how the company, 10 years in, plans to tackle food, either.

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His statement was clear:

“After more than two decades of building and leading this restaurant, I’ve decided to step away and allow our extraordinary leaders to now guide the restaurant into its next chapter. I have also resigned from the board of MAD, the nonprofit organization I founded in 2011.”

In a video of Redzepi addressing his staff, also posted on Instagram, the message was less clear.

“The running of this restaurant… for now… will sit on you guys,” he said to the restaurant’s workers, gathered before Wednesday service. “You’ll see me around but not in the way you’ve seen me for the past 23 years,” he added. “For me, I’m going into planning the next phase.”

The move felt inevitable, but still jarring to even the closest industry watchers.

Honestly I feel like I knew it was coming but I’m still shocked, a fellow writer messaged me. Didn’t think it would happen this quickly — or at all. The financial pressures must’ve been enormous, another industry pro said.

I bet they were. The stakes changed when American Express, parent to reservations services Tock and Resy and a major supporter of Noma LA, pulled its support of the residency — a story I broke in this newsletter. Tech company Blackbird soon followed. Both companies offered refunds to diners who purchased tickets through their respective orgs, and pledged to donate all remaining proceeds to groups that support restaurant workers.

One at a time, mentions of each company disappeared from Noma’s website. But before it was scrubbed, the site read: Noma LA is supported by our global partner Blackbird and our longstanding partner American Express, without whom Noma LA would not be possible.

So, uh, is it?

For now the residency continues, albeit without Redzepi. The loss of corporate sponsorships is not the most important angle of the Noma story. But I do think it is the most consequential given how restaurants operate today. Sponsors like Amex have become underwriters of what is still a tough working culture that people find troubling — even though restaurants, including Noma, say that much about kitchen work has changed over the last decade.

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Update 3/10, 10:40am PDT: Blackbird has been removed from Noma LA’s website after pulling its sponsorship.

American Express, parent company of reservations services Resy and Tock, is stepping away from its planned involvement in Noma’s Los Angeles residency. A spokesperson for Resy confirmed the move.

This comes after a remarkable New York Times report that highlighted a history of alleged physical and mental abuse inside Noma from 2009 to 2017. A decade later, as reported by Julia Moskin in the Times, former workers say Noma’s founding chef, René Redzepi, “has not acknowledged the extent of the violence they say he inflicted for years.”

The Copenhagen restaurant’s pop-up opens this week and lasts until June. On Monday, Amex/Resy cancelled a planned industry dinner scheduled for next week. In an email sent to a small group of invitees, a Resy executive wrote:

In light of the disturbing information that has come to our attention, American Express, Resy, and Tock have made the decision to step away from our involvement in Noma’s LA residency. As a result, we are no longer hosting the dinner.

Resy’s rep also said they feel badly about canceling an industry event people were excited to attend, but “felt it was important today to take the first step of exiting the sponsorship.” The bookings company is considering several options to make it up to the group of invitees, they said.

It’s notable fallout for Noma, whose long-planned Los Angeles residency is scheduled to open on Wednesday. (The opening is continuing as planned, according to a Monday Los Angeles Times report.) A previous reference on Noma’s website to “our longstanding partner American Express” has been removed.

Blackbird, the loyalty company led by Resy founder Ben Leventhal, was until Tuesday listed on the Noma LA website as the restaurant’s global partner, “without whom Noma LA would not be possible.” Blackbird granted some of its members special access to Noma LA, which sold out of $1,500 per person tickets in minutes after releasing them to the public. Leventhal said in February that Blackbird planned to subsidize the cost of meals during four industry nights, inviting members of the local restaurant community to dine for a relatively affordable $250 per person.

On Tuesday via email, Leventhal confirmed Blackbird pulled its support as well:

“Rene’s past practices, by his own admission, were unacceptable and abhorrent. We cannot lean on time elapsed and rehabilitation claims when these things resurface. Regardless of context this is highly problematic behavior.

Our priority is the restaurant community of Los Angeles and our fight continues to be for them. There are many restaurant workers and small producers and purveyors who are in the blast radius of this situation. We would like to reduce the further damage to a battered LA-based restaurant community and that will dictate how we act.

All proceeds from all of Blackbird’s ticket sales will be donated to organizations that are advocating for hourly wage workers and hospitality industry professionals. In addition, we’ve cancelled all of our events at Noma LA. We will continue to engage with the community and do our best to do what’s right.”

For the last month, former Noma chef Jason Ignacio White has been collecting and chronicling stories of abuse inside Noma on his Instagram account and an associated website, noma-abuse.com. White is scheduled to lead a protest Wednesday outside the restaurant with industry advocacy group One Fair Wage. He plans to deliver a formal demand letter to Redzepi calling for immediate dialogue, reparations for workers harmed by abusive practices, and structural change to workplace policies.

In a statement provided to the Times last week (and in a longer version posted to his Instagram account), Redzepi said,

“Although I don’t recognize all details in these stories, I can see enough of my past behavior reflected in them to understand that my actions were harmful to people who worked with me. To those who have suffered under my leadership, my bad judgment, or my anger, I am deeply sorry and I have worked to change.”

Noma also posted a lengthy statement to its Instagram account, including, in part:

“We’re aware of the stories circulating online and want to be clear: These claims do not reflect the workplace Noma is today. Although the stories appear to date back many years, we take them seriously and are looking into them carefully. Since that time, we have improved processes to address concerns. We are continuing to do so with an independent audit that ensures we keep our standards high and our workplace safe.”

The layoffs hit Square’s restaurant team hard; head of food and beverage Ming-Tai Huh was among the 4,000 Block employees (and a significant portion of the team that worked on Square for restaurants) who were terminated recently, he confirmed. That, too, was a surprise to many, including me. After all, what’s more human than the hospitality business?

The answer: Not much! But, as this move reminds us, Block is not in the hospitality business, it’s a product-driven tech company. I used to call some restaurant tech businesses, including Square, “hospitable technology” companies. I think maybe… those days are over.

Hospitality is a human business. But going forward, that tech that supports it may not be. We live in the future, but where will all the people go? This is a particularly poignant question for hospitality tech.

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“Our team had an extreme focus on the operator/restaurant,” Huh wrote in a LinkedIn post last week announcing the news of his departure. “We worked not just long days, but nights and weekends, too — the times that really matter for the food industry. This allowed us to persuade so many restaurants, industry workers, and technology/go-to-market partners that Square was becoming a formidable food industry ally again.”

Square was becoming a formidable food industry ally again. In the last year, it introduced new, seriously upgraded hardware and made inroads inside the kind of hot, hip, high-profile restaurants that any restaurant technology company would be delighted to land as a client. (I see you, New York City darlings Stars and Borgo.) In addition to his previous day job — and, before that, spending the better part of a decade in the product org at Square nemesis Toast — Huh is a restaurant operator and Square client in Boston, giving him the kind of both-sides experience that carried clout and a lot of goodwill to his restaurant peers and partners.

After 13 years on this beat, I can confidently say that it is very obvious to an operator when a restaurant technology product is built by people who have never worked in restaurants. Still, Block’s leadership thinks AI can do it better.

At least, that’s what CEO Jack Dorsey told both Wall Street and what remains of the company in late February, an outwardly terrifying, doom-and-gloom development that sent shares of Block, Inc. up 24 percent before laid off workers could pack up their desks.

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Can any company really take on the entrenched behemoths of Big Delivery? Olo, a pioneering digital ordering company with a restaurant customer list 800 brands strong, is going to try.

On Tuesday, Olo founder and CEO Noah Glass announced a consumer-facing, “second-party” ordering app that’ll launch later this year. The app ties together much of the info the company has on restaurants and their customers hitting third party delivery’s weak spots and leveraging Olo’s strong relationships with the largest chain restaurants in America.

The app, which Glass says is “just the beginning” of a new digital ecosystem that pulls the best features from first- and third-party ordering models while ditching the downsides, aggregates Olo’s restaurant customers, similar to other marketplace apps. Diners are encouraged to follow brands (examples from the announcement included Culver’s, Waffle House, and Carl’s Jr.) and place orders for pickup and delivery inside the app.

“For two decades, Olo has been quietly powering the digital infrastructure behind many of America’s favorite restaurant brands,” Glass told me over email. “With the Olo app, we’re surfacing that same trusted infrastructure to guests in a way that benefits both sides of the equation, delivering on our mission of hospitality at scale.”

(Actually, Glass wrote, “delivering on our mission of Hospitality at Scale™️” [emphasis mine] which is how I learned that Olo trademarked that phrase last year, around the same time it was acquired by private equity firm Thoma Bravo and delisted from the New York Stock Exchange.)

Olo’s forthcoming app is a distinctly consumer-facing offering from a company that’s spent over two decades working to stay (mostly) invisible. Olo is a software-as-a-service platform providing digital ordering, payment, and guest engagement tools. It’s one of those restaurant tech companies that works best when the diner doesn’t notice it. But in recent years it’s slowly stepped into the consumer spotlight. This app is a big leap forward.

“Expanding from a pure B2B company to offering guest-facing solutions is a natural evolution, and we’re not starting from zero,” Glass said.

Instead, it’s tapping an existing customer network of 40 million diners who’ve already signed up to save login and payment information (plus other info, like allergies or other dietary preferences) for use across Olo’s network of restaurants. That lets customers check out with one tap inside Olo’s new app, a convenience play that the company says boots business; restaurants experience a 7.5 percent increase in checkout conversion — that means the person actually buys the food versus abandoning their cart — when guests use a saved account instead of manually entering a credit card, or even just typing a username and password.

Olo’s newest promise to restaurants is even stronger. They won’t pay commissions for orders placed inside the app (this is the biggest complaint restaurants have about larger third-party services like DoorDash) and they’ll also receive valuable customer info like names and delivery addresses from customers. Olo’s ‘follow’ feature will juice that data since restaurants can see who chooses to follow them.

From the stage at Olo’s annual Beyond4 event in Arizona and speaking to a room full of restaurant customers, Glass called this, “One-click customer acquisition.”

WTF is ‘second party’ ordering?

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I reached out to Huh, but he declined to comment. I have also reached out to reps for Square with questions about the future of Square for Restaurants and what businesses can expect from the company moving forward.

Update, 3/2/26: Huh confirmed this news on LinkedIn. Block did not respond or acknowledge receipt of my questions.

Corporate earnings calls can sound discordant in the face of historic layoffs, and Thursday’s Block call was one of the worst I’ve heard. Block CEO Jack Dorsey announced the company had laid off close to half of its employees, reducing headcount from 10,000 to under 6,000. The company’s stock price quickly jumped close to 25 percent as Block’s executives reported a year of growth. Dorsey assured investors that he had gotten ahead of a potential problem and some analysts congratulated company execs on the company’s recent performance.

Dorsey and other execs cited rapidly evolving and powerful artificial intelligence as the reason for the layoffs; he seemed particularly excited to push the suddenly much smaller company to move (and ship) faster. I can understand how AI might trim a company’s tech and engineering org. I understand less about how it’s going to replace the people working on Square’s restaurant products that lost their jobs this week. (From what I’ve heard so far, the layoffs cut across functions.)

During the call, Block’s leadership extolled Square’s progress inside restaurants, flagging a year-over-year increase in gross payment volume, or the total dollar amount of all payments processed by restaurants and other food-service vendors using Square’s point of sale. Block wants to “bring the playbook we’ve used over in food and beverage in the last 12 to 18 months into other verticals to drive further strength,” Amrita Ahuja, Block chief operating officer/chief financial officer, said.

Square has supported food and restaurant entrepreneurs since its earliest days as a payments company. It has long celebrated restaurant wins. Even in the face of a historic workforce reduction, good restaurant news made it into yesterday’s press release: Square’s sales team managed to sign “one of LA’s most celebrated restaurants, Anajak Thai… due to Square Handheld, our seller-first support team, our growing restaurant software suite, and strong integrations with partners like OpenTable.”

(No shade to Anajak and absolutely no shade to the restaurant team at Square, past and current. If your role was affected and you want to continue receiving this newsletter, please reach out for a year of Expedite on me. Just respond to this email.)

ICYMI:

OpenTable launched an ads business.

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Tl;dr: it’s about access.

In a couple of interviews over the last week, Resy CEO Pablo Rivero stressed, repeatedly, that the move would create a much better booking and discovery experience for diners while leaving all Tock’s functions — deposits, ticketing, special events — intact. Tock restaurants will still use Tock’s software to manage their reservations and tables; the only noticeable change will be a logo switch to Resy. (Oh, and, “new demand coming from new channels to drive more business to them,” Rivero, a polished CEO who’s spent over a decade of his career at the financial services company, reminded me.)

Tock’s sunset is a decisively… corporate ending for the brand, once a lean startup taking — and often landing — punches against its rivals. As Rivero talked me through Amex’s plan to consolidate partner restaurants under Resy’s banner last week, I couldn’t help thinking about Tock’s early days, circa 2014, when it launched as a ticketing platform for restaurants and marketed itself like it knew better than everyone else. (To be fair, the ticketing and prepayme

nt model worked great for some restaurants, particularly the in-demand, tasting-menu type destination spots that saw their no-shows reduced to almost none.) Tock’s founder, Nick Kokonas, was an outspoken character in the burgeoning restaurant tech business — I knew I was in for an earful each time I saw his name light up on my phone’s screen. I have no complaints — I’ve always loved a good agitator. You’ll have to read my Fast Company story for details of Tock’s OpenTableSaurus stunt, still one of the best stories from the earliest days of what we’re now calling the “reservation wars1.”

Tock, sold by Kokonas to Squarespace in 2021 for $400 million, was never really meant to be a consumer brand — it was a tech company for restaurants. I hear that its restaurant partners still feel this way; as I reported today’s story, more than one restaurant told me they long trusted Tock to address their specific concerns, make product changes and upgrade features. They felt heard, in other words, and hoped the same support would continue under the Resy flag. (Execs say it will.)

…

The coming consumer-facing Resy-Tock consolidation is part of a larger push at Amex to (finally) unite its restaurant inventory with its popular credit cards, providing more perks to card members — and attracting new ones.

In September, Amex added a popular $400 Resy credit to Platinum cards; diners get a $100 statement credit per quarter when dining at a Resy restaurant. (Some Tock restaurants will start to become eligible for the credit this summer.) The credit has proved remarkably popular; as I wrote in Fast Company, in the three weeks following the announcement, there was a 36 percent increase in Resy reservations made by users with a U.S. Platinum card linked to their account—and a 5X increase in the daily average number of accounts being linked. It was not a coincidence that this dining credit was announced at the same time American Express raised its annual Platinum card fee by $200. (Amex apparently saw serious demand for the cards, higher price and all.)

Sixty-five percent of new Amex card members are Millennial or Gen Z consumers; the average age of a new Platinum customer is 33.

“We’re thinking about our cards like — we are moving on from being a card company and moving into being a membership company,” Rivero said. “The card is your vehicle to access the company, but once you access that, you have membership benefits that come with that product.”

All of this sounds great for people with an American Express card… but what about everyone else? You don’t need to have an Amex to use Resy, Rivero reminds me; anyone can sign up for an account, save favorites, set a notify alert. Still, he said, “Amex and Resy work better together.”

…

Eventually, Resy will consolidate its restaurant-facing tech into one platform, offering all restaurants access to the same software. The company has been working to integrate the tech since the Tock acquisition.

(In a recent and mostly unrelated conversation, I asked Resy co-founder and former CEO Ben Leventhal if it was hard to go from leading a nimble reservations startup to working inside a $220 billion financial institution, post acquisition. “Amex’s pace may at times seem slow, but ultimately they are in the business of getting it right,” he told me. Fair point.)

“Hospitality tech acquisitions and consolidation is not simple, especially for us, where it’s two front ends on the consumer side and two back-end technologies on the operator side,” Junaid Shams, American Express chief operating officer of global dining, told me in an interview. (Shams was the co-founder and CEO of Rooam, a payments platform also acquired by Amex in 2024 and announced at the time of the Tock acquisition.)

Shams says the team is pulling the best of Resy and Tock to build the new system. “It’s been a very detailed process, but the output that we have here is something very unique and something very exciting for our consumers,” he promised.

I’ve heard anecdotally that Tock has better restaurant-facing tech than Resy; I pushed Rivero to agree but he wouldn’t. “I honestly think it’s going to be the best of both worlds,” he told me.

…

The reservations business looks and feels a lot different than it did a decade ago. The stakes seem higher, even though its function is effectively the same: diners want a (great) seat at the table, and restaurants want to fill their chairs. Deep-pocked industry players are courting increasingly tech-savvy restaurants and writing huge checks to win their business. A delivery company bought a reservations service! Others broker access with membership and pay-to-play models — we’re all still trying to get into Carbone — and it’s shockingly easy to build a personal AI agent that makes all your reservations for you. The business has grown up, and I think restaurants are better for it. Still… is it weird for a technology writer to be nostalgic for simpler times?

✌️, Tock, I’ll miss you.

Some oldies but goodies:

In November, 14-year-old DoorDash warned Wall Street it planned to spend aggressively this year. On Wednesday, CEO Tony Xu detailed the company’s “massive and expensive undertaking” meant to unify its disparate tech. It’s building “a single technology platform that will allow us to better leverage our global scale while still enabling us to offer local audiences the best possible experience.”

Thanks to two major acquisitions in the last five years, DoorDash currently operates three different tech platforms: its own, plus platforms used by Deliveroo, based in London, and Wolt, based in Finland. DoorDash finalized its Deliveroo acquisition in October; then, Xu promised, “the Deliveroo app and products you know and love aren’t going anywhere.” (DoorDash bought Wolt in 2022.)

Together, the services span over 40 countries and powered almost $30 billion in orders last quarter. It is, per Xu, “the largest local commerce platform outside China.”

But they’re still operating on disparate platforms. As Xu said on Wednesday, “This slows us down.”

In a letter to shareholders released on Wednesday, Xu explained DoorDash’s complexity and the large and pricey challenges that come with rebuilding a dynamic logistics system that’s grown by leaps and bounds since its introduction over a decade ago.

“If the complexity of bringing you a burrito1 on time is hard, think about the systems we must build today,’ Xu wrote.

DoorDash’s rebuilt platform, meant to be used across its brands, will include elements from all three services. It should be finished — or mostly finished — sometime this year.

“You’ll be happy with the progress,” Ravi Inukonda, DoorDash’s chief financial officer, assured investors during Wednesday’s call.

Pressed on a timeline for the new tech’s rollout, Xu said, “I wish that the tech sack were already here.”

Here’s what else DoorDash is prioritizing during is high-rolling year:

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