Expedite is back from vacation. While I catch up, here are a few stories of note from the last two weeks. More soon!

I have a confession: I’ve never seen an episode of The Bear.

I know. I know. But I can’t be the only one. Restaurant workers’ …uh, beef with industry drama The Bear has been well documented; plenty of people say that the realistic depictions of life inside a high-pressure kitchen can trigger PTSD or just makes watching TV feel like work. (I’ve never worked in a kitchen but I do claim the latter.)

The latest and last season of the show recently landed on Hulu, and it sounds like product placement and brand sponsorships inside the show have overtaken the narrative. I’m not surprised — I do watch most seasons of Wells Fargo-, BMW- and Saratoga Spring Water-sponsoredTop Chef, I get it — but I am a little bummed about product placement with the power to shift a creative narrative. — Best Food Blog ($)

Jersey Mike’s filed for a $12 billion IPO.

A $12 billion initial public offering for a 3,300-restaurant strong sandwich chain is significant. (For context, both Sweetgreen and Cava hit about $5 billion during their IPOs.) Jersey Mike’s, which has yet to announce a date for its public market debut, was acquired last year by PE giant Blackstone for $8 billion. Its CEO, Charlie Morrison, who also led Wingstop’s IPO a decade ago, says the company could grow to 7,500 locations in the US; it’s also planning to open 400 store openings in Ireland and the UK.

The Red Lobster endless shrimp fiasco just keeps giving.

When the 58-year-old seafood chain went under two years ago, its fabled “endless shrimp” promotion (or LTO, limited-time offer, in restaurant lingo) was a compellingly convenient nail-in-the-coffin for framing the brand’s downfall. Poetic, really. But the bigger story of the once-beloved chain’s 2024 fall is more complicated than just underpriced shrimp. A new lawsuit from Red Lobster shareholders alleges that its former majority owner, Thai Union Group, tanked the business on purpose to enrich itself.

“When it was clear that the Everyday $20 Ultimate Endless Shrimp offering was wreaking havoc on Red Lobster and its balance sheet, [interim CEO Paul] Kenny doubled down,” in order to benefit the parent company, the suit alleges. — Fortune

Oh heyyy, the Bay Area has more Michelin stars than New York.

That makes a nice headline, but I agree with San Francisco Standard editor-at-large Sara Deseran, I don’t think of my city as a fine-dining town either. — SF Standard ($)

Wonder will deliver via Zipline drones in Texas next year.

Wonder tested drone delivery in New Jersey, but it’s committing to the bit in Texas. In a March interview, Wonder CEO Tony Hoggett told me that the delivery-forward chain expanded to Texas from the New York City area because of the state’s sprawl and growing population. Wonder plays good in the suburbs, he said. Hoggett previously ran Amazon’s grocery business from Austin, and during our interview I joked that maybe that’s why the company picked Texas as its expansion target — it’s probably easier to court an exec if you start building businesses in their backyard. (While convenient, Hoggett said, that wasn’t the case.)

But beyond its Wonder-friendly suburban sprawl, Texas has become a kind of ground zero for another type of delivery innovation: flying drones. Zipline, a leading drone delivery company, currently operates in major metros in Texas with a large presence in Dallas-Fort Worth. That scale and coverage is convenient for a business built on ultra-fast food delivery. Wonder customers should be able to order Zipline-delivered meals from all its Texas locations by the end of 2027 which could, by that time, total close to 100.— release

Susan Anderson, Uber’s global head of delivery, is leaving the company after 10 years.

“It’s time to take a breath again,” Anderson wrote on LinkedIn.

Liberty Mutual Investments gives InKind $320 million.

The investment arm of an insurance company is backing InKind, a restaurant finance company that gives capital to restaurants, funded by food and drink credits that it sells to diners. It’s an innovative model (I put InKind on the Fast Company Most Innovative list a couple years ago) and one that’s given $600 million in cash to over 7,000 restaurants. InKind will use its new tranche of funding in part to help develop AI-native tools designed to help restaurants on its platform drive demand during slow times. — release

Previously:

Toast is looking for a new kind of restaurant partner. The point of sale and payments company is actively recruiting an operator to build a new restaurant concept in Boston alongside the tech company’s product teams.

Toast will fund the opening — or at least “help” to fund the opening — per a release. The selected operator will enjoy a direct line to Toast’s executive team and early access to all the company’s tech. Toast calls the initiative Toast Lab, a fitting title for an experimental proving ground of sorts. Interested (and aspiring!) restaurants can apply through July 14, but the contest is limited to existing Toast operators who have used the platform for more than six months. Specifics of the deal, including the amount of funding and any potential ownership stake or controlling interest, will be decided after the operator is selected before the end of the year.

We’ve seen this kind of collaboration before.

DoorDash has dabbled in restaurant operations; Square has helped to document openings and once opened its own proof-of-concept brick-and-mortar around the corner from my house. Tech companies get a real-life proving ground for their products and, in the case of a successful restaurant, years or even decades of promotion. I can already imagine the press release headlines: Toast made this restaurant an overnight success!

I’m happy to see restaurant technology companies supporting restaurants (or, in this case, restaurant) in this way. But interested parties should definitely read the fine print:

“Applicant grants Toast a non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, fully sublicensable, worldwide license to use, reproduce, modify, and create derivative works from materials submitted as part of the Application (”Submission Materials”) for any business purpose. Toast may independently develop concepts similar to those in Applicant’s Submission Materials, and nothing herein restricts Toast’s right to do so. Applicant represents that it has the right to submit all materials included in the Application. Applicant should not include any information it considers trade secret or proprietary unless willing to do so subject to these Terms.”

On Monday morning, American Express announced its plans to acquire European reservations platform TheFork for $700 million in cash. The deal is expected to close later this year subject to regulatory approval and, when completed, will bring the total number of bookable venues on the American Express network — those on Amex-owned Resy, Tock, and TheFork — to 75,000, per a release.

Assuming everyone’s accurately reporting their inventory, that’s more reservable spots than OpenTable’s global roster of 65,000 restaurants, a shift that would unseat the once-undisputed category leader.

“Our card members love restaurants, and it’s exciting to see the opportunity for dining to become a greater part of our membership model globally,” Pablo Rivero, Resy CEO and American Express svp of global dining, posted on LinkedIn.

A representative for American Express told me that following the closing of the potential acquisition, TheFork and Resy would operate as separate platforms. “We expect TheFork to continue operating under its existing leadership, brand and platform,” they said.

Additionally, TheFork would be part of Amex’s international card business, they said, partnering with Resy to connect the company’s full global dining network.

Restaurants on Tock received a similar message when that acquisition was announced years ago. “As you may know, American Express owns Resy,” Tock CEO Matt Tucker wrote partner restaurants in 2024. “When the deal closes, Tock and Resy will continue to remain separate businesses.”

“Dining is one of the most important ways people engage with our brand,” said Rafa Marquez, president of international card services at American Express, in a statement. “Over time, the proposed acquisition would help us enrich our differentiated membership model by offering card members more ways to discover, book and access great restaurants.”

American Express has been aggressively growing its reservations network by acquisition. In 2019 it bought Resy for a sum that was never officially confirmed but rumored at $200 million. It acquired reservations platform Tock for $400 million in 2024 and later this summer will move its 8,000 venues to Resy, dismantling the Tock brand and boosting Resy’s bookable venue count to 25,000.

TheFork launched in 2007 in France as LaFourchette and was acquired by TripAdvisor in 2014; its restaurants span 11 countries with many concentrated in major cities like Paris, London, and Rome. According to TripAdvisor, TheFork earned $232 million in revenue in the 12 months ending March 31.

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DoorDash’s White House stunt kinda backfired.

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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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“The zine opens up an opportunity to provide context, on our own terms, about who we are and what we love, to color in the edges of your time with us. It’s like watching a film on Criterion, an…

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A Fortune profile had me nostalgic thinking about Big Delivery’s early days. How far they’ve come. Read on for a look at this newsletter’s first DoorDash mention, in September …

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