You've seen it in your favorite restaurant, as well as the upscale grocery store around the corner. It's lurking in Arby's and Panera, but also surrounding you at breweries and tap houses: industrial chic. This design aesthetic that took over the world since the dawn of warehouse conversions (and Chipotle) appears to be on its way out.
This month's vocabulary lesson, as gleaned from the rare “clean” entries on the Urban Dictionary site, includes: Special snowflake — a term for someone who believes she or he is different and unique.
Husband Doug and I have been married 28 years. The realization we probably shouldn't work together full-time came earlier in our marriage when I was creating a valance for our window, and I asked him to help me hang it. That was probably 20 years ago, so I don't remember exactly what was said, only that hanging a curtain amounted to much gnashing of teeth—too much for what the job really entailed.
When soup is the heart of your business, you can't serve just the basics. That's why founder Eric Ersher tries to keep dreaming up new soups, sometimes from the unlikeliest places.
Living in the resort hinterlands surrounding Disneyland, Dara Maleki felt a lot of the local restaurants served up poor service and lackluster food with prices seemingly aimed at fleecing the throngs of tourists that flock to Anaheim, California. Even with no experience in the restaurant business, he felt he could do better, so he dreamt up a concept that could appease tourist-weary locals as well as mouse-eared visitors.
Collectively, brothers Chris and Tim Tresslar own 10 Plato's Closets and two Style Encores. In their 15+ years in the recycled fashion biz, they've convinced six younger relatives and a few family friends to get into the same Winmark brands, and they offer a simple, but important piece of advice: Put a fresh face at the counter whom the young, primarily female customers can relate to.
As the dot-com bust slowed the economy at the end of the 1990s, Jeff Oddo noticed a significant opportunity for his facilities maintenance business as his clients began outsourcing ever more services to reduce their headcount of employees handling non-core functions.
What happens when Kim Kardashian, Richard Simmons and Leonardo DiCaprio walk into a yogurt store? If you're Shoshana Joseph and Marta Knittel—owners of West Hollywood's Yogurt Stop—your fledgling franchise gets major free press and street cred just when you need it.
From the classic diner design to the comfort food inside, Freddy's Frozen Custard & Steakburgers radiates post-war optimism.
It was long after the lunch rush, but Chris Newcomb still wasn't comfortable taking up a booth in the Jackson, Mississippi, restaurant that bears his nickname, Newk's. The reason was what James Patterson was holding in his hand—a camera. As Newcomb sat in the booth with an ahi tuna salad and a slice of pink cake in front of him as props, he raised and lowered his chin, looked away, looked at the camera just as Patterson, the photographer, instructed, but it was clear he wasn't enjoying it, no matter how many times he reassured us he was fine.