This is the episode I'll be recommending to every restaurant owner I talk to this year.

I sat down with Craig Susser, founder of Craig's Restaurant in LA and Nashville. 35 years in the industry. Waiter, bartender, maitre d' for 22 years, and now one of the most respected names in fine dining. This guy has seen it all.

Craig gets brutally transparent about what it actually takes to survive and scale in this business right now — margins, labor costs, the online review nightmare, what hospitality really means, and why most operators are one bad decision away from losing the regulars they worked years to build.

This isn't theory. This is someone who's been in the trenches for three decades and figured out what works.

🍽️ Learn more about how to scale your restaurant through Dineline’s done-for-you marketing program: https://dineline.co/growth/watch/Youtube

Babak Bina didn’t just survive the restaurant industry. He bent an entire city around his vision.

After landing in Boston as an immigrant, washing dishes to stay alive, he spent the next 30 years building concepts that defined the city’s dining scene.

Babak talks about the moments operators never admit publicly:
– The lowest point where he almost walked away
– Flooding an entire dining room and owning the fallout
– Reinventing concepts while everyone else plays it safe
– Investing in people instead of chasing shiny ideas
– The pandemic moments that could’ve erased everything
– What immigrants understand about hospitality that others don’t
– The belief he holds that most operators will disagree with

The market is shifting again. The operators who grow from here will be the ones who think like Babak — conviction, adaptability, and brutal honesty.

This is one of the strongest interviews we’ve ever released.
If you’re tired of surface-level advice, press play.

🍽️ Learn more about how to scale your restaurant through Dineline’s done-for-you marketing program: https://dineline.co

📲 Grow your restaurant the SMART way with our proprietary restaurant software, Dishio: https://get.dish.io/

🎓 Take a look at our FREE Restaurant Marketing Course: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL403WqY9pN16aGIQc02X1nXFQLg0ThWuF

Follow us on Instagram for tips to grow your restaurant: https://www.instagram.com/dinelineco/

Jordan Boesch didn’t wait for a better solution to manage staff schedules. He built it.

He was just a kid when he saw his dad struggling to manage his team's schedule. Spreadsheets, paper, chaos—you know the drill.

So what did he do?

He coded a tool to help his dad out. Fast forward a few years… and that tool became 7shifts—now used by over 50,000 restaurants to manage their teams, schedules, and payroll.

I sat down with Jordan on the latest episode of Restaurant Misfits and got the full story:

• How he scaled a side project into a restaurant tech powerhouse
• What he’s seeing across thousands of operators right now
• His take on AI, retention, labor costs—and what’s next for restaurants
• The biggest mistakes owners still make with their staff

Whether you're running one location or scaling a group, this one’s packed with gold.

🍽️ Learn more about how to scale your restaurant through Dineline’s done-for-you marketing program: https://dineline.co

📲 Grow your restaurant the SMART way with our proprietary restaurant software, Dishio: https://get.dish.io/

🎓 Take a look at our FREE Restaurant Marketing Course: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL403WqY9pN16aGIQc02X1nXFQLg0ThWuF

Follow us on Instagram for tips to grow your restaurant: https://www.instagram.com/dinelineco/