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This paper aims to investigate talent management (TM) practices of independent fine dining restaurant (FDR) organizations and explores why employee retention rates in FDRs are higher than other restaurants. This research adds to the TM literature by surfacing attitudes and influences that lead to employee retention.

The present study collects data using McCracken’s (1988) long interview method to provide insights into value similarities and differences between employees and independent restaurant managers. Fourteen interviews at two independent FDRs inform the results. This study employs a grounded theory approach.

Study results show that people take pride in working for the restaurants and the culture within the restaurant inspires a higher level of self-esteem. This independent, family-owned environment helps employees and managers achieve higher work performance and satisfy overall lifestyle needs. Respondents report their employment helps them to do things that bring out the best in them and allows them to accomplish other things that they want in life. The study also suggests that a shared value system between employees and managers creates a more stable workforce and longer tenure.

The current study examines only two independent family-owned FDRs, so generalization is limited. The current study uses grounded theory to expand on research in the TM literature.

If owners and managers of FDR focus on addressing employees’ higher-order motivational needs, they have a better chance of retaining employees. Losing productive employees has high direct and indirect costs, and the restaurant industry is plagued with high turnover. Independent restaurants also need to evaluate their new employee orientations because unstructured training contributes to an environment of uncertainty. Developing a positive culture in an FDR is possible with a focused, family-oriented business. This work culture takes time to develop. Recruiting and selection methods to ensure a fit with the culture and values are a cost-effective method to ensure the continuation of this culture. The consistent values between employees and managers in this study demonstrate that hiring for personal values and not necessarily for skills already developed helps with positive TM in FDR.

The current study extends the knowledge in TM, ecological systems theory and motivational needs-based theory through detailed interviews and value analyses. Long interviews and triangulation of the data surface conscious and nonconscious memories from both employees and managers specifically relating to employee retention factors in FDR.

As the restaurant industry is a representative service industry, long-living restaurants could carry the secrets of key factors that are needed to establish “sustainable business models” in service industry. The authors aim to answer the following question: How can restaurants innovate business model sustainably to last for more than 50 years through the era of digital transformation with open innovation dynamics?

Five long-lived restaurants from Daegu, Kyoto and Naples were selected separately by using the snowballing approach, and were analyzed through in-depth interviews and participatory observations.

Restaurants in Daegu have lived long mainly because of adding value to their recipes. Restaurants in Kyoto have lived very long, primarily by decoupling their original services, ingredients and recipes. Restaurants in Naples have enjoyed long lives by coupling or recoupling their ingredients, services and recipes.

The implication is that long-living restaurants or service firms could maintain their own sustainability by dynamically circling the following services: (1) adding and boning recipes (focusing on special menus or products), (2) coupling of ingredients (creative recoupling of original ingredients) and (3) decoupling of services (disconnecting the value chain and rebalancing it).

Few studies on hospitality firm survival consider the impact of online media exposure. This paper aims to investigate how the online news coverage of restaurants, characterized in terms of the number of articles, channel (Web page or mobile app), topic (operations or products) and consistency (mix of news tones), influences their survival.

A yearly panel data set covering 682 news-reported restaurants in Shanghai, China, over the period 2011–2019 is analyzed using a Cox model, and an extended cross-sectional data set containing 9,488 restaurants is used for robustness checks.

A larger number of online news articles, regardless of channel or topic, significantly improves restaurants’ chances of survival, and this positive impact of online exposure is greater if that news is published by mobile apps (rather than on Web pages) or reports topics related to operations (rather than products). Although, generally, news inconsistency is not good for restaurant survival, when the number of online news items is eight or more, inconsistency becomes good for survival.

This research guides restaurant operators to use news exposure in an online marketing environment to increase the firm’s chances of long-term survival.

Online media exposure has hitherto been ignored in the literature on the survival of hospitality firms. This paper provides a new perspective on hospitality firm survival and also contributes to the literature on media exposure by conceptualizing a unique factor, namely, the consistent online exposure.

The purpose of this paper is to present a review of the foodservice and restaurant literature that has been published over the past 10 years in the top hospitality and tourism journals. This information will be used to identify the key trends and topics studied over the past decade, and help to identify the gaps that appear in the research to identify opportunities for advancing future research in the area of foodservice and restaurant management.

This paper takes the form of a critical review of the extant literature that has been done in the foodservice and restaurant industries. Literature from the past 10 years will be qualitatively assessed to determine trends and gaps in the research to help guide the direction for future research.

The findings show that the past 10 years have seen an increase in the number of and the quality of foodservice and restaurant management research articles. The topics have been diverse and the findings have explored the changing and evolving segments of the foodservice industry, restaurant operations, service quality in foodservice, restaurant finance, foodservice marketing, food safety and healthfulness and the increased role of technology in the industry.

Given the number of research papers done over the past 10 years in the area of foodservice, it is possible that some research has been missed and that some specific topics within the breadth and depth of the foodservice industry could have lacked sufficient coverage in this one paper. The implications from this paper are that it can be used to inform academics and practitioners where there is room for more research, it could provide ideas for more in-depth discussion of a specific topic and it is a detailed start into assessing the research done of late.

This paper helps foodservice researchers in determining where past research has gone and gives future direction for meaningful research to be done in the foodservice area moving forward to inform academicians and practitioners in the industry.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the importance of feedback in developing and operationalising knowledge from the perspective of craft brewing operators. The study contributes to various literature streams, including marketing and craft brewing entrepreneurship. An additional contribution is made through the adoption of the knowledge-based theory of the firm, and the SECI process to facilitate understanding of the significance of knowledge in the craft brewing industry.

An online questionnaire was designed to gather data from mainly micro and small craft brewery operators. Of the 110 craft breweries identified across Australia, 57 (51.8 per cent) participated. The predominantly qualitative data were analysed using content analysis and word association.

The importance of knowledge acquisition for craft brewery firms was revealed in various ways. For example, respondents most favoured new knowledge to learn about quality issues and perceptions of quality among buyers/consumers. Further, acquired knowledge through feedback was a determinant factor in participants’ decision to produce particular styles of beers. Several alignments with the adopted theoretical frameworks were revealed, including the role of socialisation (SECI process) illustrated through the transformation of explicit into tacit knowledge.

The study examines the dimension of knowledge in the craft brewing industry, which, although considerably developing, continues to be underresearched. Furthermore, the study’s findings underline various important implications for the craft brewing industry, suppliers, and for end consumers. The study also proposes a refinement of both the RBTF and the SECI process based on the findings.

Franchising has become an increasingly popular overseas expansion strategy for companies in various industries. A successful development in a transition economy such as Serbia has been exclusively associated with McDonald’s, which raises concerns about the ability of other international franchises to penetrate the Serbian market. The purpose of this paper is to explore the customer-based constraints that may hamper the spread of franchising in a post-communist country. Specifically, factors such as country-of-origin (COO) effects, longevity and brand localness/globalness that may affect consumers’ preferences are considered.

This paper uses mixed methods, that is to say a combination of qualitative and semi-quantitative approaches. Primary data were collected using (45) semi-structured interviews with local customers. The (success) story of McDonald’s in Serbia serves as the reference point.

The findings suggest that COO and localness are both relevant in explaining consumer preferences. Longevity signals the ability to adhere to international standards as well as regular local engagement. The results also stress that, contrary to widespread belief, global franchise names do not have an advantage over local players.

Further investigation is needed to empirically examine the relationships between several key variables identified in the present study (longevity, COO, tradition, patriotism, trust, emotional attachment, perceived quality, authenticity, satisfaction, behavioral intentions). These may influence franchise system penetration and, ultimately, its performance.

Although post-communist countries have become highly appealing for international fast-food and coffee-shop chains, these countries are hard-to-please environments for setting-up and operating a franchise business. These findings advocate franchises to find the right balance between their global name and a quick integration of indigenous attributes to compensate for their late entry. Franchise marketing managers must develop a brand narrative that includes both local brand associations and global/international standards to increase franchise brand awareness and generate a positive consumer attitude.

Despite the call for more studies on franchising in emerging markets and their realities, not much attention has been paid to (local) customer-related constraints. The inclusion of a temporal perspective appeared to be highly relevant in investigating the potential effect of longevity on the local development of the franchise system. Moreover, there is a scarcity of scholarly branding research in the franchising sector. Local competition, although a neglected dimension in prior studies, has been examined through consumer preferences toward global and local brands. The chosen research methodology responds to the recent call of scholars for more diverse approaches. Finally, as a post-communist, transition and emerging economy, Serbia serves as a stimulating and yet uncovered research setting, given its tumultuous history with Western countries, as well as the long successful history of the McDonald’s franchise.

The rapid growth in volume and value of on-demand restaurant food delivery, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, is causing a paradigm shift in the food service sector. However, there is a lack of hospitality management research into this emerging phenomenon. To address this gap, this paper defines and develops a novel conceptual model and typology and proposes a research agenda for ghost production in the context of food service.

This paper uses the Servuction model to explore, define and model the radical separation between food service production sites, points of sale and consumer interaction from the perspective of on-demand restaurant food delivery. A novel typology is developed and illustrated with eight industry examples from the UK and an accompanying cost benefit analysis. Future research priorities are identified.

In the hospitality literature, little attention has been paid to changes on-demand restaurant food delivery brings to production and business models of food service organisations, resulting in significant gaps between food service practice and theory. The knock-on effects to stakeholders include increased convenience for customers, uncertain employment status of riders and, for restaurants, striking a balance between capturing new markets and losing control of the customer. Additionally, for aggregators, there is a lack of profitability in existing models, despite holding the balance of power (and data).

The concept of “ghost production” and its associated typology is novel and offers a contribution to hospitality management literature by defining the term, scope and scale of this new phenomenon. Practical implications are proposed.

Consumers’ evaluation of online review helpfulness has been widely examined. The extant literature suggests that the attributes of review content (e.g. review length and extremity) influence review helpfulness. However, review length cannot fully reflect the richness of the review content. Anchoring on information diagnosticity and extremity bias, this study aims to explore the effect of review comprehensiveness on its helpfulness.

Field observations were obtained from 11,812 online restaurant reviews on a popular restaurant review platform. A controlled experiment was conducted to further delineate the effect of review comprehensiveness.

Review comprehensiveness moderates the effects of review length and an extremely negative review on helpfulness. It also confirms that for reviews of the same length, one covering more aspects is perceived by consumers as more helpful.

Different aspects of information in a review can efficiently assist decision-making. The results suggest that review platforms can better design their interface by providing separate areas for different product aspects. The platform can then receive more comprehensive and helpful reviews and increase the diagnosticity of these.

The study enriches the literature by introducing review comprehensiveness and examining the joint effects of review length and comprehensiveness on helpfulness. It also contributes to the literature by indicating how to reduce the effect of review extremity.

The gradual ageing of global population has necessitated the creation of conducive and supportive food and beverage environments for older adults. This study identifies the key evaluation criteria for senior-friendly restaurants and examines the importance of each criterion.

This study uses the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) to synthesis the key evaluation criteria for senior-friendly restaurants and analyses the weights of these criteria. It identifies and prioritises four main criteria and twenty sub-criteria in the hierarchical framework by employing the sophisticated approach.

The results indicate that the main criteria ranked by importance are “barrier-free environment”, “food quality”, “service quality” and “corporate social responsibility (CSR)”. There are five most important sub-criteria, such as “simple and intuitive use” and “perceptible information” belonging to the main criterion “barrier-free environment”, “hygiene and safety” and “food freshness” belonging to the main criterion “food quality” and “assurance” belonging to “service quality”. Incorporating the analytical findings, this study suggests the key evaluation criteria to facilitate the construction and development of senior-friendly restaurants.

The precisely hierarchical model and key criteria proposed in this study provide clear guidelines for managers of senior-friendly restaurants to develop feasible strategies and also contribute to the theoretical development of food-friendly environments and services for elderly consumers.

Hotel restaurants are widely considered to be under‐performing assets and hotel companies have sought to improve their financial performance in a number of ways including outsourcing to specialist restaurant companies. This article reports the findings of a study that explores the key dimensions of outsourcing through a series of semi‐structured interviews and group discussions with 55 key informants. The findings reveal five key dimensions to the outsourcing relationship: core competencies, brand compatibility, organizational culture, operational tension, and systems of review, evaluation and control. It is concluded that, whilst there is evidence that the outsourcing of hotel restaurants can offer substantial benefits for both hotel and restaurant companies, it is important that the relationship is treated as more than merely the contracting‐out of support services. The provision of food and drink is an important and integral part of the hotel product and the complexities of the relationship between the partners, particularly in terms of issues such as brand association, organizational culture and operational tension, should not be underestimated. The impact on consumer perceptions of the hotel product and consumer satisfaction should also be considered carefully.