There’s a certain magic about our favorite restaurants. They’re places where we’ve made memories with friends and family and might serve as a source of comfort. While many restaurants have been long forgotten by now, there’s one chain that resonated with many important people that is, unfortunately, no longer around: The Automat. The story and impressions this unique establishment left behind are told in the new documentary The Automat by Lisa Hurwitz.

An approach to bringing a newness model to market for fast-casual and quick-serve restaurants would be to follow a seasonal model. A hybrid that might follow natural seasons but could also be based on campus seasons or even sports seasonality. This model could also realize a bit of practicality and sustainability by reuse of seasonal, visual assets. Similar to a reoccurring stage theater production or department store visual inventory, as a season ends, it is replaced with last year’s package.

While Korean tacos are all the rage, the wildly popular Austin food truck has moved onto something even better – fries, on steroids. The Tex-Mex Korean fusion dish became so popular, it instantly put Chi’Lantro on the competitive food truck map, right up against other mega mobile eateries across the U.S. Now running five trucks in Austin and Houston, owner Jae Kim may come off as some kind of French Fries master.

With the disclosure of these tax dollars’ appropriation as means to lowering the cost of the production of unhealthy foods (did not find a single green vegetable on the EWG’s subsidy list, unless we count tobacco), and the price of those same foods being utilized to set a “living” wage, then the failure of that wage to keep a full-time worker above the poverty line that subsequently requires additional supplementary funds to marginally offset this labyrinthine injustice, what else must be made clear? 

McDonald’s might have taken off in France years ago, but it was the introduction of something even more casual that has the trendiest of Parisians talking today. Within the past year, something very American has been stirring on the streets of Paris. In a land that very recently was at the forefront of declaring that American food was nothing more than grease and a lack of imagination, suddenly, there is no greater praise for food amongst the young Parisians than “très Brooklyn,” a term that has come to symbolize something particularly cool and of high quality, not in spite of but because of its informality and creativity.