Hotels accommodate their guests in almost every way, from laundry service to room service. But you may be surprised to learn that room service is actually waning in popularity, according to a recent study from Chicaco-based online food ordering service GrubHub. So if guests aren’t ordering as much room service, then what are they eating? GrubHub analyzed orders delivered to 8,000 hotels across the U.S. and found that takeout orders to hotels increased 125% in the last three years.

Other interesting findings:

– On average, hotel diners spend about 11% more per order than non-hotel diners.
– Men are about 54% more likely than women to order meals to hotels.
– Hotel takeout orders peak early in the work week, with fewer orders from Friday through Sunday.
– Dinner and late night are the most popular meal times for travelers. Nearly three-fourths (72%) of hotel orders are placed during dinner and late-night hours.

Read the entire press release here.

How does this news affect restaurants? It is clear how important it is to have a local component to your brand as guests continually choose local restaurants for their meals over room service. A couple of ways to do so include ensuring your restaurant is listed online, whether in a Yelp or Urbanspoon page, or a food ordering service site. Don’t forget to add your restaurant to major search engines’ local listing services such as Google My Business. And while this may be a no-brainer, it’s of utmost importance to offer a delivery option! For more help with increasing your restaurants’ local brand presence, please reach out to Synergy.

Who would have thought that heaven existed between two slices of bread? If you’re like us, then you might have a small obsession with  sandwiches. Whether a panini, burger, or roll, we love them all. Of course, a great sandwich takes considerable thought and finesse in ingredient selection and execution.

Restaurant Hospitality, a formidable source for providing hospitality trends and happenings, had recently announced the winners of the Best Sandwiches in America Contest, and we couldn’t have been more thrilled to see the results. The finalists are broken down into 18 categories –  grilled cheese, barbecue, breakfast, vegetarian, hot dog/sausage, seafood salad, burger, etc. and consisted of some interesting creations! Category finalists included an inverted grilled cheese, a three-pork sandwich, a Cajun grouper sandwich, a breakfast-styled banh mi and a Southern fried Jidori chicken sandwich .

Want to check out who else made the cut? Read more and get inspired here: http://restaurant-hospitality.com/food-trends/best-sandwiches-america-meet-2014-winners

Mann’s Packing (we are proud to say they are a client!) and Technomic have teamed up to produce a comprehensive report on consumer preferences of salad greens and their trending patterns across menus nationwide. According to the report, two-thirds of diners are eager to try new salad greens and are not pleased with ordinary options offered at most restaurants. The study found that consumers prefer the robust texture and mild flavor of crunchy, dark leaves that have been chopped into bite-sized pieces. Salads are big for this summer and we highly recommend downloading this report for the valuable insight on today’s salad trends.

To download the complete report, click here.

The White Castle Slider has been named the ‘most influential burger of all time’ according to Time Magazine reporters who interviewed a team of burger historians and experts. Also included in the list, among others, were the McDonald’s Burger, the In-N-Out Burger, The Burger King Whopper, and the ShackBurger, but what makes the White Castle Slider so iconic?

Now famous for their small, square hamburgers with grilled onions, White Castle was the first hamburger fast food chain, opening in March 1921 in Wichita, Kansas. With the original slider only costing 5 cents, it was the first hamburger chain to sell a million hamburgers and then the first to sell a billion hamburgers. In the age of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, many Americans feared that ground beef was unsanitary and White Castle combated this by using white facilities and letting customers watch the meat being ground through a glass window. The emphasis on cleanliness and sanitation helped make White Castle the first fast food empire and paved the success for America’s burger obsession

Near the end of each year, hospitality industry experts such as the National Restaurant Association, like to predict what food trends the new year will ring in. The NRA’s 2014 Culinary Forecast has the low-down on what diners will likely be noticing on their plates in the year ahead.

For 2013, the NRA surveyed chefs to find what they thought would be a hot food trend– the top three of the list were locally sourced meats and seafood, locally grown produce and healthy kids’ meals. How do the 2014 predictions stack up to last year’s?

Local is still going to be big, and tops off the first two items of the NRA’s Top 20 Trends.

1. Locally sourced meats and seafood

2. Locally grown produce

3.  Healthful kids’ meals

5. Gluten-free cuisine

6. Hyper-local sourcing

7. Children’s nutrition

8. Non-wheat noodles/pasta

9. Sustainable food

10. Farm/estate branded items

Read the official report for the entire list of trends and results.

Spicy foods are not a turnoff for American diners, in fact, they crave flavorful foods! New research states that 54% of consumers prefer hot or spicy flavors and sauces. Given that this statistic has increased by 8% since 2009, we are predicting this trend is hot (no pun intended)!

Synergy Restaurant Consultants founder Dean Small always says, “Flavor drives traffic,” and the latest research reports agree. Technomic found that 41% of consumers say that new or innovative flavors can influence them to try a new restaurant. Additionally 75% of these consumers are also highly likely to return to a restaurant that serves them a delicious menu item featuring innovative flavors.

Now is the time to play with the flavors offered on your menu. Get creative and use unique flavor combinations to surprise and delight diners. Based on our 25 years of experience, we know bold flavors will drive traffic to your door.

Southeast Asian flavors and cuisines are becoming mainstream in the United States. Foods such as kimchi, bibimbap, and pho, are no longer foreign concepts and are now commonly found on restaurant menus. Additionally, many restaurants are putting Asian spins on familiar offerings.

According to restaurantbusinessonline.com, this increase in popularity stems from three main reasons:

• An increase in the Asian population in the United States
• Consumers are becoming more interested in bold flavor profiles
• Consumers favor street food for its convenience, affordability, and flavors

Get inspired by those who have already added Eastern influence to their menus. We recommend checking out  Shophouse, Pei Wei Asian Diner, Fusian, and Tom Yum District.

Source: http://www.restaurantbusinessonline.com/menu-development/culinary-trends/articles/flavors-southeast-asia

September is National Chicken Month. Although we love chicken in a variety of ways, our favorite kind is definitely fried!  Here are two fried chicken dishes we love!

Waffle and Chicken – Taste of Belgium (Cincinnati, Ohio)

At Taste of Belgium, the waffle comes first!  The Bistro is famous for their Liege-style waffles; made from dough rather than batter, these waffles are thick and sweet. Paired with a breaded chicken cutlet and covered in hot sauce and maple syrup, this is not your average chicken and waffle meal.  We recommend ordering with a side of the Belgian Frites!

Honey Butter Fried Chicken – Honey Butter Fried Chicken (Chicago, Illinois)

Although their restaurant just opened this past weekend, Josh Kulp and Christine Cikowski have been serving their honey-butter topped fried chicken via the underground-restaurant Sunday Dinner Club.  Their new brick-and-mortar restaurant features the namesake chicken, market-driven vegetable sides, biscuits, and desserts. The chicken is brined in salt, sugar, citrus, and spices, double-battered in buttermilk and seasoned flour, fried to perfection, topped with paprika salt, and finished with a dollop of sweet honey butter.

Looking for more? Here’s Bon Appetit’s list: The Top 10 Best Places for Fried Chicken. What’s your favorite restaurant for fried chicken?

By now, almost everyone has heard of the cronut, a hybrid between two of the world’s best pastries, doughnuts and croissants.  The original cronut, started by French pastry chef Dominique Ansel at his namesake bakery in New York City, was an instant hit.  Using a proprietary laminated dough recipe, Chef Ansel fries the dough in grapeseed oil and then rolls each cronut in sugar, fills it with cream, and finishes it with a glaze.  There is one flavor offered each month and so far the flavors have been rose-vanilla, lemon-maple, coconut, blackberry, and fig-mascarpone. New Yorkers and tourists alike have been lining up every morning in an attempt to score one of the 300 cronuts available daily.

Of course, in the past few months there have been copycat cronuts across the world. From doissants in Washington DC to croissant-donuts in Asia, this pastry has become a global phenomenon.

Since the cronut, Chef Dominique Ansel has also debuted two more innovative pastries.  The Magic Souffle is a portable soufflé made of toasted orange blossom brioche and light, fluffy chocolate.  The Frozen Smores are crispy marshmallows stuffed with ice cream and served on a smoked willow branch.  Chef Ansel’s other confections haven’t taken off like the cronut, but they still sound pretty amazing!