A person very close to me is pretty darn senior at The French Laundry.

Arguably the best restaurant in the world for a long time (yes it spawned a whole bunch of other restaurants...)

But I have some pretty intimate knowledge about their business, and let me tell you - even though TFL knows a ton about cooking. Their payment to the employees and whatnot is not so great.

For example, one of the things they do is put "Service is included" on their menus and such, which gives the customer the impression that tip is include.

So imagine serving a table that spends $50,000 (yes this is common) on dinner -- and they dont leave a tip, and the servers are making $12 per hour.

Seriously - this happens all the time.

Not anonymous, and that's important. It's Virtual Dining Concepts,[1] who also did the Mr. Beast[2] ghost pop-up, the Barstool Sports ghost pop-up, and the Cake Boss spinoff ghost pop-up, and Steve Harvey's ghost pop-up, and the Kitchen: Impossible ghost pop-up, and Mariah Carey's ghost pop-up cookie shop, and the Five Nights at Freddy's ghost pop-up.[3] Their next step after Fieri was mass-licensing TikTokers and giving them restaurants. Their co-founder is Robbie Earl, one of the OGs of licensed restaurant chaining - he's a co-founder and still CEO of Planet Hollywood, who's using this trend to prop up some of his other restaurant properties.

For instance, some of the Guy Fieri restaurants are run out of Buca di Beppo restaurant kitchens. I'll give you one guess who's chairman of Buca di Beppo.

[1] https://www.foodandwine.com/news/guy-fieri-flavortown-kitche...

[2] https://www.foodandwine.com/news/tiktok-recipes-delivery-res...

[3] https://joinvdc.com/brands/