Last year over the holidays, I attended a virtual wine tasting event that was put on by one of our partners. It was with a vineyard / winemaker in Spain and so it was evening for us and some ungodly hour for him. At the… Read More
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All posts filed under “food”
High-rise apartment pavilion turned Japanese izakaya in Zurich
This past spring a new restaurant called Ooki Pavillon opened in the Sihlfeld neighborhood of Zurich. It’s an izakaya-style Japanese restaurant that is housed in a seven-sided pavilion that was initially constructed in the 1950s. The place looks great (see above), but what you may… Read More
A mapping of restaurant “chaininess”
This is an interesting study by Clio Andries (assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology) and Xiaofan Laing (city planning graduate student). It looks at restaurant “chaininess” across the United States. To do this, they mapped over 800,000 restaurants and looked for, among other… Read More
Essential food logistics
Blair Welch, co-founding partner of Slate Asset Management, was recently interviewed by Don Wilcox of RENX about the company’s recent acquisition of the Commercial Real Estate Business of New York-based Annaly Capital Management. As part of the deal, we also acquired $0.4 billion of grocery-anchored… Read More
Voi Cube — the first store in Switzerland without any employees
Swiss supermarket chain, Migros, has just launched what is being called the first store in Switzerland to not have any employees. The concept, called the Voi Cube, is a small container-like outparcel space that is open 24/7 and offers about 500 or so everyday items.… Read More
CloudKitchens has spent more than $130 million on property over the last two years
According to a recent Wall Street Journal review of property and corporate records, Travis Kalanick’s ghost kitchen startup, called CloudKitchens, has spent over $130 million over the past two years buying more than 40 properties in about two dozen cities. Travis is co-founder and the… Read More
Peak meat
There is evidence to suggest, according to this recent Bloomberg Green article as well as many other sources, that we may be hitting “peak meat.” That is, the global production of animal proteins appears to be declining. It declined last year in 2019 and that… Read More
The value of Champagne
Westmount Gaurantee hosted a Champagne tasting event for its clients this evening. Obviously it took place over Zoom. It was a great event and I learned a few things about Champagne. As most of you will know, sparkling wine cannot be called Champagne unless it’s… Read More
The state of the restaurant industry
People are starting to eat at restaurants again. Here is a recent chart from the WSJ showing seated diners at restaurants on the OpenTable network: OpenTable has been publishing this data since the beginning of the pandemic in something they call “the state of the… Read More
Deal is back on: Amazon to buy stake in Deliveroo
This is an interesting business story. Deliveroo is a London-based online food delivery company that was founded back in 2013 and today accounts for a big chunk of the online restaurant platform market in the UK. (They are also developing a network of “ghost kitchens”… Read More
