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- An unsurprising followup to the story of a Maine restaurant that is getting its lobsters stoned before killing them: Government officials in the state are not cool with this idea. Maine health inspectors “would treat food served to consumers at licensed eating places and affected by marijuana, as has been described with this establishment, as adulterated and therefore illegal,” reports the New York Times.
- Krispy Kreme is helping diners kill two birds with one stone and introducing coffee-glazed doughnuts, per Food & Wine. And at the other end of this mashup spectrum, the chain plans to brew coffee that tastes like doughnuts. Dunking coffee-flavored doughnuts into doughnut-flavored coffee would be so meta.
- Modern booze hounds are turning away from beer, and according to the Chicago Tribune, that means spiked seltzers are on the rise.
- A Chick-fil-A in Maryland recently served a man who patronized the restaurant’s drive-thru on his lawnmower. Is that thing street-legal?
- Celebrity chef Andrew Zimmern tells People about his last conversation with Anthony Bourdain, the late Parts Unknown host who died on June 8. “He was telling me about pursuing my own happiness and he gave me his long sort of speech about it, that I deserved to be happy and I was like, ‘That is so great, where did you get that little nugget?’” Zimmern says. “I had said the same thing to him about five years earlier, which is great because sometimes you even know things yourself but you need to have a friend repeat it back to you.”
- Starbucks has announced it is topping new beverages with cold foam. For those who aren’t in the know, cold foam is made by simply blending a small amount of the beverage until it is foamy.
- Olive Garden has a loyal following thanks to its soups, salads, and breadsticks, obviously, but MarketWatch reports the chain also receives high marks for its bathrooms. “There’s also the age-old restaurant-chain virtues of predictability and dependability — you know exactly what you’re going to be served, and you don’t have to worry that you’re having dinner in some hole-in-the-wall joint that’s unfamiliar and suspect from a sanitation standpoint,” says Restaurant Business Online editor-at-large Peter Romeo.
- Chipotle is still having a hard time implementing its updated food-safety protocols, so the burrito chain has partnered with Zenput in an attempt to stick to its standards. Zenput is a software platform that “helps operators evaluate and track all aspects of the restaurant and ensure food safety protocols and the overall operation are documented,” according to a press release.
- Taking a page from Amazon’s playbook, rival tech giant Google is getting into the supermarket business in France. The Silicon Valley giant is teaming up with France’s Carrefour to offer grocery delivery, reports Fortune.
- And, finally, American Express, is reaching its tentacles into the restaurant-reservations market. The financial outlet is launching “an OpenTable-like feature” for its premium credit cardholders in the United Kingdom, per Business Insider. AmEx reportedly hopes to court wealthy millennials with this program.
