White Castle lands at Logan Airport. Consumers are turning to upscale restaurants this holiday season. How consumers choose to dine keeps evolving. These stories and more, This Week in Foodservice.

Will consumers include restaurants in their holiday celebrations? Data from Placer.ai shows weekly visits to upscale and fine dining restaurants increased 3.4% year-over-year in the week of November 10, 2025, and 1.4% in the week of November 17, 2025. During November and December of 2024, Placer.ai notes that fine-dining and upscale restaurants saw more foot traffic than any other operator categories.

A different Placer.ai report analyzing some of Darden’s concepts, shows some of the multiconcept operator’s upscale chains are seeing some momentum in the area of foot traffic. During the week of November 10, 2025, year-over-year visits were up 3% at Seasons 52 and 8.6% at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse. The week of November 17, 2025, visits were up 2.3% and 7.5%, respectively.

Foodservice News

• The top 100 independent restaurants generated $1.96 billion in gross food and beverage sales, per a Restaurant Business study. Mila in Miami topped the list with sales of $51.1 million.
• Sales projections for the top 1,500 restaurant chains might surprise you. Per Technomic’s latest forecast, cumulative chain sales will increase 3.1% in 2025 compared to 3.0% last year. Strengthening sales for McDonald’s and Chili’s, among other chains, has helped considerably.
• White Castle opened a burger kiosk in Boston’s Logan Airport. The quick-service restaurant chain developed it in conjunction with a food kiosk company and a vending machine company. White Castle has sold its world-renowned sliders from kiosks for quite a while, but the Logan unit represents its first one that’s exclusively blended for the chain.
• Burger chain Mooyah opened its first location adjacent to a c-store, per a Restaurant Dive report. The Flint, Mich.-based unit represents the chain’s first location in that state. Mooyah expects to open more c-store adjacent locations, the story adds.
• Chick-fil-A plans to transition as many of its licensed units to the chain’s franchise model, per a QSR Magazine story. This will impact Chick-fil-A’s college campus, hospital and theme park locations. According to its 2025 FDD, there were 425 domestic licensed restaurants at year-end 2024. Nearly 50 are airport locations, which are excluded from this effort.
• The way people enjoy dining out is evolving in three key ways, per Toast’s Restaurant Trends Report shared by The Food Institute. They include more diners seeking a table for one, Tuesday is becoming a popular night out and breakfast has spiked. Notably, reservations for one increased 22% compared the same period one year ago.
• The latest example of casual dining’s woes comes courtesy of Romano’s Macaroni Grill. The Italian-themed chain has retrenched by 90% in the past 10 years, per a Nation’s Restaurant News story. The Italian-themed casual dining chain lists 17 units on its website, which is down from 158 locations at the end of 2014. Reservations for Tuesday increased 15% year over year. And
• Unox has begun production at its first U.S. manufacturing facility in Denver, N.C. The facility expansion represents a $20 million investment, per a company release. The North Carolina location manufactures products specifically designed for the North American market, including its CONVEX convection oven. The Denver facility announcement comes as Unox continues its global expansion, including the development of Unox City, the company's state-of-the-art headquarters and innovation center in Padua, Italy.
• Middleby has inked a deal to sell a controlling interest in its Residential Kitchen business. Upon completion of the deal, Investment firm 26North Partners will own 51% of Residential Kitchen, while Middleby will own 49%, per a release. The transaction also supports Middleby’s ongoing transformation into a focused commercial foodservice solutions provider, the release added.

Economic News

• Private employers shed 32,000 jobs in November, per data from the ADP National Employment Report. Segments shedding the most jobs include professional/business services, which lost 26,000 positions, and manufacturing, which lost 18,000 jobs. In contrast, the leisure and hospitality segment added 13,000 jobs. Overall, though, many industry observers view the net decline of 32,000 jobs as a sign that the jobs market is softening.
• Economic activity in the services sector expanded in November. The ISM Services PMI came in at 52.6. Any reading of more than 50 indicates expansion. This marks the ninth month in 2025 when this index reached expansion mode. The Business Activity Index continued in expansion territory in November, registering 54.5 percent, 0.2 percentage point higher than the reading of 54.3 percent recorded in October.
• Is the U.S. poised for a period of stagflation in 2026? One bank thinks that’s the case. The Royal Bank of Canada believes the U.S. could be in for a period of stagflation, which an economic condition characterized by high inflation, stagnant economic growth and high unemployment, due to four specific factors, per a Business Insider story. They include high housing prices, sticky wage growth, tariffs and heavy government spending.