Article · January 1, 2024

What Restaurant Spaces 2026 Actually Revealed About Where Restaurants Are Headed - Chute Gerdeman

The panels were good. The arguments were better. Here's what's worth carrying home.

What Restaurant Spaces 2026 Actually Revealed About Where Restaurants Are Headed The panels were good. Here's what's worth carrying home. Every industry conference has a surface conversation and a real one.

The surface conversation at Restaurant Spaces 2026 was about AI, permitting delays, and construction costs. The real conversation, the one happening between sessions, underneath polite panel language, in the moments when someone said something they clearly meant, was about whether the restaurant industry is building the right things for the right reasons.Spoiler: some of it is. Culture & GrowthScale is a culture problem.

It just shows up as a construction problem.The rapid expansion panel could have spent an hour on cost-per-square-foot and timeline compression. Instead, the conversation kept gravitating toward the same uncomfortable truth: when brands grow fast, the thing that breaks first isn’t the supply chain or the permitting process. It’s the part of the company that made anyone care in the first place.Paris Baguette is opening 120 locations in North America this year.

Dutch Bros is targeting north of 180. Torchy’s is pushing into new markets where the brand is effectively unknown. The brands doing it well aren’t winning on better software or faster GCs.

They’re winning by refusing to let an unknown person run an opening. Torchy’s plants experienced GMs and AGMs on-site two to three months before launch and keeps them there. Dutch Bros deploys culture teams from across the country to live inside a new shop for a month before doors open.The logic is simple and almost never followed: you cannot export what you haven’t protected.

If you get a new market wrong, you’re probably dead there for three to five years. The brand damage is quiet and permanent.“Once you lose your culture, your brand is done. The numbers will fall off at some point.” – Rapid Expansion & Brand Evolution panel Design & InfrastructureYou’re not building a store.

You’re signing a 10-year lease on a decision you made today. Gregory Zamfotis, founder and CEO of Gregorys Coffee, opened his session with a story that landed harder than any statistic: he planned ahead, added extra outlets everywhere, and then launched in-house baking, which needed a 220V line on the exact opposite end of the counter. The store he had “future-proofed” wasn’t actually future-proof at all.

It was just optimized for his best guess.The data behind why this matters is not subtle. Gregorys has operated 19 stores across 19 different Simon properties, including indoor malls, outdoor kiosks, inline stores, and a shipping container, all with the same brand, same product, and same experience across every footprint. What made that possible wasn’t a bigger budget.

It was a design philosophy built for adaptability from the start.96% of grocery stores now have self-checkout, up from near zero in 200683% of QSR traffic is now off-premise, up from 76% in 2019 (NRA)40%+ of orders arrive before the customer walks through the door“The question isn’t whether things will change. It’s whether you’ve designed for when they do.” – Gregory Zamfotis, Founder & CEO, Gregorys CoffeeThe four principles Zamfotis laid out are unglamorous but specific: design for the menu you don’t have yet; design for the channel you haven’t launched yet; design for the format you haven’t tried yet; and above all, make the cost of change low. The real ROI of modular design, he argued, isn’t in what it costs to build.

It’s in the renovations you never have to do. AI & What’s NextThe AI conversation at every conference is running about two years behind. Here’s what’s actually happening.Ron Galloway, futurist and author, framed his session with a provocation: most of the industry is still debating whether to use AI.