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Ninety Nine Restaurant abruptly closes three CT locations
Ninety Nine Restaurant & Pub, a Massachusetts-based chain of family-friendly restaurants, abruptly closed three locations in Connecticut Monday.
A spokesperson for the chain confirmed Tuesday that Ninety Nine had closed its restaurants in Cromwell, Groton and Stratford on Nov. 28, effective immediately.
“The Ninety Nine is in the process of transferring Team Members to our other restaurant locations in Connecticut or offering them severance packages,” the company said in the statement. “The Ninety Nine values its guests and the local communities, and thanks everyone for their patronage.”
Remaining Ninety Nine restaurants are in Bristol, Enfield, Glastonbury, Killingly, Norwich, Torrington, Vernon and Wallingford.
The chain, based in Woburn, Mass., has more than 100 locations in New England and New York state, with the bulk of the restaurants in Massachusetts. The website Boston Restaurant Talk noted that Ninety-Nine has closed three locations in the Bay State this year, most recently its Canton restaurant on Nov. 27.
National diner chain Denny’s has also closed multiple locations in Connecticut this fall. Restaurants in Enfield, West Haven, Wethersfield and Vernon suddenly closed between Sept. 5 and Oct. 17, leaving four remaining Denny’s in the state.
Drink This Every Night Before Bed To Lower Your Blood Sugar
There’s been plenty of buzz around apple cider vinegar (ACV) in recent years. You may have seen it recommended for various ailments, and thanks to its promised health benefits, ACV has become quite popular. But this isn’t just another wellness trend without any science to back it up: Studies around ACV seem to confirm that it really can be beneficial for our health. And if you struggle to regulate your blood sugar, apple cider vinegar could be the answer you’ve been looking for.
While its popularity might be relatively recent, ACV is nothing new. The vinegar, which is made by fermenting crushed apples with probiotics that turn its sugar into acetic acid, has been used as a home remedy for centuries. This compound has a myriad of health benefits, including lowering cholesterol. Key research has also found that it’s an effective way to regulate blood sugar.
How to make apple cider vinegar lower blood sugar?
“A number of studies suggest that vinegar might prevent spikes in blood sugar in people with prediabetes and type 2 diabetes by blocking starch absorption,” according to Harvard researcher Robert H. Shmerling, MD. In fact, Arizona State University testing shows that vinegar can blunt blood sugar spikes.
One study on people who have type 2 diabetes (which means the body has trouble using insulin properly) found that drinking ACV every night before bed reduced their resting blood sugar levels in the morning. This is likely due to the acetic acid in vinegar, which has an antiglycemic effect. Here’s how it works: Starch, which we get from foods like potatoes and pasta, is full of glucose and can therefore cause blood sugar to spike. But acetic acid helps us absorb less glucose.
How To Use Apple Cider Vinegar To Lower Blood Sugar
Participants in the Arizona State University study took about two tablespoons of ACV every night, which you can dilute with water to make it more palatable. That won’t affect the vinegar’s benefits, and will also give you a boost of hydration before bed. Just make sure to brush your teeth after, since vinegar can be harmful to tooth enamel.
Struggling with high blood sugar and diabetes can feel overwhelming, but eating a healthy diet, along with taking a daily dose of ACV, can put you on the path to better health. As always, make sure to consult your doctor before starting a new regimen to ensure it’s the right thing for you.
Why getting a table at Dallas restaurants is harder than it used to be
The restaurant industry has changed in innumerable ways in recent years, but one shift Dallas diners are coming to terms with is the growing demand for restaurant reservations and the dwindling ability to get a table without one.
The surge in demand for table bookings picked up speed in 2021 as people eagerly returned to in-person dining once COVID-19 cases dropped, but the shift seems here to stay. Walk-in seat availability is harder to come by, and making reservations only a day or two out at popular restaurants often means taking early or late-night seating — or striking out altogether.
The uptick in demand for restaurant reservations is happening nationally. Online searches for reservations in the first quarter of 2022 were up 107% from the same time frame in 2021, according to national data from Yelp. We talked with several local restaurants who said they’ve seen a noticeable owner rise in demand for reservations at Dallas restaurants in the past year.
There are several reasons for the shift. First, there’s the matter of planning and convenience, which is no different now than it’s always been. Diners have schedules to juggle, babysitters to hire, and celebrations to plan around, all of which factor into the demand for reservations.
Then there’s the matter of social currency. Hard-to-get reservations have become a signal of social status. The country’s most coveted restaurant bookings are now being sold to people willing to pay anonymous sellers thousands of dollars on black market sites, like one run by a 34-year-old in Miami, according to a new report from the San Francisco Chronicles.
But restaurants are really driving this change in reservation culture. Still facing workforce shortages and rising operating costs, some restaurants have reduced their hours or scaled down their footprints. This has led restaurants to rely more heavily on reservations to run their businesses, and they’re encouraging them more than ever in a climate of economic uncertainty, says Emily Knight, president of the Texas Restaurant Association.
“In Dallas, we’re running at about a 20% [restaurant] staffing shortage, and with that you’re going to have fewer tables and slimmer menus,” Knight says. “So now what you have is a restaurant that needs much more thoughtful staffing and to know who is coming in and when to dine. And they need to ensure that if that person makes a reservation, that they’re going to really come in.”
TakeTatsu, for example. The omakase restaurant opened in Dallas’ Deep Ellum neighborhood in May 2022 and has already become “the city’s hardest reservation,” according to D Magazine dining critic Brian Reinhart. To get a seat at Tatsu, hopeful diners set alarms for 8 am on the first and the 15th of the month when reservations for the tasting menu, which must be paid in full at $170 per person, are released in two-week batches. The seats go quickly. After all, there are only 10 seats and two seats a night.
Matthew Ciccone, owner of Tatsu, says offering a limited number of prepaid reservations is pivotal to their business model and to ensure the level of hospitality and food they strive to execute. He found that releasing any more than 10 days of reservations at a time increases the likelihood of cancellations, even with a policy in place that asks for cancellations to be made five days in advance.
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“By doing it this way, we are controlling our food waste and ordering exactly what we need. The other side of that coin is why we ask for full payment up front. We pay our staff what they should be doing by doing this,” he says. “We can also really tailor the menu to the guests that book, and the only way to do that is to have that money up front.”
Ciccone says there has been a noticeable change in restaurant reservation demands in the Dallas dining scene in the past few years, and he sees it as Dallas catching up to other major cities like New York, where he lived for a decade.
“There’s no such thing as dining out without a reservation there,” he says. “I think this is going to be a new thing here [in Dallas] and part of the trade-off that we’re making with having more good restaurants.”
With that change, though, comes the possibility of people taking advantage of the demand and reselling restaurant reservations for a profit, and it’s something Ciccone is trying to hold off.
“We did an analysis with Tock [a booking site] to make sure people were not using computer programs to book reservations. Tock doesn’t allow people to use a script to book reservations, so we feel comfortable