'This is the definitive guide for anyone looking to enter the restaurant industry! Full of hands-on practical advice and real-life examples, Robin and Eric provide you with the expertise necessary to avoid common pitfalls and navigate your way to owning the restaurant of your dreams!' —Herb Mesa, Finalist, The Next Food Network Star, Season 6 'Outstanding work...presented in a bright and motivating style that is quite informative. Highly recommended reading for the food service entrepreneur.' —Henry L. Hicks, Certified business broker, fellow of the IBBA, past chairman of the board of the International Business Brokers Association, CEO of Georgia Business Associates, Inc., board member of the Georgia Association of Business Brokers Six out of every ten startup restaurants fail. Your restaurant should not be one of them. Veteran industry experts and restaurant brokers Eric and Robin Gagnon now present their guide to buying an existing restaurant so you can beat the odds. Readers will finish this book knowing how to acquire a restaurant in a way that is less painful, more profitable, and delivers a better return on their investment. With the help of this guide, you can soon satisfy your Appetite for Acquisition!

In this book you will learn my trade secrets from being a front-line restaurant, bar, and club owner/operator, as well as my extensive experience as a buyer and seller of many restaurants, bars and clubs. For a 45 year period (1950-1996), my family owned and operated: a) Zim's Restaurants, the largest independent non-franchised restaurant chain in San Francisco, b) nearly 35 restaurants, bars and/or clubs in Northern California including Zim's Restaurants, Z's Bountiful Buffets, Kibby's Drive Ins, and Casa Carlita's Mexican Restaurants and c) miscellaneous other operations, including many cocktail lounges. Today I own Restaurant Realty Company, the largest restaurant, bar and club business brokerage in California. I have personally sold over 800 restaurant, bar and club businesses, and I have completed over 2,500 business valuations since 1996. Throughout this book I will share my experiences and knoweldge from my twenty-plus years of restaurant experience, and more than thirty years of real estate experience. Having worn many hats as a restaurant, bar, and club owner/operator, buyer, seller, landlord, and broker, I want to share my years of experience to make it easier for prospective restaurant, bar or club buyers to learn how to effectively purchase a business. My goal is to help a buyer understand the key things he, or she, needs to know in order to minimize mistakes and to make a successful, well-thought-out purchase. I want this purchase to have a strong chance for success, subject to buyers operating the business properly after they take ownership. I cover the following topics in the book: 1. The Buyer - a. motivations for buying, b. things you need to know before buying, c. qualfications needed to purchase, d. things you need to do before you purchase, e. the advantages and disadvantages of buying an existing business versus starting one from scratch, f. what are you buying, and g. how buyers initially screeen business opportunities; 2. What Do You Need - a. the essential for preparing a business plan, b. how much money do you need to open and operate, c. methods for raising money; 3. Buyers Do's and Don'ts - a. buyer's three-stage checklist, b. important questions and information to ask the seller, c. signs to look for to determine if the seller's business is in trouble; 4. Success Vs. Failure - a. key ingredients for a successful business from a customer's and buyer's perspective, b. why so many businesses fail, c. turning a losing business into a winning business opportunity, d. why do sellers sell?; 5. Valuations and Other Financial Aspects - a. various sample valuations, b. understanding financial statements; 6. Importance of Location - a. major factors in selecting a strong location, b. how an operator determines if an existing site will work for his proposed new operation, c. special types of locations, d. how to find a good restaurant site; 7. Lease and Other Legal Aspects - a. premise lease, b. how a tenant can negotiate a good lease and renew it on favorable terms, c. helpful techniques in negotiating your lease, d. why landlords want to maximize their rent; 8. Steps to the Sale - a. selling process from offer stage to close of escrow stage, b. dealing with the most common problems related to the sale and how to ensure a closed escrow, c. overcoming the most common obstacles in dealing with the landlord, d. the main three parties in the transaction: buyer, seller and landlord, e. how the sales process works, f. explanation of the asset purchase agreement, g. the buyer's due-diligence process, h. things that can go wrong during a sales transaction that a seller needs to know - and a buyer should too, i. advantages and disadvantages of an asset sale versus a stock sale; 9. Is Franchising For You? - the advantages and disadvantages of buying a franchised business versus buying an independent, non-franchised business and 10. Using a Restaurant Broker to Your Advantage.

Insatiable Appetite: Food as Cultural Signifier in the Middle East and Beyond explores the cultural ramifications of food and foodways in the Mediterranean, and Arab-Muslim countries in particular. The volume addresses the cultural meanings of food from a wider chronological scope, from antiquity to present, adopting approaches from various disciplines, including classical Greek philology, Arabic literature, Islamic studies, anthropology, and history. The contributions to the book are structured around six thematic parts, ranging in focus from social status to religious prohibitions, gender issues, intoxicants, vegetarianism, and management of scarcity. Contributors are: Tarek Abu Hussein, Yasmin Amin, Kevin Blankinship, Tylor Brand, Kirill Dmitriev, Eric Dursteler, Anny Gaul, Julia Hauser, Christian Junge, Danilo Marino, Pedro Martins, Karen Moukheiber, Christian Saßmannshausen, Shaheed Tayob, and Lola Wilhelm.

This book explores the role of identity in adolescent foreign language learning to provide evidence that an identity-focused approach can make a difference to achievement in education. It uses both in-depth exploratory interviews with language learners and a cross-sectional survey to provide a unique glimpse into the identity dynamics that learners need to manage in their interaction with contradictory relational contexts (e.g. teacher vs. classmates; parents vs. friends), and that appear to impair their perceived competence and declared achievement in language learning. Furthermore, this work presents a new model of identity which incorporates several educational psychology theories (e.g. self-discrepancy, self-presentation, impression management), developmental theories of adolescence and principles of foreign language teaching and learning. This book gives rise to potentially policy-changing insights and will be of importance to those interested in the relationship between self, identity and language teaching and learning.

What looks like a consciously altruistic effort to encapsulate one woman's entire life into lessons for the benefit of womankind may be just that: after divulging every gruesome detail of her spiral into anorexia and subsequent self-discoveries in this memoir, Knapp died of lung cancer last June at age 42. Similar in tone to her previous Drinking: A Love Story, this work is candid and persuasive enough to reach many women with analogous problems. But it's more than one woman's tragic story; multitudinous interviews with women with eating disorders, excerpts from classic feminist texts and sociological statistics lend credence and categorize the book under cultural studies as much as self-help. Knapp hypothesizes that the feminists who came after the revolutionary 1960s, herself included, were stifled rather than empowered by the overwhelming choices before them. They gained ''the freedom to hunger and to satisfy hunger in all its varied forms.'' Unfortunately, writes Knapp, size-obsessed fashion magazines and other social messages contradict a woman's right to desire, contributing to the rise in eating disorders and other illnesses. Knapp observes an aspect of the backlash against the feminist movement: when ''women were demanding the right to take up more space in the world,'' they were being told by a still patriarchal society ''to grow physically smaller.'' Though Knapp admits it's ''easier to worry about the body than the soul,'' she hopes creating a dialogue about anorexia will enable all women to nourish both.

Uncovers the influences that have conditioned people to overeat, explaining how combinations of fat, sugar, and sa

After 25 centuries, Aristotle's influence on our society's moral thinking remains profound even when subterranean. Typical members of our society can often be made to see that their moral thought and action are, in crucial ways, unwittingly Aristotelian. No one in contemporary philosophical ethics can afford to ignore Aristotle. Much of the finest work in recent moral philosophy has been overtly and professedly Aristotelian in inspiration. And many writers who would officiallydistance themselves from Aristotle and his contemporary followers are nonetheless indebted to him, sometimes in ways that they do not realise.Values and Virtues provides a platform for some notable writers in the area to present and discuss their new ideas about Aristotelian ethics in a way that will advance the academic debate and engage the interest of a broad range of philosophical readers.