When Dan Simpson talks about Taziki’s Mediterranean Café, he doesn’t sound like a CEO of a 108-unit restaurant brand. He sounds like a caretaker of people, of food, of an idea that hospitality still matters. The company may serve 700,000 pounds of sushi-grade salmon, 420,000 pounds of lamb, and tens of thousands of cans of imported Mediterranean ingredients every year, but behind those numbers is something more intentional.
Taziki’s is “stubbornly old school,” as Dan puts it. In a world rushing toward kiosks and automation, he refuses to remove the human welcome from the entryway. The brand still cooks from scratch. Still insists on community connection. Still believes the business must feel personal. And yet, behind that philosophy lies one of the most forward-leaning tech transformations in the fast-casual space.
That transformation wouldn’t be possible without two partners: Square, which processes payments for more than 4.1 million active sellers annually, and Restaurant365, whose unified restaurant management platform now serves as Taziki’s operational backbone. Together, they have given the brand something it never had before: clarity.
A decade ago, Dan stepped into the role of Chief Innovation Officer at Taziki’s with a simple mission: understand the guest better. But the tech stack worked against him. Sales from Square flowed into one system; sales from the mobile app went somewhere else; catering lived in another silo entirely. There was no single source of truth.
The fragmentation didn’t just create reporting headaches — it slowed decision-making to a crawl. Basic questions felt impossible to answer.
“Who are our customers? What do they want? Are they coming back? These aren’t brilliant questions. They’re obvious questions. The problem was that we couldn’t get the answers.”
Without unified data, Taziki’s couldn’t properly test LTOs. They couldn’t understand waste. They couldn’t diagnose whether a struggling location needed better traffic, better frequency, or better pricing. They couldn’t even reliably measure food cost — high sales often masked underlying waste issues they couldn’t see.
The team felt it everywhere: in staffing, in inventory, in scheduling, in the speed of decision-making.
Something had to break.
The breakthrough came when Taziki’s aligned its entire operation around a new architecture: Square as the payments and transaction backbone, and Restaurant365 as the home for accounting, operations, scheduling, inventory, and analytics.
Instead of multiple data pipelines converging into a homegrown system, everything now moves through one consistent lane.
Managers could run inventory on their phones — three at a time. Admin work that used to swallow Sunday nights now took minutes. Flash reports were no longer riddled with errors from mismatched feeds. And for the first time ever, Taziki’s could map the relationship between food cost, waste, sales mix, labor performance, and guest frequency.
“Something as simple as being able to do inventory on our phones — that changed their whole lived experience. Monday morning just feels different now.”
What used to feel like a fragmented system patched together with spreadsheets now felt like a single organism.
With Square and R365 connected, Taziki’s began uncovering the stories their data had been trying to tell all along.
Thanks to integrated guest data, Taziki’s discovered that loyalty clicks at 3.5 visits.
Not seven. Not ten.
Just three and a half.
“If they come three or four times, they’re with us for life.”
That single insight reshaped how the brand thinks about marketing, promotions, and loyalty structure.
Instead of tying labor targets to ever-changing menu prices, Taziki’s adopted a normalized metric: entrée per labor hour — an operator-friendly labor measure that withstands inflation and price adjustments.
The magic number today? 7 ELH.
Once actual vs theoretical data was visible at scale, Dan’s team found stores with “healthy” food cost percentages that only looked good because of high sales volume. The unified system exposed the waste hidden beneath.
When Taziki’s tested their Turkish lamb meatballs, the integrated system didn’t just track sales — it tracked:
Suddenly, menu innovation wasn’t guesswork. It was science.
Square has long outgrown its identity as the “little white reader at the farmers market.” As Jean Silva explains, the company has spent the last decade building the infrastructure to support restaurants at scale — and operators like Taziki’s are helping define what modern enterprise hospitality looks like.
Square’s advantages are structural: they manage the entire payments pipeline internally, providing deep data granularity that most POS platforms simply can’t match. For a brand like Taziki’s, that translates into real-time visibility into volume trends, customer patterns, and operational performance.
But Jean insisted that none of that matters without one thing: partnership.
“The least productive vendor relationships are reactive. The best are proactive — when we’re building solutions together and meeting before the problems show up.”
For Square, this means walking into stores, talking to frontline staff, and getting granular feedback. In many cases, the biggest wins aren’t sweeping product launches — they’re tiny improvements that make someone’s shift just a bit smoother.
Dan admits that insisting on hospitality in a convenience-obsessed world is “swimming upstream.” Many brands are optimizing for speed at all costs. Many are handing off their guest relationships to third-party channels. Some have forgotten what hospitality feels like altogether.
But Taziki’s sees things differently: the more the world automates, the more valuable real hospitality becomes.
And technology isn’t replacing that ethos — it’s enabling it.
By reducing friction, systems free employees to connect with guests. By providing visibility into training gaps, managers can empower teams instead of exposing them. By tying frequency, sentiment, and operational performance together, Taziki’s can tell the truth about its guest experience rather than guessing at it.
“If it’s not on their minds, we’re all winning — it means it just works. It means they’re free to love on their guests.”
Taziki’s is now building its first true ten-year plan — something the brand never had before. And the direction is clear: reclaim what makes the brand different in an increasingly crowded Mediterranean fast-casual space.
That vision includes:
Dan summed it up simply:
“We’re going back to kindergarten — but we have the chance to go all the way to PhD if we invest in our people.”
Jean believes the next big wave is already forming: alternative payments and fully omnichannel guest journeys. Younger generations are moving faster than the industry realizes. Tools like Square AI and voice ordering are already reducing administrative burdens and turning data into natural-language insights.
Dan believes the industry is experiencing a hospitality correction. Guests want curated, intentional dining experiences — not endless customization or cold automation.
And both believe that the future belongs to operators who combine:
Technology may set the foundation, but hospitality remains the heart.
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