Next month, hundreds of restaurants across the country will ask their patrons to pay for their tap water to quench the thirst of people they have likely never met.

That’s because March 21 marks the beginning of World Water Week and the start of the fourth annual UNICEF Tap Project. Launched in 2007, the Tap Project has restaurants ask their customers to donate $1 or more for the tap water they usually enjoy free of charge. All donations help UNICEF bring clean, accessible water to the nearly 450 million children worldwide who lack access to safe water.

The Tap Project is the brainchild of advertising creative director David Droga. Since its New York City kickoff four years ago, the project has spread to almost all 50 states and raised $1.5 million, according to tapproject.org.

The initiative focuses on restaurants because of their readymade ability to make a significant impact, says Richard Alleyne with the U.S. Fund for UNICEF.

“We like the idea of the restaurant involvement because it’s so turnkey and the dining community has really picked up on it in the last two years,” Alleyne says.

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With the New Orleans Saints’ Super Bowl win and Mardi Gras festivities already under way, February promises to be a good month for Louisiana. The icing on the cake—or the okra in the gumbo—is that the state was recently singled out by the International Culinary Tourism Association (ICTA) as one of the premier destinations in the country.

In a report earlier this month, the association homed in on Louisiana because, while New Orleans’ culinary reputation is well established, “if you dig a little deeper you start to see the whole state has great food and drink,” says ICTA managing director Erik Wolf.

The report sought to assess the strategies that different destinations around the world had in place to foster culinary tourism, not solely the quality of food in a given place. While Washington, Michigan, Oregon, and Ohio all have good programs, Wolf says, Louisiana stands out as the “primary hot spot” in the country.

“A lot of states are doing a little, but Louisiana is doing a lot, and they’re doing it well,” he says.Read more

In the aftermath of the massive earthquake that rocked Haiti on January 12, the restaurant industry has responded with various fundraising initiatives to help the devastated Caribbean island nation.

The destruction was “unimaginable,” in the words of Haitian President René Préval, whose presidential palace lay in ruins after an early-morning earthquake that may have killed as many as 200,000 people. The earthquake razed large sections of Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, burying countless bodies in the wreckage of collapsed buildings.

As the images of devastation flooded television sets across the globe, U.S. restaurants large and small sprang to action. Two days after the earthquake, McDonald’s announced a $500,000 donation to be matched by Arcos Dorados, the company that operates nearly 1,700 McDonald’s locations in Latin America.

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In the latest sign of a possible wage-dispute trend in the restaurant industry, five Houston-based restaurants agreed to fork over more than $334,000 in back pay to 154 current and former employees after the Department of Labor found minimum-wage and overtime violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).

The Department’s Wage and Hour Division discovered that non-exempt employees, entitled to “time-and-a-half” pay for overtime under the FLSA, “were being paid straight time for all hours worked, including those worked over 40 in a workweek,” according to a press release issued Friday. “Additionally, the companies did not maintain the required recordkeeping.”

“It is a top priority of this department to ensure that all workers receive the wages they have earned,” said Cynthia Watson, regional administrator for the Wage and Hour Division in the Southwest, in the release. “In these cases, employees were found to be earning hourly rates that fell below the federal minimum wage. This is illegal.”

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One year since the economic collapse brought restaurant growth to a standstill, some quick serves have started to see signs of recovery.

The burst of the housing bubble last September, which sent the world economy crashing, made expansion nearly impossible. Businesses stopped investing and banks stopped lending. The fallout at Sandella’s Flatbread Café was typical.

“The pipeline didn’t just stop getting filled,” says CEO Mike Stimola. “The whole thing basically flew apart.”

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With much of the world focused on economic indicators, Juárez, Mexico, is experiencing trends of a grislier sort: Decapitations, arson, and homicide are all part of daily life in one of the world’s most dangerous cities.

Juárez’s drug war, which has claimed more than 1,000 lives in 2009, has ravaged the restaurant industry and sent franchises north into El Paso, Texas, to escape violence and extortion.

“There’s crazy people burning restaurants over there and they try to get money from the restaurants and bars,” says Antonio Rodriguez, general manager of one of the two Barrigas Restaurant locations in El Paso. Arson is a common punishment in Juárez if a restaurant refuses protection from drug cartels. As a result, Rodriguez sold his house and moved his family to El Paso in search of security.

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