AUSTIN (KXAN) — Neighbors who live behind Terry Black’s Barbecue on Barton Springs Road have filed a lawsuit against the restaurant claiming the smoke coming from the restaurant is a nuisance.

The lawsuit claims the barbeque joint’s five smokestacks burn wood 15 hours a day which is causing damage to their property as well as mental anguish and physical impairment. Terry Black’s has been in their current location for the past year. “The smoke, both the particles and the odors permeate into homes,” said Guy Watts, the attorney who is representing 15 neighbors on Daniel Dr. who are bothered by the smoke.

Watts said for the past year they’ve tried to work out a solution with the restaurant, but nothing worked, which is while they filed the lawsuit. “Sometimes it doesn’t matter if your windows and doors are closed, you can still smell the smoke inside your house,” said Watts, who also lives on Daniel Dr. “We have a neighbor, 6 months ago never really had a respiratory problem, but he does now, my son has greater respiratory problems now than he did 18 months ago.” Read More!

Tampabay.com - Remember when food trucks were a hot new trend? In 2011 the Tampa Bay area started with about 13 food trucks; today that number is more than 150, with new ones coming onboard each week.

The trend is evolving again. An increasing number of those mobile vendors are using their food trucks to build a client base and refine a concept before launching brick-and-mortar restaurants.

Chicago Little Italy Restaurant in Lutz and Anise Global Gastrobar, Wicked 'Wiches and Chop Chop Shop in Tampa all began as food trucks, where the price of starting a business can be as low as $20,000 versus an initial outlay of more than $100,000 with a brick and mortar.

This truck-to-table phenomenon is playing out nationally in cities like New York, Minneapolis/St. Paul and Los Angeles, with a number of surprising rationales. They never planned to stay small in the first place. Read more!

Tripadvisor.com - Hungry for pizza? Come to Florida!

The top 10 U.S. pizza cities and restaurants for pizza have been listed byTripAdvisor, and Florida made the cut.

Pizza

Two Florida cities made the list for best pizza, with Orlando at No. 4 and Miami Beach at No. 10. It comes as no surprise that Chicago tops the rankings.

So how did they come up with the list?

TripAdvisor used three factors -- the quality of pizza restaurant reviews, the number of reviews and the ratio of reviews “compared to all restaurants for the city,” according to TripAdvisor.

“Using time-tested techniques and premium ingredients, the top ten U.S. pizzerias are successful as they always keep their eyes on the pies,” said Brooke Ferencsik, director of communications for TripAdvisor.

For TripAdvisor’s overall top 10 U.S. pizza restaurants, the city of St. Augustine made high marks at No. 2 for their restaurant, Pizza Time of St. Augustine. Read more!

Rhrealitycheck.Org - the lawsuit, filed in federal court in New York, proposes a class of about 10,000 dave & buster’s employees who allege the company moved them to part-time status in 2013, eliminating their health insurance coverage in the process.

The employees claim this action violates section 501 of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), a federal law governing employee health and pension plans.

The employees allege that Dave & Buster’s reduced worker hours to avoid the ACA’s so-called employer mandate, which requires employers with 50 or more full-time employees or full-time equivalents to provide ACA-compliant health insurance coverage for those employees and their dependents, or face financial penalties. Read more!

Bay9news.com -  Florida Democrats have filed legislation to more than double the state's minimum wage to $15 an hour, an eye-popping figure they hope will spark an outpouring of activism aimed at pressuring the Republican-controlled Legislature to act.The legislation, SB 6, is sponsored by Sen. Dwight Bullard (D-Miami), who for years has tried unsuccessfully to raise Florida's minimum wage of $8.05, currently set slightly above the federally-mandated minimum of $7.25 an hour, to $10.10.

Minimum wage workers, many of whom staff fast food establishments, have long complained of what they say is the inadequacy of their paychecks to meet the necessities of daily life. A so-called "living wage" is what Angel Vega, who works the counter at a seafood restaurant, says he deserves. "I feel like that would help a lot of people, you know what I mean, and get their own place and start saving," Vega said. "It would be much better, especially with the hard work, especially hard labor and all that. That would do pretty good."  Read more!

News4jax.com - Investigators say a restaurant manager in Chicago often encouraged his patrons to join the restaurant's rewards program.  Then, Alexander Pera would offer to take the check and help you pay your bill quickly.

"When he [Alexander Pera] brought it back to process it, he would make copies of the application and the credit card. He had all of the personal identifiers as well as the credit card number," explained U.S. Postal Inspector Robert Sizer.

With that information and the rewards program application he had everything he needed to fraudulently use the credit cards, and he did. Investigators say he  stole $50,000 50 victims.

Authorities say Pera took extravagant vacations as well as multiple trips to Disney World under different aliases. Read more!

NRN.com - For the third year in a row, Irvine, Calif.-based cult phenomenon, In-N-Out Burger, earned the top ranking from consumers among the Limited-Service restaurant chains in Nation’s Restaurant News’ annual Consumer Picks report.

The family-owned brand won consumer’s hearts and did so at a time when limited-service restaurants have struggled to keep their heads above water. Visits were down three percent in the segment overall in 2014, resulting in more than 370 million lost visits, according to Port Washington, N.Y.-based research firm The NPD Group. Continue

News Herald.com - A Gulf County jury last week awarded a Port St. Joe woman over $6 million due to injuries suffered while working at a now-closed restaurant.

Whether Evelyn Holland receives a dime remains an open question, despite a life her attorney said has been relegated to a wheelchair due to disabling injuries to her pelvis and spine.

What further made the case of Holland against Gracie O’Malley’s Restaurant one for the books was that the defense was a no-show: no defendant, no defense attorney, nobody on one side of the courtroom during last week’s trial. A jury of six awarded Holland the $6 million after a trial that consumed, from opening statement to verdict, roughly six hours and which included no cross-examinations, motions or witnesses for the defense.

Continue

NBCnews.com - A former Hooters waitress has been awarded more than $250,000 after an arbitrator found that racial discrimination contributed to her getting fired.

Farryn Johnson, who is African-American, was fired from her Baltimore restaurant job in August 2013 because "Hooters prohibits African-American Hooters Girls from wearing blond highlights in their hair," according to a lawsuit.

While other women were allowed to highlight their hair, the restaurant manager told Johnson she couldn't be at work with blond streaks because it didn't look "natural" on African-Americans, the suit said.

"The manager at the time literally said, 'You can't have blond because black people don't have blond hair,'" Johnson, who had worked at the restaurant for about a year, told NBC affiliate WBAL-TV in Baltimore.

 Read more!