A New Case on a Familiar Frustration

Have you ever been sitting in a restaurant, waiting for your food, while delivery drivers stream in and out? You can smell what’s cooking, but instead of plates hitting nearby tables, you see bags stacking up for pickup. Eventually, you find yourself asking the question every diner hates to ask: When will our food be ready?

This tension, between serving in-person customers and servicing all the delivery orders coming in, sits at the heart of “A New Vision for BBQ?”— a recent case co-authored by Pnina Feldman, the Bigelow Research Associate Professorship in Business Administration at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, and Jeremy Halversen (MBA ’25).

Feldman recently discussed the case and her teaching passions and experiences on the latest episode of Office Hours, a Darden faculty spotlight series hosted by Brett Twitty.

“We always have a dilemma in a case, you always have to help the protagonist make some choice,” Feldman tells Twitty.

In this instance, the protagonist is Mike Blevins, the real-life founder and co-owner of Vision BBQ in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The case follows Blevins as he struggles to serve two customer groups at once — loyal diners in his newly expanded restaurant and a steady stream of delivery orders coming through apps such as DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub — without letting one undermine the other.

“It becomes very challenging during the restaurant’s peak hours when you see a line of drivers waiting to pick up orders,” says Feldman. “And it can be very frustrating if you’re a dining customer.”

As Blevins explains in the case: “In my mind, the true customers are those who come to the restaurant or order on the website. But the apps are still the main way most of those customers find us … To be honest, once you account for revenue sharing and the promotional costs, the profitability is questionable. That said, it’s hard to quantify because it’s also marketing, and how do you really quantify the profitability of finding the next loyal customer? You also get addicted to the cash flow hitting your account from the app every week.”

Feldman says the central question of the case is: What should he do? How can Blevins resolve this issue when what he cares about most is these loyal customers who come and dine in the restaurant?

A Teacher Before She Knew It

Long before Feldman set foot on Grounds, she practiced teaching.

“It’s started very, very early on,” she says. As a child, she naturally gravitated toward the role of instructor, lining up friends as “students” and putting herself at the front of the room. As she grew older and became strong in math, teaching turned from play into purpose. Feldman began tutoring middle school students — work that doubled as her first source of income.

During her military service in Israel, Feldman served as a soldier-teacher at a military boarding school. There, she taught math, physics, chemistry and English.

“Seeing students come in not understanding something about the material, and then suddenly you say something and it clicks, and you see this light bulb go off, I absolutely loved it,” says Feldman. “It gave me a lot of meaning.”

By the time Feldman enrolled at the Technion for her undergraduate and master’s degrees in industrial engineering, teaching had become part of her identity. She worked extensively as a teaching assistant, supporting large lecture courses by leading smaller discussion sections.

“I think I was a teacher before I realized what I was going to be,” Feldman says. “I was definitely a teacher before I was a researcher.”

Why Barbecue Made the Perfect Case

And, for as long as Feldman can remember, she has been fascinated with how things work, especially in the context of processes at factories.

“I grew up around business,” she says. “My dad came to Israel with big entrepreneurial dreams, and so I grew up visiting different factory floors. I learned how to make plastic gadgets, and then later how ice cream is made.”

Soon she fell in love with the service industry.  

“I worked in a theater and some country clubs. I wanted to understand the theory behind it all,” says Feldman. “I saw how important it was to have good relationships with your suppliers and employees, and how important customers are in the service process.”

She adds, “Service is my passion and it’s what I do for research.”

Feldman has translated that passion into an elective, “Managing Service Operations.” That’s where she teaches the case about Vision BBQ.

“There is something really special about this case for me,” she says. “First, it's based on a research paper I wrote about the relationship between restaurants and food delivery platforms. And second, I wrote the case with an MBA student as part of an independent study he was doing with me.”

(Feldman’s paper is “Managing Relationships Between Restaurants and Food Delivery Platforms: Conflict, Contracts, and Coordination,” published in the February 2023 issue of Management Science. It was a finalist for the best paper published in the journal between 2022-2025.)

Feldman notes that nearly 90% of Darden graduates go on to work in service industries —whether it’s consulting or investment banking or another area — making cases like Vision BBQ broadly relevant.

“It's very important to learn how to lead a service organization successfully,” she adds.

Studying Real Problems, Not Just Theory

An award-winning scholar, Feldman received her Ph.D. in operations management from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and teaches in the technology and operations (TOM) area at Darden.

She tells Twitty it was “a natural path” from industrial engineering.

“When I decided I wanted to do a Ph.D., there were essentially two main options: continue with engineering and do a Ph.D. in engineering school, or go to a business school and  focus on operations management,” says Feldman. “I really enjoy real-world problems and engaging with what companies really struggle with. In most cases, business school is a better place to do that compared to an engineering school, and so that’s what I did, and I never regretted my path.”

Feldman teaches Operations Management, a required first-year course.

“Operations is not about what you do, but more about how you do it,” she says. “In the first part, we take a process view of an organization, and ask, ‘How would you design it? How would you manage it? How would you improve a process in an organization to be able to create value and have a competitive advantage?’ And then in the second part, we add uncertainty and variability to the process. And we ask, for example, ‘How would you make inventory decisions? How would you make capacity decisions when you have uncertainty in demand or  supply?’ And finally we talk about the more strategic aspects of operations, and consider multi-firm dynamics which is supply-chain management.”

One of Feldman’s favorite cases to teach in the second part of the core operations course is “Rivian Charging Ahead,” published by Darden Business Publishing in 2021. The dilemma in the case is whether or not the electric-vehicle maker should develop and build its own network of charging stations.

Students are asked to wrestle with questions about whether charging stations should be proprietary, where they should be located, and how many they should have, among others.

Letting Students Lead

“The way we teach cases at Darden is very different,” says Feldman. “My role is not to lecture. It’s to ask questions, help the discussion emerge, and trust the students to get there.”

Ultimately, it’s to prepare Darden students to successfully lead organizations after they graduate.

In that sense, Vision BBQ is not just a story about barbecue or delivery apps. It is a window into the kinds of decisions leaders must make when growth introduces complexity, when technology reshapes customer expectations and when doing more business risks diluting what made that business special in the first place.

Professor Pnina Feldman is co-author of the case, “A new Vision for BBQ,” with Jeremy Halversen (MBA ’25), published in October 2025 by Darden Business Publishing.

To listen to the full conversation between Feldman and Brett Twitty, or browse previous episodes, visit “Office Hours,” Presented by Darden Ideas to Action.