Lin & Daughters uses Apple Business to serve up crucial customer insights.
Since 2023, Lin & Daughters has been offering delicious Chinese-style comfort food in Manhattan’s West Village. By claiming their location and adding their logo through Apple Business (formerly Apple Business Connect), Lin & Daughters has been able to highlight special menu promotions, boost brand recognition, and use Insights to help plan their next restaurant location.
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Becky Lin can tell you countless stories about the challenges of running her own restaurant. Ever since Lin opened Lin & Daughters in New York City in 2023, she’s endured all sorts of unexpected obstacles. Like when a squirrel chewed through some cables, causing the restaurant’s internet to crash. Or when their delivery bike was stolen, sending Becky on a chase around Manhattan.
“There are so many things that can go wrong,” Lin says with a laugh.
Thankfully, she wound up finding her bike. And she found a simple way to help manage the many day-to-day needs of their restaurant, thanks to Apple Business.
“Onboarding to Apple Business was the easiest thing that we had to do.”
Located in Manhattan’s bustling West Village neighborhood, Lin & Daughters was inspired by Lin’s experiences working in her family’s restaurant, where she helped make dumplings from scratch. “Food and service became our love language,” she says. “That instinct — to care for others through what you cook and how you serve — stayed with me.”
She decided to recreate that cozy atmosphere by launching Lin & Daughters, which serves up delicious dumplings, noodles, and other unique Chinese-style comfort foods. Since 2023, the restaurant has relied on Apple Business to manage its location and logo, promote menu items, understand how customers discovered Lin & Daughters, and boost the company’s brand awareness.
Lin first used Apple Business to set up a place card adding photos of the restaurant and updating its hours, ensuring the information would show up accurately across Maps, Siri, Wallet, and more. Lin & Daughters then began using the logo feature for Mail and Tap to Pay on iPhone, which displays the restaurant’s name and logo in the Mail app and on iPhone when receiving payments.
“I’ve paid careful attention to branding from day one,” Lin says, noting that the Lin & Daughters logo is prominently displayed on its packaging, website, and on the restaurant’s window. “Seeing the logo in Mail was significant. It finally felt like our online brand presence had reached the level of polish of our brick-and-mortar one.”
The restaurant’s logo also appears during Tap to Pay on iPhone transactions, helping Lin & Daughters further build its brand by providing continuity across sales, including at pop-ups and street fairs. Tap to Pay on iPhone also came in handy when the restaurant lost its internet for a week, thanks to that hungry squirrel: “It saved us during that time,” Lin says. “We just used our phones to keep taking orders.”
Lin & Daughters uses showcases to highlight special menu items, like its Seasonal Cold Soba Salad with Shrimp — a dish that’s become a summer favorite. “When it’s 100 degrees and humid in New York City, a steaming bowl of noodles isn’t exactly calling your name,” Lin says. “So we chilled things down, by adding crisp salads and cold noodle dishes to the menu. Then we ran a showcase to spread the word.” And that proved to be the right strategy to take as the restaurant saw about a 30 percent increase in orders of the salad after adding it to a showcase.
“Seeing the logo in Mail was significant. It finally felt like our online brand presence had reached the level of polish of our brick-and-mortar one.”
Because Lin & Daughters offers such an intimate dining experience — the restaurant can comfortably seat about 10 customers at a time — delivery orders make up a substantial portion of its business. The company created a Custom Action Link for its place card to drive customers to order directly from the restaurant. And it uses Insights provided by Apple Business to see where searches are coming from. “We thought Insights was super cool, because of how hyperlocal businesses are in Manhattan,” Lin says.
Understanding customer activity came in handy when Lin began planning Lin & Daughters’ next location. She examined their customers’ search activity using the heat map, looking for a Manhattan neighborhood where the restaurant already had brand recognition — but where there was room for growth.
That led Lin to the city’s Flatiron district, where Lin & Daughters opened its second location in the fall of 2025. With the help of Apple Business, Lin can spend less time worrying about the hurdles of running a restaurant and instead focus on sharing her passion for cooking. “Every time someone gives a compliment, or even just a smile and a nod, it’s like a little boost of love that keeps me going,” she says. “It reminds me why I started.”
Data provided by the customer. Apple was not involved in the gathering or analysis of the data reported.