ChipotleMexicanGrill

If your New Year's resolution was to pinch more pennies, Starbucks has some bad news. The coffee king is raising prices due to rising costs of coffee and milk. And they aren't the only restaurant chain getting ready to pass higher expenses on to their customers.

The market wasn't overly impressed with Yum! Brands' quarterly report on Tuesday night. The company that watches over Taco Bell, KFC, and Pizza Hut has seen domestic business fall by 2% to 3% at each of its three chains. But Yum! fared substantially better in China, with its popular KFC scoring a whopping 19% spike in comps.

The hugely successful Chipotle Mexican Grill is branching out, at least tentatively: ShopHouse Southeast Asian Kitchen has just opened in Washington D.C.'s Dupont Circle. Our reporter scouts the location, sampling lunch and taking in the already impressive crowd.

Legendary investor Peter Lynch espoused the philosophy "Buy what you know." Well, who doesn't know restaurants? We know where the crowds are, and we know what we like to eat. Here are five chains that managed to grow during the market lull, positioning themselves perfectly for the future.

Do you get a warm fuzzy feeling when you open your cupboards? If you use products made by companies like Method, King Arthur Flour Company, and Seventh Generation, you're supporting businesses officially certified as do-good corporations by the nonprofit B Lab -- where the "B" stands for "benefit."

I know that some of my fellow bloggers over on BloggingStocks love Chipotle as a stock, salivating at its growth potentional. However, here I'm writing about the food and presentation and ambience of the Chipotle experience, and frankly, I think it's very overrated. I'll start with the ambience....

It's funny how the notion of "eating well" seems to constantly change. When I was a kid, it meant only eating out at McDonald's once or twice a month, only adding two or three packets of sugar to a glass of Coke, and trying to limit our fish stick consumption to three meals per week. Three years...