Lynne Collier ’92 MBA eats out a lot — steaks, chicken quesadillas, pancakes on a stick. If Outback Steakhouse, Taco Cabana and Sonic can invent it, she will taste it. She also talks a lot — to the wait staff, to drive-through window attendants, to third-shift weekend managers. Anything to glean how good a restaurant is.

Collier is no food critic or health inspector. She’s one of the country’s foremost restaurant analysts for Stephens Inc., a brokerage firm in Little Rock, Ark. And her bulldog tenacity — she regularly visits 25 restaurants a week and calls scores of others for their wait times — was profiled by The Wall Street Journal in September 2001 in a piece about stock analysts getting back to the practice of old-fashioned detective work to see how a business is really faring.

Her colleagues joke that a 5-foot, 95-pound woman can’t be trusted to rate the dining industry, but Collier’s evaluations more often than not lead to rising stock prices and sound investment decisions.