Honeydew And The Tyranny of Bad Fruit Salad

How many times have you walked into a restaurant or cafe, looked at the fruit salads on display, and thought to yourself "Mmmmm, you fruit salads sure look good"? And those fruit salads seem to say back "Yes! We are! Look at how colorful and fresh we look!" I do this damn-near once per week. And every time the fruit salads talk to me, I respond with "LIAR! You are not tasty! You are unripe and poorly prepared! You are here to trick me and steal my money!"

Talking fruit aside, I'm sure that you know my situation. Fruit is something that needs to be cared for, monitored, and prepared with love. For example, you can buy apples year-round in most grocery stores. And for eight out of those twelve months, the apples taste like starchy butt. Why do people keep buying them? Because they look good! Why do stores keep selling them? Because people keep buying them! The entire fruit industry is predicated on these duplicitous little whores known as out-of-season fruits.

I'm not a locavore fanatic. I'm also not a fanatic about only eating seasonal food. The wonders of refrigerated trains and trucks have allowed us to get fresh foods all year round, and I think that is peachy keen. The cat's pajamas. The bee's knees, even. My complaint lies with those that sell it. They rely on the prettiness of fruit to continue selling, but they never seem to test the product for flavor before putting it on the shelf.

Could you imagine wine producers simply throwing wine up on a shelf without trying it? Of course not! But we do it with fruit every day. Where with packaged products, we're guaranteed quality compliments of rigorous controls on the part of the manufacturer, fruit pushes that responsibility to the grocer. We have many smaller grocers out there who have built a business on promising quality produce. The ones of which I'm aware generally started out exclusively as fruit and produce stands and simply evolved into more complete grocery stores. But the original philosophy of trying the products before freaking selling them remained.

Restaurants and cafes are the worst of the lot. At a grocer, one could reasonably make the argument that the grocer simply puts what's available on display and it's the customer's responsibility to do the variety of sniffs, squeezes, pokes, and taps required to determine if a fruit is good. I think that a good grocer should still do their gourmet best, but the argument at least has merit.

Restaurants and cafes have NO such leeway. They simply chop up fruit, put it in a container, and call it a day. They don't do taste tests. They don't store fruit and wait for it to ripen. It's off the truck and into your mouth and it tastes like it. This is unacceptable.

When we go to a restaurant, we're generally paying for basic ingredients. Unless you go to a comically high-end restaurant that has more Michelin Stars than customers, your ingredients are precisely what you'd get from your local grocery. You pay for the preparation, the attention to detail, and the artistry of inventive combinations.

Even at the lowliest of restaurant, this is what we are paying for. Making most of the things at an average eatery are pretty easy. The value comes from having someone else guarantee the quality of the ingredients, storing them, preparing them, and keeping sufficient supplies on hand. The extreme cost of eating out is a tenuous balance and all of those variables must be met for it to be worthwhile.

I suspect that this is the reason why casual/fast food like Panera Bread, Chipotle, Five Guys, and their ilk have been positively exploding onto the market. Their business models are all very similar: finely focused menu; assembly-line production of items; and extreme quality control. This keeps prices low, quality high, and service quick. The value equation is so heavily weighted in their favor that people have to think of reasons to not go.

In these cases, the quality control is institutionalized. It's not part of a philosophical drive of one or two leaders. But this doesn't matter. The market was tired of getting crap for low prices, or good stuff for a huge difference in price. The average meal at McDonald's, which all but defines the low end, is about five dollars. The average meal price at TGI Fridays, which is decent, is around thirteen. Nearly three times as much. There was nothing in between.

Obviously, this market vacuum wasn't going to last forever. Actually, it's amazing that it lasted for this long. I think that it's because the segment into which Chipotle et al have entered was once dominated by local restaurants. The very same local places that I am now disparaging for lack of quality control and a lack of gourmet sense. It is no surprise, then, that small, local restaurants are hurting badly in the face of this cheap competition, as they damn well should.

The title of this article specifically references fruit salad and honeydew. Honeydew is the bane of all who like fruit salad. It's an utterly delicious melon once ripe, but you'd never know that. It's NEVER ripe. Compare this to the fruit available at Starbucks, which usually has fruit salads of some sort available. Or the fruit salad at Panera bread. The fruit is always ripe. Are they doing this for gourmet, philosophical reasons? Regardless of whatever tripe Howard Schultz tries to feed us, they aren't. They're doing it because good quality is good business! If you are a local restaurant and you do not have this level of quality control, you will fail, and importantly, you deserve to fail.

You might have succeeded for a time compliments of little competition, but mark my words, the market wants quality, and if Panera, Chipotle, and others have shown anything, it's that no matter what you are selling, there is a major corporation out there just waiting to turn your product into an assembly line and sell better food for less. It's not hard to prevent this! Start with the honeydew, lather, rinse, repeat.

The Evolution of Fast Food

What started with girls on roller skates and has ended with organic beef burritos? That's right! Fast food.

Isn't it amazing how far fast food has come? In many ways, it could be argued that fast food started as high quality, simple recipes made by mom-'n-pop restaurants, mutated into high-speed, low-quality restaurants, and after many years is finally morphing back to a business model built upon quality instead of speed and price.

While I don't remember it all that well, I assume that this progression has been going on for some time, and was salient enough of a market movement for McDonalds to conceive the Arch Deluxe back in the mid nineties. I suspect that it was this market foresight is what has allowed McDonald's to strongly outperform pretty much every one of its competitors in recent years. This was long before Panera Bread, or Cosi, or Chipotle, and yet McDonald's was already aware of the market shifts that would give rise to those now-ubiquitous brands.

Today, we've got so many fast food options is actually a bit amazing. You can satisfy nearly any craving for any food type on the run. I'm sure that lots of people will decry this as further fuel to our expanding waistlines, but from a gourmet's perspective, I see it as the continued advancement of food in America. It's because of our culture that gives the US, bar none, the most diverse diet on Earth.

I'm sure that there are studies about this somewhere, but I don't think I need them. Use Google Earth to take a stroll down a street in London, then do the same thing in Boston or New York. The difference is stark. London has half the variety of foods that NY has, and that doesn't even include the limitless variety of ethnic foods available from street vendors.

But that's neither here nor there. Street vendors could be seen as the original fast food, but they were limited to high-density areas that could support a business based on walk-bys. No, American fast food exploded when the car culture reached from coast to coast, and decent roadways started extending out in more rural areas. It's actually stunning to think that way, but going back less than a human life presents a country that's startlingly different from today's. In a very, very short time we saw the mass acceptance of the car, car culture, highways, fast food, and urban sprawl. Go back just sixty years and these things didn't exist. Think about that. A sixty-year-old isn't even old, anymore, and yet when they were born, those things didn't exist.

Now, my lord, now we have so much freakin' fast food. We've got the big guys, McDonalds, Burger King, KFC and their ilk, but we also have countless smaller institutions such as In-N-Out. We've got alternatives to burgers that made their fortune as the "anti-burger" like Subway, and companies that made their fortune as the "anti-Subway," like Quiznos.

What's amazing is how much of a frontier this still is. It's tempting to almost think that we've gone as far as possible, that there is nowhere else to go in fast food. But finding how far efficiency can be pushed is an ongoing enterprise. Chiptole is only ten years old, and there are many small operations trying to figure out the sweet spot between efficiency, quality, and speed. Fresh City is basically fast food, but their Warwick location struggled for most of its life and finally succumbed early last year.

Moreover, I can only imagine the number of restaurants that are going under all across the country every year, all holding the possibility of becoming the next Chiptole. The next big hit might be Chinese fast food, or maybe falafel. All that might be needed is a good brand.

When I reviewed Chipotle, I called it the new fast food. I was wrong. The new fast food had been here for some time

On Restaurant Business.

As I discussed in this post, I have good reason to believe that restaurant business is slowing. Not only were there some persistent rumors that Providence Prime was, and a number of other restaurant were, closing, on a recent visit to Prime, their menu has taken a turn for the, dare I say it, cheaper.

I mentioned that absolute head-count is only part of the story, it's the quality and profits derived from those crowds that can make the difference between open and closed. And if Providence Prime's increase in seating, at the cost of ultra-cushy booths, offering of cheaper, cured meats, panini, bar food (which is 50% off from 5-7pm daily), and $30 pricks-ficks menu, is any indication, the high-end places in RI are doing all they can to weather the storm.

These are dangerous times for a gourmet. Not only are our own budgets strained, but many of our favorite eateries might not be able to make it. Hell, even fast food is having a hard time. The $1 double-cheeseburger is causing litigation between BK corporate and its franchises. For October, McDonald's is flat (and that's considered outperforming), BK fell 4.6%, and Arby's plummeted 9%.

About the only one doing well is Chipotle. I assume it's because people can now more freely eat it thanks to Chipotle Away.

Please Welcome Borders to 2003.

Borders Books has announced a deal with Verizon, of all companies, to provide free wifi in their bookstores and cafes. The CEO of Borders said this is all part of "Re-engaging with customers as a serious bookseller" and "is one of our strategic priorities."

This of course has nothing to do with the fact that most local cafes and bookstores have been offering free wifi for the better part of a decade and, shockingly, Barnes & Noble just started offering free wifi. Oh yes. This has nothing to do with B&N.

This is the exact reason why Borders is an also-ran retailer that's been on the verge of insolvency for years. They don't lead. They don't think. They follow, and do a damn poor job of that.

Welcome to 2003, Borders. You're only six years behind the curve. Better than you've been in a long time.

UPDATE: Well, this is fun. You know how I complain about Barnes & Noble, Panera, and basically every other major corporation offering free wifi? Unlike Coffee Exchange, or Updike's Newtowne, or Bagelz, there is a portal page through which you must agree to terms, and then sign in.

Why are there terms? Because if there weren't, the company lawyers would have nothing to do. It's shitty, plain and simple. Well, Borders does them all one better. Instead of signing in and then assigning your computer an IP number based on your MAC address (if you didn't understand that, it's ok. All it meant was that the wifi recognizes your computer and lets it in.), Borders and Verizon actually have an application that runs in the background keeping your connection active. It actually hijacks the connection from the operating system and acts like some kind of wifi cop.

I didn't have my laptop with me, so I can't confirm if it's as deathly slow as Panera, Starbucks, or B&N, but chances are it is. These big companies don't fucking get it. It's not a business model. It's not something you can skimp on. Either do it right, or forget it. For my part, you know where I'll be? I'll be at Updike's Newtown, enjoying better espresso and better wifi.

Borders to offer free Wi-Fi (Crunchgear.com)

WiFi

I just used my laptop for some full-on WiFi access in Coffee Exchange. Much like their coffee, Coffee Exchange is a case study in how to do shit correctly.

The place was packed with people on laptops inside and out. At least a dozen, not including me. The connection was quick and fast. Page to page reaction was measured in tenths of a second, and the connection was fast enough to stream YouTube videos with aplomb. All of this without some inane portal page through which I must "sign in."

Now compare this to Barnes & Noble or Panera Bread, where I have to sign in, which sometimes doesn't work (or in PB's case, NEVER works on my cell phone), and even after that the connection is laggy, and slower than leap-year-old molasses. It's useful for checking e-mail and that's about it.

My experiences at Panera and its ilk further prove that the big guys seriously don't get it. They know how to be a big franchise and apply exacting quality control over a massive empire, but are completely unable to reach beyond that. I can only assume it's because by the time the big guys become big, they've been taken over by suits, armed with MBA's, and applying all the little nuggets they learned from those thick things called books.

This compliment goes to other places as well, including Brewed Awakenings and Blue State Coffee. Many if not most of the small guys know how to do service right, as opposed to trying to hawk over-branded garbage for ridiculous prices.

Welcome Back KotterI MEAN Local Barista!

I went down to the closest Starbucks to see if the much-ballyhooed training session did anything. Well, from my experience, it made things worse. As I've said before, I've never gotten anything but good to very good espresso drinks from Starbucks. Maybe I've just been lucky since the Starbucks 'round these here parts aren't as busy as some other, more metro locations.

I had been to the location I tested two days previously, so I guess that's as close to experimental conditions as we're going to get. I got the same thing today as I got then, a triple-shot venti latte. It is, without a doubt in my mind, the worst latte I've ever had at a Starbucks location. Did they re-set the espresso machine? Did they recalibrate the whole store? I have no idea. The espresso was weak, and, as you can see from the picture, the milk was not steamed well at all.

It's not the worst latte I've ever had. It was acceptable, and I'm wondering if this is the quality that other people have been getting from their Starbucks. If that's the case, then the panic about re-booting the whole chain is very well-founded. I guess what makes this all so funny is that the latte before the training was much better than the latte after the training.

I went to another Starbucks, this one inside a Stop & Shop, a few hours later. Locations such as this were apparently spared from the training sessions, and the young woman working the counter had little knowledge of the event. She made me a latte using Starbucks' old methods and, lo and behold, it was a good latte. It's all very strange.

Welcome Back Your Local Barista!

Well, if you haven't already done so, you should go down to your local Starbucks and see how your favorite barista is doing. Yesterday, every Starbucks in the country closed from 5:30pm to 9:00pm for "remedial training." This was done to combat a decline in the quality of drinks at Starbucks. This is the second major announcement after the decision to eliminate the egg sandwiches.

Many people have questioned whether this was really needed, and no, I don't think it was. But man, was it great publicity. This was millions in free advertising to drive home to the public that Starbucks is dedicated to quality drinks.

Frankly, I've been on the better end of Starbucks drinks. I've never had a drink from a Starbucks that I would call any less than "good." I had a crap cup of coffee once, but that seems like a pretty minor sin.

So, yes. Go visit your barista and see how the new training went! I heard that one talent they would be taught was free-pouring steamed milk. Bravo!

Starbucks Closes Between 5:30 and 9:00 P.M. on Tuesday to Perfect the Art of Espresso (Starbucks Corporate)
Coffee Break: All Starbucks Closing (CBS News)
Starbucks To Get Rid of Egg Sandwiches (Starbucks Gossip)

One No-Foam, Triple-Venti, Half-Caf, Alpacino, Please.

Risking the revelation that I eat crap every now and then, I actually like Starbucks' egg sandwiches. No, they're not gourmet, but they're more than edible, and they're leagues better than comparable offerings from McDonalds, Dunkin Donuts, and their ilk. But the fact remains that I have mentioned those brands in the same breath as Starbucks, and that's the very reason I'm writing this.

Starbucks is in a bit of trouble. I think it's being a bit overblown because of Starbucks' high-flying stock up until recently, and as such any stumble is seen as catastrophe. Starbucks has, even as it's grown to an utterly ubiquitous brand, maintained a sense of exclusivity and cachet. This is changing. As the opportunities for new Starbucks began dropping, in the search for new locations the powers that be began opening in crappy areas and in amounts too great for given areas. For example, there are over thirty Starbucks on Manhattan. There’s only one chain with more: McDonalds. That will figure in later, but for now, Starbucks problems.

Much ink has been spilt about this over the last few months, most recently in the New York Times. More specifically, the Saturday, January 12th New York Times. It's written in the style of a letter to Howard Schultz. The same style that seemingly everyone on the friggin' web has been writing their comments on the Starbucks situation.

It's all in response to a letter Howard Schultz wrote to his executive team early last year. Basically, Schultz is decrying the loss of character in Starbucks. He misses the aroma, the theater, and the character of the "neighborhood" coffee house. And that's really it. He misses the character that Starbuckses used to have. I, sadly, wouldn't know. Living in Rhode Island, we didn't really get any Starbucks until well after they had lost all of the character he now misses.

I think the New York Times article hits the point best. The other major posting about the subject was done by a pair of ex-Starbucks marketers at The Idea Sandbox and Brand Autopsy, even Schultz, are way off.

I'll start with The Idea Sandbox, because be breaks down Schultz's statements pretty well.

Loss of Theater: This is specifically about the new, fully automatic espresso machines and how there is no longer hand-crafted espresso. Yeah. So. People don't go to a Starbucks for theater. They go for coffee. A loss of theater is not bad. It's much, much more important to get high quality coffee in the hands of customers quickly so they can either leave or sit down. This is not a fancy, high-end cafe.

Idea Sandbox guy, Paul Williams, lists some cons, as he and arguably Schultz see it.
* Beverages seem less hand-crafted. More mechanical, less personal.
* Current automated machines block sight-line between customer and barista.
* Expertise no longer required. Baristas rely on machine and skills become lazy.

All of the negatives are subjective, artistic criticisms that do not apply to everyone and could be seen as bad just as easily as good. Less personal?! This is a business, ditch the namby-pamby words. And I can't believe they're interested in a line of sight between the customer and barista. Fine, lower the counter six inches. Done. This is another non-criticism. In all my times of being in a Starbucks, no one I've ever seen has been interested in watching the barista. They place their order and then just wander off until it's called for pickup. The e-Bar at Nordstrom uses the same La Marzocco, and guess what, people act the same there as at Starbucks. They ignore the barista.

His recommendation is to go semi-automatic. Oh yeah, there's a good idea. Even Williams says how "it may take 3, 4 or 5 trials to get the shot perfect. Quality is the key." No, quality and time are key. If a barista did that they'd either be fired after they finished the shot or the customer would leave. Time is more important. We could always go with his other option, having both a semi-auto and full auto machine in the location. Also bad. Starbucks' kitchens are limited in space for a good reason, to be a well-oiled machine. They can't afford more counter space for a huge espresso machine.

And about no longer requiring expertise, when has that ever, in all of history been bad. The only reason we have affordable cars, and motors, and planes is because all of the work required to build them was taken from skilled machinists and given to less-skilled assembly line workers. The worker became inseparable from the machine, and that's the case in a Starbucks for very good reasons. A barista can be easily taught to analyze a good shot to make sure the machine did it right, and that's all that's needed. Teaching them to use a semi-auto wastes time, both the company's and the employee's.

The second major problem mentioned is the loss of coffee aroma. Both Williams and The NY Times mention this and I'm all for it. Coffee smells amazing! I love the smell of coffee. But merely putting it in stores for the hell of it isn't good enough. It wastes time, energy, and I feel manipulated. No, they need to involve coffee again in making a superior product. Fresh ground coffee, YES! Coffee-scented air fresheners, NO! And the idea of eliminating food in store is also dumb. A company is interested in growth. It should find ways to grow. If the cooking sandwiches are ruining the smell of the coffee, find ways to vent the food smell. Starbucks should try to find new ways to leverage their brand into related products, and egg sandwiches and pastry are related.

I do LOVE Williams' idea of in-store coffee roasting. Unfortunately, this would require stunningly skilled people manning the roast or a machine that does it without user input. Very, very difficult to implement, and damned near impossible on a massive scale. Roasting is an art, I should know, I've tried (and failed catastrophically).

The rest of the articles deals primarily with the marketing aspect and, while being generally accurate, isn't too important for a blog about food.

If you want to have passion, fine, run a small store passionately. Starbucks is NOT about passion anymore, and Schultz's "passion" is negative. He is no longer a cafe owner, he's a business man who is running a mega-conglomerate and he must act that way.

Starbucks has a major problem with McDonalds offering latte and cappuccino. Even if it's a failure, it will commoditize espresso even further, having a ripple effect on how Starbucks is viewed. Starbucks isn’t helping this. In many ways, they’ve been copying McDonalds in marketing direction. Starbucks does everything McD’s does except for television advertising. They need to take drastic steps to ensure that Starbucks is strongly and effectively separated from the burger joints in every conceivable way.

Starbucks has been an unsinkable duck recently, able to open a gazillion stores while still maintain an air of exclusivity. This has been, in my opinion, one of the great marketing feats of the last thirty years. Still, I recently saw a Starbucks open in a Stop & Shop. If you don't know what a Stop & Shop is, the name alone should tell you that it's not a place where Starbucks should be opening stores if they want to maintain brand quality.

Starbucks is a major chain. People WANT to go to the major chain. They enjoy the professionally designed interiors, the lightning fast service engineered by efficiency experts, the variety of expertly packaged foods, and the branded merchandise. It evokes a sense of quality.

Starbucks was totally justified in using automated machines. Starbucks can no longer be the "neighborhood" store. It can straddle the fence a bit, though. By carefully choosing locations, maintaining quality, and never wavering from their brand message and what goes well with coffee, I think they can be the Macy's of the coffee world. Not as cheap as Wal*Mart, not as expensive as Saks 5th Avenue, but still desirable.

I definitely think that coffee should be the primary smell, but never lose focus on the product. That's ALL that matters. If you cannot achieve smell through some process that makes the end product better, forget about it. Grinding coffee on site? That makes the product better and has smell, so good show. Going back to the La Marzocco machine, thus slowing everything down and throwing inconsistency into the coffee, BAD! Forget theater! Forget skilled baristas! This is business and I want a quality latte every, single time I go in. No exceptions. No variations. I want coffee and I want it three minutes ago. I do not expect latte art and master baristas at a Starbucks, and that's fine. I go other places for that experience. I go to Starbucks for the Starbucks experience, which is valuable in and of itself. Quick service, consistent quality, wide selection. That is why I like Starbucks.

And about those egg sandwiches. Coffee goes well with breakfast. Egg sandwiches go well with breakfast. Coffee and eggs go well together. Still, Starbuck’s has chosen to eliminate the egg sandwiches. They did so a week or so ago. At first, I thought this was a bad thing, but I have since changed my mind. I mentioned above that Starbucks needs to differentiate itself from McDonalds. That means they cannot… cannot have anything similar to an Egg Mcmuffin. And please, for the love of God, give me some bloody crackers in the cheese platter.

The Wrath of Grapes.

There are a few things about restaurants lately that I truly hate. One of them is tiramisu. I freaking hate tiramisu. Not because I hate tiramisu, but because I hate tiramisu. It's as though every restaurant thinks that if they just have tiramisu on their God-forsaken menu that it will make it more "exotic." You are not being ethnic! You are not being inventive! Having a dessert with a funny name does not a gourmet restaurant make. Don't even pretend! Get rid of it and replace it with something real, like chocolate cake.

In the same boat as tiramisu at these crappy restaurants is Robert Mondavi's Opus One blended wine. Now, call me a snob, but I've never been all that impressed with blends. I like my cab to actually be a cab, likewise for pinots and merlots. I'm certainly not against the idea of blends, and Opus One is pretty damned good, so it's hard to be against good wine.

Still, Opus One is famous not because it's good wine. It's famous because it's famous. It was more a marketing exercise with a fancy logo, fancy name, and two fancy men associated with it. This marketing exercise has Opus One sold in restaurants that have no place at all in selling good wine. In fact, Opus One has now become a strong metric by which I measure a wine list. Namely, if Opus One is the most expensive wine on the list, it's in all likelihood a shitty list. This metric has yet to be proven wrong.

I've got a news flash for the restaurants that think by having Opus One, with it's fancy name, on your wine list that it will make your restaurant haute cuisine. It doesn't. It's out of place, out of price, and the only people buying it are self-important idiots who fancy themselves gourmets but actually have palates so dull you could fill the bottle with Welche's Grape Juice and there's a possibility they wouldn't notice.

Give it up. You just look ridiculous. If you want to truly impress with desserts, hire a pastry chef. If you want to truly impress with wine, hire a sommelier, or even just someone who knows SOMETHING about wine. You don't even have to hire them for long. Just long enough to give some structure to your offerings and take your restaurant from middling piece of stupidity to something greater.