Restaurants of the future? WSJ Reports.

In an article featured in Friday’s WSJ, they discuss José Andrés’ newest restaurant in Beverly Hills, and how its key attributes may or may not be the trends of the future.  Interesting weekend read for all of y’all who are interested in the restaurant business.

You can help make a difference.

And all it takes is a Facebook account.  This is too easy to not do.

Rather than re-invent the wheel, I’ll just paste in the latest email from Chefs Collaborative:

“We are excited to announce a new partnership with Muir Glen organic tomatoes, a company with a demonstrated commitment to organic and sustainable practices.

Muir Glen is raising up to $40,000 for Chefs Collaborative through a viral campaign on Facebook.  So far over $17,000 has been raised!  You can support this campaign in two ways:

1. Become a “fan” or “friend” of Muir Glen on Facebook.  For each new “friend” or “fan” acquired now through March 31, 2010, Muir Glen will donate $1 to Chefs Collaborative. If you have a Facebook account, simply search for Muir Glen (in the upper right corner of the screen), then click the button to Become a Fan.

2. Purchase the 2009 Muir Glen Reserve kit which includes vintage varieties of fresh, hand-picked tomatoes from California’s Yolo Valley.  For each $7 kit sold online now through March 31, 2010, Muir Glen will donate $2 to Chefs Collaborative.
   

Please feel free to pass along this email to friends and family and help us reach our goal of $40,000!

Thank you for helping us spread the word and for all you do to promote a more sustainable food supply!

Sincerely,

Chefs Collaborative”

It ain’t easy being green… WaPo Reports

Great article from the Washington Post highlighting the challenges of sustainability in restaurants, even if the intentions are good.  The article focuses on two case restos in the DC area: Founding Fathers, a 263-seat restaurant promoting a commitment to fresh and local ingredients, and Equinox, a 90-seat (expensive) restaurant basically doing the same thing.

While the challenges are the same for both, the lesser-expensive Founding Fathers often has troubles truly sourcing its local ingredients, citing lack of clear reporting and cost.  And that makes sense; think about three turns in a night, that’s almost 800 meals, and that’s just one daypart.

Talking with restaurateurs around in NYC, this is definitely an issue.  As with most purchase decisions, cost is a/the major factor in choosing one product over another.  Unfortunately, “long term assets” do not include anything about the environment or health concerns (until Google decides that they have a computer algorithm that can model this).  When the rubber hits the road, how can a “good idea” also be a “profitable idea”?  It is clearly a major concern for any business, and the food business is no exception.  Quite simply, it is expensive to source local ingredients, and in the winter months, as any farmer’s market regular will attest, it is difficult to get ingredients that would compose an entire meal.

However, there is light at the end of the tunnel.  A survey sourced from Zagat says that 61% of people are willing to pay more for “green” or “sustainable” food.  A key question that is left out is of course, “how much more,” but let’s hold that thought for a moment.  If this 61% is willing (and able) to shell out a few extra bucks to support farmers truly farming/raising sustainably, then this provides the much-needed money to invest in infrastructure and other needs, which then addresses some of the volume and distribution issues that are the problems in the first place.  Take, for example, the Milk Thistle Farm, a local New York dairy farm in Ghent, NY.  They recently started selling bonds to invest in a new bottle facility on-site.  This will help with their distribution footprint, and will hopefully expand their market share.  And it will bring their costs down (I hope).

This is why I continue to see immense value in partnering with the big food companies in order to effect any real change.  At the same time, those big companies need to learn to partner with the little guys instead of buying them out and changing the rules.  During a meeting in the Lehigh Valley last week, the President talked about the importance of innovation and its longer-term effects on the job market in this country.  If we think about the food industry in the same way, there is plenty of room for innovation, and its benefits go much farther than job creation.

In any case, give the article a read.  And if you’ve got an extra grand, get a Milk Thistle Farm bond.

It’s turkey time.

 

It must almost be Thanksgiving.

It seems like all I do these days is go to Kennedy Airport and head off to faraway lands.  Today I’m heading to the left coast, to pay a visit to the burgerrents.  And, of course, it is thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving is a great holiday.  I mean, when else can you unabashedly stuff your face with rich foods, using the excuse, “well, it is thanksgiving…”?  Never.  Except maybe Christmas, New Year’s, your birthday, groundhog day, every other Monday, and Friday.  Oh, and saturday.

Growing up, Thanksgiving always meant stuffing and canned cranberry jelly.  To this day, I still look forward to eating both of those items on the magical fourth Thursday in November.  Now, as a little kid, I was slightly fooled about the Thanksgiving stuffing that my dad used to make.  My mom, being a foreigner, didn’t really know too much about stuffing, and made it out that my dad’s stuffing was this revelation, a recipe handed down from generation to generation (although, in retrospect, I highly doubt my italian-born great-grandmother knew what Thanksgiving stuffing was).

In any event, the smell of my dad’s stuffing permeated the house on Thanksgiving Day, and the taste was always delightful.  I hoped that some day, I, too, would be able to make this magical delicacy.

A few years ago, I got my chance.  I was asked to cook Thanksgiving dinner for my family a couple of family friends.  I started to plan months in advance, thinking about how the timing would work, and how my culinary skills would astound and amaze my guests.  There would be butternut squash soup with toasted pine nuts, pancetta, and a sage cream, mashed potatoes with rosemary and caramelized shallots, chickpea flat bread with rosemary and gorgonzola, turkey, and, of course, my great-great-great-great grandmother’s super-secret recipe for turkey stuffing.

I knew that it had one ingredient: breakfast sausage.  It never really dawned on me that again, a foreigner would not have breakfast sausage.  Especially not Jimmy Dean breakfast sausage.  I guess this was another one of those things that I was fooled about, just like Uncle Ben being my uncle.

That was an honest mistake.  I thought he was just really tanned.

Anyway, I asked my dad if he had the recipe.  Thinking he would say, “yes, son, I can give you the recipe, but promise me you’ll guard it with your life.”  Then, he would pull it out of his wallet: a frayed, worn-to-the-point-of-being-like-cotton recipe card, written in ancient script (aka, cursive).  He would hand it to me with a look of pride, as I, his only son, would inherit the stuffing recipe.

Imagine my dismay when he told me, “Uhh, I don’t know what you’re talking about.  I think the recipe is from the package of Pepperidge Farm stuffing.  I mean, it’s just sausage, celery, and onions.”

WHAT?!

PEPPERIDGE FARM?  My entire childhood was based on a recipe that some “test kitchen” at the Campbell’s Company came up with?  Jimmy Dean® Old Fashioned Breakfast sausage™, onions, LUCKY Brand celery, Swanson®-brand chicken stock for moisture, and a bag of Pepperidge Farm®-brand stuffing (Original™ or Herb Seasoned™), baked for about 45 minutes in a Pyrex® a pre-heated 350-degree General Electric Monogram™ oven was not a Burgeretti family recipe?  Are you kidding me?  I was duped by corporate america?

Apparently I had been.

I always knew that the cranberry jelly came from a can, so that wasn’t really a problem for me.  But this whole stuffing thing basically meant that my entire Thanksgiving history was based on a corporate sham.  A rich, meaty, delicious sham, but a sham nonetheless.  What was next?  Was mom’s Easter “alphabet-shaped pasta in a sweet and highly viscous red tomato-sauce-like sauce” also a widely available commercial product?

Couldn’t be.

In other news, here’s a picture of a grass-fed sirloin steak I made last night.  Just thought I’d share.  I’d also like to give a shout-out to chanterelle mushrooms, just because they are awesome.  Especially when they are cooked in a pan that has leftover black truffle bits and butter in it.  I’m just saying, they are delicious.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

 

MMM, salty.

In today’s MediaPost email blast, there was an article about Diamond Crystal Salt’s new advertising campaign, which features a microsite called Salt101, which features information about Diamond Crysal salt and features Alton Brown.

Now, normally I wouldn’t visit a brand’s microsite, unless it was the age-old classic, “will it blend?”  However, a quick visit to the site actually entertained me for a good 15 minutes, as I learned why I should buy Diamond salt now, in all of its various forms and shapes and sizes.  It also had a few interesting ideas and applications of salt, most of which are admittedly common among foodie circles, but are probably lesser-known among the masses.

The videos are short but entertaining, and are organized into two areas: the kitchen and the lab.  The former tackles home cooking and uses of salt, while the latter focuses on the science stuff.  Whoever produced these shorts was probably watching Wes Anderson movies for a few weeks straight prior to makng the videos, because each one is like watching Life Aquatic or the Royal Tenenbaums.  Either way, the site was well worth the visit.

Food marketers really can’t catch a break.

As cited in an article in AdAge today, Kellogg’s is removing anti-oxidant claims from its Rice Krispies cereals– another move following the elimination of the “Smart Choices” food labeling system.  The FDA is also now going to also create its own front-of-pack labeling system, which will surely be as easy to read as the USDA’s food pyramid.

 

What about some new food sourcing guidelines??

Smart choices no longer so smart.

After being in market for under a year, the FDA has ordered food companies to discontinue the usage of the “Smart Choices” food labels, citing concerns over the standards used to choose products that are included in the program.

My feelings on the issue are mixed– at its heart, I dont’ think the program was meant to do harm to consumers, and perhaps, even if included on a box of Trix, it made people more conscious of food nutritional values.  Or maybe it just made them buy more and think they were being “healthy.”  In either case, the program will be no-more for a while.

I am sure that many in the industry are happy (especially Marion Nestle), but hopefully a meaningful and nutritionally-beneficial program will come out of this.  I think the idea is there and is good– it’s time for the food companies and the FDA to make it a reality.

 

PS: I know that I owe you all a few entries on Paris.  It’s been nuts here, so I apologize.

A post about Gourmet Magazine because this is a food blog.

So I need to have some sort of opinion.

I feel like I would be remiss not to post about Gourmet magazine being yanked from the shelves after the November issue (I don’t need to link to it because if you’re reading my blog, you probably know about this already).  Working in the marketing business, I have had long standing relationships with a few people who worked at Gourmet, and I have nothing but positive things to say about them all.

That said, my own relationship with the magazine has been a tumultuous one.  That’s a little melodramatic, but blogs revel in the extremes.  I am a dedicated reader of both Gourmet and bon appétit.  I will put that out there first.  Around five years ago, I devoured bon ap like there was no tomorrow.  To be honest, I didn’t like Gourmet.  I thought it was too hoity-toity, with all of its edit about traveling to Italy and eating truffles in Piedmont, and going to Warsaw to eat pierogi.  It was so snobbish.  BA was there, like a trusted advisor, for home chefs, like me.  I wasn’t going anywhere but the D’Agostino around the corner, and if I was feeling frisky, to the Grand Central Market.  I could have carried my passport if I went to Chinatown, just to make it feel authentic, but for all intents and purposes, I was a land-locked, cash-strapped, twenty-something with a tiny kitchen and a moderately strong food imagination.  Replete with recipes, BA was my go-to guide in the culinary world.

Then a funny thing happened.  The economy crashed.  Gourmet lost ad pages.  All of a sudden, Flushing, Queens, was the new “hot spot.”  The ad pages dropped dramatically.  McKinsey knows that.  But anyone who is a dedicated reader could have told you that long before looking at a P&L sheet.  For us readers, this was great.  We were getting: a) more relevant content; b) fewer pesky ads (ssh, don’t tell anyone I said that); and c) a better sense as to what Gourmet had been trying to do from the onset, before it got sucked into the Condé Nast “holier-than-all-other-magazines” way of operating.  I became a dedicated Gourmet reader.  I relished its arrival in my free magazine pile every month.  bon appétit lost me along the way, at some time around its “food porn” redesign.  I had gone Gourmet, and there was no turning back.  Chicken liver is for oafs… I only eat foie gras from the Périgord.

And now, Gourmet is gone.

Personally, I am conflicted about this.  While I will probably head back to BA, groveling with the smell of stale caviar on my breath, I will miss the feeling that I got from reading Gourmet.  That said, in all honesty, I will not read it online, I will not buy cookbooks under the brand name, and I will not watch “Diary of a Foodie.”  Basically, the brand will be dead to me.  And life will go on.  I really liked CHOW magazine, too, and we all know how that ended.

On a more professional note, I am less conflicted.  I am happy to see it go.  I think Condé needs to wake up and smell the roses, and I am glad that McKinsey is making this happen.  The editorial was great, but great editorial doesn’t always pay the bills (unfortunately for the editors).  From an advertiser’s viewpoint, the product was mediocre at best, and the disproportionately high ad pricing resulting in a disproportionately high decline in ad pages proves it.  Sorry, maybe you should have negotiated rates when you had the chance.

Thoughts?

“Smart Choices”– is it about marketing?

An article in the LA Times today talks about “Smart Choices”-labeled food products, and Marion Nestle, a very vocal critic about the whole thing, claims that “it’s all about marketing.”

I’m not sure I agree with her.  But what do you all think?

Sustainability, Inc.

So it’s Advertising Week here in NYC, and amidst all of the marketing jargon being thrown around, there was an event entitled “Team Earth: Empowering a Sustainability Movement.”  AdAge called it “an event to seek out,” and a last-minute scheduling snafu did not get the even as much publicity as it probably deserved, but it did allow me a seat.

And, it nicely commenced at 5pm, getting me out of the office and on my way to Locanda Verde to meet BG for dinner.

Anyway, the panel was led by some guy at CNBC that I’ve never heard of.  The panel consisted of the Chairman of Conservation International, Peter Seligmann, the CEO of Starbucks, Howard Schultz, and the Chairman of Wal-mart, Rob Walton.  These heavy hitters in the conservation movement were talking about sustainability and how it has to play a crucial role in business moving forward.

Seligmann threw out a few interesting points.  His first point was that the quality of the environment is going down.  I guess we all knew that anyway, but he reiterated it.  But, he said that engagement, awareness, and understanding is up, and that’s a good thing.  The public only really dedicates something like 17% of its interest to the sustainability movement, which is shockingly low, considering that every person on this planet is directly affected by what we’re talking about here.  He also stressed the importance of including corporations, hence his sitting on a panel with C-suite execs from two huge global brands.

Schultz, who can’t seem to catch a break these days, despite all of the advertising efforts (did anyone see the Businessweek brand rankings this week– they’re down 16% in brand value), echoed Seligmann’s sentiments, saying that sustainability will simply be part of the rules of engagement moving ahead.  There is a balance needed, he said, between making money and having a social conscience.  Since everyone refers to coffee as “tall” and “grande” these days, maybe he should have had a social conscience back then when he made us sound like losers when we want a small coffee.

He went on to talk about how people are willing to pay to support it and it has to be a real business change, and not just a marketing ploy.  It has to be a truly integrated strategy, part of the company’s DNA, and so on.  Now, coming from him, who convinced the country that four bucks is a perfectly acceptable price for a cup of coffee, I’m not sure that he can speak to “willing to pay for it” from the right perspective.  If people are willing to pay $4 for a cup of coffee, they will probably still pay $4 for a very slightly smaller cup of free trade coffee.  Or $4 for a smaller cup of coffee and a series of about 40 advertising panels in the tunnel between Times Square and the Port Authority.  Either way, people do have a social conscience, and by paying a little extra, they think they are helping.

Lastly, Rob Walton talked about Wal-mart’s commitment to sustainability.  The thing about Wal-mart is that when they talk, people listen.  I personally am not a huge fan of Wal-mart. I’ve been to one once, and I didn’t enjoy the experience.  I think their business practices are questionable, and I think they ruin neighborhoods.  All of that aside, I do applaud them for what they are doing to drive the food industry around the world to embark upon a path to more environmentally conscious production (remember that whole “when they speak…” bit?).

Now, being the businessman he is, Walton said that what got Wal-mart involved was the opportunity to make a difference… in a profitable way. Wal-mart got you again!  But, seriously, that’s the only way to make big business change their tune.  At the end of the day, a business is there to make money.  For any of this sustainability stuff to stick, it’s going to have to make someone some Benjamins.  Even Seligmann admitted that you’ve gotta keep your feet on the ground and not keep your head in the clouds with some pipe dream.  For the big guys to get involved, you’ve gotta tell them what it’s going to mean for them business wise.  It it don’t make dollars, it don’t make sense.

Anyway, interesting stuff.  Check out Team Earth.  It’s like a feel-good forum for big companies.