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Saturday, June 02, 2001
Did the Cheddar's tabs have the suggested tips listed, too? I thought just the sales tax was broken out by diner. In any case, yes, this was ingenious.
How do we do this without a computerized point-of-sale system? I'm not sure, other than to encourage the wait staff to take the extra 30 seconds needed to calculate individual diner's taxes. Perhaps we can design our own checks to make this easier. In a perfect world, diners will note this convenience and tip accordingly.
And I guess one can't rule out computerized receipts, especially once we really get cranking, unless one of us wants to spend three hours each night going over receipts by hand. We just have to do it in such a way that doesn't make the place feel like Denny's. By the time we open, for instance, PDAs should be affordable enough that we can give them to waiters, who can use infrared beams to zap orders to the kitchen and cash register.
Unfortunately, by the time we have the wherewithal to open a restaurant, not only will PDAs run under $20, but monkeys will be riding jetpacks out of my butt.
posted by Luke Seemann at 6:50 PM | Comment?
Friday, June 01, 2001
I'll give Cheddar's props for one thing: their receipts. They provide a neat little gimmick for large parties who want to split the bill up per individual. The items on the bill are grouped according to the person who ordered them, and each group has a mini-subtotal after it that specifies, with tip, how much each person owes. It's an incredibly efficient way to avoid the inevitable hassle that comes with trying to split up a bill.
I imagine the billing software that performs this trick isn't hard to find. But when I pointed the gimmick out to Luke, he agreed that we should implement it, except we'll have to find a new way to do it, for we'll be using pen-on-paper receipts instead of the electronic, less personal kind. So... maybe we can print the breakdown on the back of the hand-written bill? Or maybe we'll have the waiters do it by hand? Or maybe Luke has something up his sleeve?
posted by sandor weisz at 10:51 PM | 1 comment
Tuesday, May 29, 2001
I fear I'm going to sound like Bob Greene here, but I'd like to take a moment to lament the passing of the great American road restaurant.
Road food once was one of the joys of travel. Not only did each region have its own specialties and inventions -- cheese steaks in Philadelphia, horseshoe sandwiches in Springfield, Ill., Frito pies in Santa Fe -- but individual cooks had their own takes on the standard hash browns, burgers and what-not.
Here's Kerouac on local flavor:
In the window I smelled the food of San Francisco. There were seafood places out there where the buns were hot and the baskets were good enough to eat too; where the menus themselves were soft with foody esculence as though dipped in hot broths and roasted dry and good enough to eat too. ... And oh, that pan-fried chow mein flavored air that blew into my room from chinatown, vying with spaghetti sauces of North Beach, the soft-shell crab of Fisherman's Wharf-nay, the ribs of Fillmore turning on spits! Throw in the Market Street chili beans, redhot, and french fried potatoes of the Embarcadero wino night, and steamed clams from Sausilito across the bay, and that's my ah-dream of San Francisco. And in "Blue Highways," William Least Heat-Moon says the best indicator of honest food on the road is how many wall calendars there are.
No calendar: Same as an interstate pit stop.
One calendar: Preprocessed food assembled in New Jersey.
Two calendars: Only if fish trophies present.
Three calendars: Can't miss on the farm-boy breakfasts.
Four calendars: Try the ho-made pie too.
Five calendars: Keep it under your hat, or they'll franchise.
One time I found a six-calendar cafe in the Ozarks, which served fried chicken, peach pie, and chocolate malts, that left me searching for another ever since. I've never seen a seven-calendar place. But old-time travelers -- road men in a day when cars had running boards and lunchroom windows said AIR COOLED in blue letters with icicles dripping from the tops -- those travelers have told me the golden legends of seven-calendar cafes. This weekend I met Sandy in the Quad Cities for a wedding, then drove up to Madison and finally back to Chicago. That's a 600-mile circuit, and I'm not sure I passed a single exit not fouled by a Chili's, Olive Garden or similar family-style chain. Driving through Beloit was hardly different from driving through Moline. I worried I'd made a wrong turn and had wound up where I'd begun.
When 11 of us set out for lunch in Bettendorf, we asked the hotel manager for a recommendation. I was hoping for something along Main Street (Do towns even have Main Streets anymore?), but she offered the Holiday Inn and Bennigan's. "Well, we'd sort of like something locally owned." She was stumped. The closest thing she could think of was a place called Cheddar's Casual Cafe. It sounded homey, so we went.
Cheddar's, it turned out, is just another gimicky chain, one of those synthetic places "The Simpsons" lampooned a few years back: "If you like good food, good fun, and a whole lot of crazy crap on the walls, then come on down to Uncle Moe's Family Feedbag!" (Only now do I grasp the significance of Moe changing his bar to a restaurant in the same episode that Bart sells his soul to Milhouse for five dollars. Duh!)
What were Cheddar's crimes?
- Replica farm signs and "old-time" baseball equipment on the walls.
- The bottomless coffee ... one thimble-size cup at a time. It was maddening having to hail a waitress every third gulp.
- Spasagna.
- The blank look the waitress gave Gabe when he asked whether the Spasagna was vegetarian.
- Laminated menus clearly conceived not in the mind of a rural restaurateur but by a marketing committee in a Dallas laboratory.
- Iowa appears to have made great strides in cloning. Although they varied in dimensions, the waitress corps was a fleet of perky, blue-eyed blondes named Jennifer in khaki pants and blue shirts. In "Children of the Corn," the youth slaughter their parents with scythes and axes. Today's children of the corn kill them off with a steady diet of cheese, grease and schmaltz. I'm not sure which terrifies me more.
In "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," Phaedrus goes mad amid the hollowness of the big city. "It is the little, pathetic attempts at Quality that kill. The plaster false fireplace in the apartment, shaped and waiting to contain a flame that can never exist." He's talking about Chicago, but I'm afraid a lot has changed since he took to the road, for he'd find that this hollowness has since blanketed America.
It wasn't Cheddar's lack of Quality that got me down. It was, as with Phaedrus, "the little, pathetic attempts at Quality," such as the fake mementos and artificial plants. The final straw came when our waitress offered to grind pepper over my salad. You're in Bettendorf, Iowa, you've just been served a pale-green salad with exactly four slivers of pinkish tomato, and a few turns of the pepper mill is supposed to make it a classy joint: Do you laugh or cry? I'm a polite person, so I pulled my fork from my paper napkin and ate.
Americans' bondage to chains is, if not excusable, at least explainble. After a long day on the road, we're tired, and the last thing we want to do is stretch any brain muscles thinking about where to eat. So we head to places we are familiar with and where we know what to expect, no matter how low that expectation may be.
For a nation that tamed the West and alleges to have visited the moon, we're a timid lot. We'd rather be guaranteed a mediocre meal at a chain than risk a bad meal at an unknown, and it's not just with restaurants that this is the case. We'd rather suffer the stigma of Starbucks than risk a unique independent. Given a broad slate of foreign and independent movies, we defer to blockbusters. Most sentient beings, myself included, knew that "Pearl Harbor" was but three hours of pabulum, but millions of us, myself included, went anyhow.
Maybe it would be different if travelers had a better idea of where trusted restaurants could be found. Here's one possible guide. If Blogvoices were working, I'd set up a road-food forum there. For now, feel free to e-mail me your suggestions, and when I get enough, I'll post a list. I'm looking for good, independent restaurants close to interstates or major highways. Service should be fast, restrooms should be clean, and meals should be under $10. Bonus points go for authentic quirkiness and delicious inventions.
And here are some applications for our place:
- Our wait staff should be cordial but sincere. Perky waitresses will be warned the first time, shown the door the second.
- There will be no dress code more formal than, "Look nice, OK?"
- If we offer bottomless coffee, we will mean it. No tiny cups.
- From our bacon to the knick-knacks on our walls, nothing will be fake.
Now, where did I put my atlas?
posted by Luke Seemann at 2:12 PM | Comment?
Jason's gyro-buying experience expresses the kind of attitude I'd like our employees and our ambience to evoke. People shouldn't only find our service acceptable, they should find it let's-give-them-all-the-money-in-my-wallet fantastic.
posted by sandor weisz at 11:23 AM | Comment?
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