Wednesday, November 20, 2002

Don't know about you, but I know what our restaurant will be serving for Thanksgiving: "a huge ox roasted on a spit, stuffed successively with a calf, a lamb, a turkey, a goose, a duck, and finally a young chicken, and seasoned throughout with spices."

Seven great tastes that taste great together!
posted by Luke at 3:38 PM | Comment?
 

Friday, November 15, 2002

In lamenting the death of road food, I remarked on the "old-time" decor -- read as, "a whole lot of crazy crap on the walls" -- found in a place like Cheddar's. In this week's Straight Dope dispatch, Cecil tracks down the origin of Cracker Barrel's decor. He discovers that although most of it is genuinely antique, it's all pre-assembled at the Cracker Barrel mothership in Lebanon, Tennessee, before being shipped to each new franchise.

The decor warehouse is a 26,000-square-foot facility with a staff of 11 and over 100,000 bar-coded items in inventory ... For each new location, a design team arranges a load of rustic-looking stuff on mock store walls in the warehouse, a task greatly simplified by the fact that the layout of every Cracker Barrel is pretty much the same. Then they photograph the results, pack all the items on pallets, and ship them to the site.

Sounds like an efficient way to keep any sense of serendipity out of your restaurant. Cheers, Cracker Barrel!
posted by Luke at 10:06 AM | 1 comment
 

Thursday, November 07, 2002

An amusing tale of restaurant-hires-waiter, waiter-gains-cult-following, restaurant-fires-waiter, cult-following-retaliates, theater-develops-cabaret-about-waiter's-saga: Tempest in a saucepan.

My favorite part is the story about the waiter hounding his customers if they didn't show their faces often enough:

"About a month later I got this phone call," Lutz says. "It's Gilberto, and he says, 'Dr. Lutz, you haven't come back. You didn't like my restaurant?' So I went back. And then I learned that if I didn't go at least once a month, Gilberto would call. So I'd go every month just to miss the phone call."

Now there's a strategy we hadn't considered -- stalking. Our desire for the ideal waiter is strong, and for a regular customer base even stronger, but I believe it stops short of encouraging surveillance and phone solicitation.

(Unless the solicitations come in the form of pre-recorded messages from celebrities and movie stars. Then I'm all for it. Just last week I got a call from Gloria Steinem asking me to vote Democratic. That's all it took!)
posted by Sandor Weisz at 10:54 AM | Comment?
 

Friday, November 01, 2002

My co-worker Guiseppe points out today's Phil Vettel column, in which Vettel -- after joking about his own dream restaurant, ha ha -- says the tony new club Domaine (Which makes you wretch more: the name itself, or the extra "e"?) accepts payment in yen and euro in addition to boring ol' greenbacks.

Payment in euro. How cool would that be? Not very, but it sure would be fun. And if the euro-dollar conversion rate continues to hover around 1.004, no extra calculation would be involved.

Vettel makes a good point about dessert and booze having the highest profit margins. I understand that breakfast also has a good bottom line, which makes sense given that a $5 order of French toast starts with about a quarter's worth of bread (and 25 eurocents' worth of french bread, natch). Should we be the world's first omelet, wine and chocolate emporium?
posted by Luke at 4:20 PM | 2 comments
 

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