Tag: food

Slick, sleek & slimy

I have fond memories, though my cholesterol level does not, of eating at D’Best Sandwich Shop in Boca Raton. It’s been a few years, but as I  recently munched on a Miami Cuban-style cheesesteak1 my mind started wandering and I got to wondering if D’Best still existed. As I went looking for their website, I recalled a few of their regional twists on the cheesesteak, like the New York style, a New Jersey style… not to mention their incredible non-steak explosion of an entire Thanksgiving meal directly onto a bun (D’Pilgrim).

D’Best still exists, alright… but I was truly unprepared for what I found.

You see, back when I’d visit, D’Best-the-subshop was a place you’d leave coated with a thin layer of grill grease. Had to wait in line? You’re washing your hair tonight. The place was by no means messy, but it had a certain unfinished quality to it… definitely the kind of place where the food matters more than the branding. I’d describe it as feeling somehow honest… completely lacking in pretense. Kind of blue collar? Yeah, I guess.

You can probably tell why I was expecting the website to be endearingly terrible. I was ready for a little Comic Sans, an “under construction” GIF, and a scanned paper menu—as a multi-megabyte bitmap, of course. That would seem normal. Kind of quaint.

D’Best-the-website, however, looks very professional. It’s fast, designed to modern standards, has eye-pleasing amounts of whitespace—oh, for fuck’s sake, it’s responsive—and is even served over HTTPS. Oh, and did I mention that it’s completely lacking in character? It feels like it should belong to… I don’t know, L’Best Artisinal Panini Bistro.2

And it very well could.

But what really raised an eyebrow was this line:

We have an unwavering commitment to flavor. Connect with us and let us know how we are doing.

And also, this one:

We never stop short of a culinary experience you’re sure to enjoy.

D’Best’s flavor may not waver, but you’d never hear that out of their mouths. Their sandwiches may be delicious, but a “culinary experience” they are not. This is a place where the meat gets grilled by guys in football jerseys, backwards baseball caps and maybe a tattoo or two.

Something was rotten in the state of Boca, so I plugged the above phrases into a search engine. And then I did one of these. It turns out there are at least 80,000 restaurants whose websites promise the same “unwa­ver­ing com­mit­ment to fla­vor,” and look more-or-less exactly the same as D’Best’s.

All of these, including D’Best and Hickory Hut St. Paul, say the’re “Powered by EatStreet,” a website-in-a-box service for restaurants. EatStreet seems to host these sites, and provides them with a generic design template as well. All of these different restaurants, from all over the country, basically end up with the exact same website, with the exact same messaging, except for a few small tweaks.

This feels a little slimy on the surface, but is there anything wrong with it? After all, restaurants’ websites are of truly hyperlocal interest. I mean, nobody in DeKalb, Illinois is looking for D’Best. They’re more interested in The Huddle American Food… which has the exact same website as D’Best. Sigh.

In the interest of being honest with myself, I tried to explore just which part of me was so offended by this. Was I offended as a food person? As a past D’Best devotee? Or as a copywriter who can’t help but see this as a business getting by without needing the services of myself or someone like me?

To reach the answer, I tried to put myself in the shoes of the owner of D’Best, and I realized that, you know, it must have been a whole lot nicer to run not just restaurants, but most kinds of local businesses before the Internet. Some person who really needs to be worrying about keeping rats out of the kitchen doesn’t want to think about about building and securing a website, plus dealing with all the Internet necessary-evils (Yelp, Google, Facebook, OpenTable, Square, Foursquare, etc.) that supposedly exist to bring them customers, but instead use their stature to intermediate the customer relationship, and extract a recurring fee for doing so for the rest of forever. (Actually, a few of those companies would love it if D’Best decided to give up on running a standalone website.)

If EatStreet can keep a simple site up and running smoothly, plus keep it more secure than the proverbial site-by-nephew, is that really such a bad thing? After all, a few decades in, the Internet is still not made for normal people; there’s just too much that can go wrong if one doesn’t have the specialized knowledge to do technical stuff properly. There’s definitely value in simplifying things for a normal person who just want to run their damn businesses. So even if EatStreet is yet another friendly intermediary, thanks to them one can order a D’Best Philly style online—consider my mind blown. Could that functionality exist without some centralized service keeping the Internet gears running smoothly in the background, handling the credit cards and taking a cut?

For all the upside they deliver in functionality and security, however, EatSreet sure has their tendrils into D’Best in an inadvisably-deep manner—a quick whois check shows that EatStreet actually owns D’Best’s domain name. Or should I say their new domain name. I found this other domain that still contains an older D’Best website. While this site is still slicker than it should be—remember, my cheesesteak place’s site should look a little like their paper menus, minus the grease stains—this site’s a lot closer to what I would expect. There are some typos. It’s got a page where you can meet the team. It has a freakin’ FAQ page where they tell you how to reheat a cheesesteak (which, by the way, they say you shouldn’t do).

This Internet archaeological find is a sign that someone once cared about and hand-crafted D’Best’s web presence… but at some point said “fuck it, this EatStreet thing doesn’t make me think.” Thanks to their scale, EatStreet can centralize best practices for all of their customers, but they can’t centralize the déclassé character, the local flavor, the unique greasy fingerprints that inevitably end up on the website when it’s made by the owner’s proverbial teenage nephew.3

While those at the helm of D’Best can do what they think works for them, it just sucks to see a place with so much flavor take the path lacking in taste. But they have cheesesteaks to make, and as long as people keep coming through the door to order these greasy wonders on bread, they don’t have anything to worry about.

Ultimately, I guess I’m just writing about myself and my preferences. While you couldn’t stop me from grabbing a cheesesteak if I happened to be in the neighborhood, from where I’m standing I can’t help but see big, lazy centralization as the sworn enemy of goodness. May I never get too big to have taste.

  1. For the curious: a single slab of steak topped with swiss cheese, mayo and potato sticks—a rather unhealthy twist on the ubiquitous pan con bistec, and also not a cheesesteak.[↩]
  2. A hypothetical restaurant I’d also totally eat at, by the way.[↩]
  3. Just kidding! Kids these days don’t actually know how to use computers. They’d just set up a Facebook page.[↩]

The Premium McWrap packaging is very nicely designed

McDonald's Premium McWrap 1I’m clearly no stranger to marketing, but my career hasn’t yet brought me in touch with product packaging. I like packaging, and I’ve actually bought things over the years because they were nicely packaged — stuff like candy,1 Altoids Sours, some random bike part… and yes, I’ve even bought myself a few low-balance gift cards2 to keep in my this is so awesome file.

I recently found myself impressed with the cardboard packaging around the McDonald’s Premium McWrap — I should probably go ask for a clean one while they’re still available. I guess I didn’t notice when they added this item to the menu, because I ordered my first one by mistake. My annoyance at paying about double what I expected turned to intrigue about as soon as I peeked into my drive-through bag.

Some of that price certainly went into the packaging design. What I found wasn’t a cheap paper-clad item like standard McDonald’s wraps, but something that actually looks like a “premium” product.

  • The box is rather thoughtfully designed, containing the food very nicely within — you know, what you want from a container.
  • It has a pull-and-tear strip for opening the package… and naturally, the strip runs right past the Xbox ad unit on the front.
  • There’s a little tab system on the side of the box that’s there primarily to indicate which wrap you ordered, but also to passively educate you on the rest of the lineup. (“Oh look, they also have sweet chili flavor!”)
  • It doesn’t look like this should work, but once you’ve opened the package, the box easily stands upright, even with the wrap inside.
McDonald's Premium McWrap 2 McDonald's Premium McWrap 3

Wait, was what tasty?

  1. Still pissed that my parents wouldn’t buy me Bubble Tape.[↩]
  2. Confuse your local cashier today — ask for a $1 gift card![↩]

No Ovaltine please — we’re cool

As a kid, I didn’t know anything about Ovaltine aside from their commercials, so I hadn’t seen it as a sponsor of classic radio and television, as a joke on Seinfeld, or as a big fat liar in A Christmas Story. I can’t remember any of my friends having anything to say about it, either.

I was totally unbiased.

But from the company’s marketing alone, I could tell that rich chocolate Ovaltine was uncool. I had never drunk any — and decades later, I still haven’t — but if I ever had, I certainly wouldn’t have told anyone about it.

I’m not exactly sure why the stuff made my lame-sense tingle as a kid. Maybe because Ovaltine was named after a shape (and shapes are for little kids), or that its marketing proudly proclaimed that it was full of vitamins (like everything parents love, and kids don’t), but what I suspect it was… was a little more basic than that.

Watched the ad above? Note the ending. “More Ovaltine, please!” closed all Ovaltine ads of my childhood. My present-day cynical, works-in-marketing self can imagine some agency selling this concept to the Ovaltine company with “Look, these kids not only love this vitamin-filled drink, but they love it so much they’ll develop manners and ask for it politely! Parents will eat this up!”

But my kid self saw things a little differently. “Wow, these kids are super-polite. That’s totally uncool.1 I don’t want this. Where’s the Nestlé Quik? That rabbit is cool.”

There’s a marketing message here, and it probably goes a little something like this:

If you have different targets, your messaging needs to speak differently (use “code-switching”) when speaking to different targets — there’s peril to face when one target receives a message tailored to another. It may fall on deaf ears, or maybe turn them off, entirely. Tell my mom about the vitamins — tell me about the chocolate.

And so on. But there’s also a human message here:

Look, as you grow you’re encouraged to “act your age” and as part of that, cast aside things and behaviors associated with people younger than you, and instead do things that are more becoming for someone as grown as you are. Society beats the kid out of you.

To be able to act your age is wonderful and arguably necessary… as long as you can still, as they say, “walk a mile” in smaller shoes when the situation calls for it. And, of course, recognize why a kid — this kid, kind of grown up now — may not be interested in your vitamin drink, however how rich and chocolatey it might be.

 

  1. Full disclosure: I was kind of a polite kid, and I definitely thought I was uncool. Shoe fits.[↩]

There was bread in the air

It was dark and the car was pointed east — some expressway was behind it and some more was ahead, with the exact proportions rapidly changing. Its windows were down and its sunroof was too. Around here, la madre naturaleza usually cradles us close to her sticky and often gross bosom, but she had taken the night off.

In Miami, mid-60s is fairly cool for any time of year. I take what I can get.

I couldn’t hear what was playing because the engine and the wind were too loud, and I was determined not to be that guy. I probably had something on my mind too, but who can remember? For a stretch of road perhaps a half-mile long, however, the air and my thoughts were suddenly full of the unmistakable scent of freshly-baked… sourdough. I think it was sourdough.

This was pleasing to me. Then it went away. I kept driving.

Deliciously clever dessert marketing

dessert

I went to a restaurant recently, one that could be placed comfortably in the same genre as Cheesecake Factory. Nice atmosphere, food’s great. But what stood out most to me was the way they marketed desserts.

What would you think the top reason is that people don’t order dessert? I’d guess that the first or second (the other being health/weight concerns) is that their entrée leaves them too full to eat more. How do you sell a dessert to someone who’s too stuffed to eat one? Get them to order it before they’re stuffed.

Our server initially mentioned, then reminded us on almost every appearance she made at our table, that all of their desserts are delicious, made-to-order and take up to 30 minutes to prepare, so my dining companion and I should get our dessert order in early if we don’t want to wait.

This might not give a non-critical thinker pause, but — you know — I tend to notice when someone’s reaching for my wallet. I also understand that restaurants tend to run at pretty slim profit margins, and how important attach rates of desserts, drinks and appetizers are to their business.

They really want you to have that slice of cheesecake, even if they’re probably going to be boxing it up to-go. Clever, huh?

New Orleans, in food

To say that my sister and I enjoyed the food during our trip to New Orleans would be an understatement. Anticipating a blog post like this (and for posterity), I took photos of nearly everything we ate, and checked in at each restaurant using Foursquare.

Foursquare normally annoys me, but in this case, was very helpful in logging all the places we went, on which days we went, and so on.

(Unless otherwise noted, my meal is in the foreground.)



Tuesday, March 9




Dinner: Parasol’s Restaurant & Bar

Me: Hot Sausage Po Boy. Despite being a lifelong disliker of pickles, I decided to try my sandwich with them anyway, having ordering it “dressed.” While I’m not sure they added much, it was not bad with pickles. Mine was also a little light on meat, at least compared to Allison’s.

Allison: Roast Beef Po Boy.

Wednesday, March 10




Lunch: Gumbo Shop

Me: Red Beans & Rice with Smoked Sausage Gumbo. Gumbo was yumbo.

Allison: Chicken Andouille Gumbo.




Dinner: Port of Call

Both: Burgers (mine with cheese, hers with mushrooms) with baked potato. While I was a little surprised at the lack of fries as an option, I didn’t mind at all. The baked potato was amazing. Also, I wasn’t going to break out the flash, but yeah, the lighting was a little on the low side.

Thursday, March 11




Brunch: Slim Goodies Diner

Me: Robert Johnson Burger

Allison: Havana Omelet. Came with tortillas!




Snack: Creole Creamery

Me: Black & Gold Crunch Ice Cream

Allison: Oatmeal Cookie Ice Cream

Dinner: Verti Marte

Verti Marte, a convenience store with sandwich counter in the back, had no seating, so we ate this meal in the car. Sorry, no photo; we were hungry.

Me: Muffaletta, something I had never tried. My reaction was along the lines of: “I’m pretty sure I’d list half of the ingredients on my do-not-like list, but boy are they good together!” Quite possibly my food highlight of the trip.

Allison: BBQ Po Boy

Friday, March 12




Lunch: Willie Mae’s Scotch House

Me: Chicken Fried Pork Chop. Mine was good, but I was jealous of her chicken.

Allison: Fried chicken. Quite possibly the best I’ve ever tried.




Dinner: Slice

Allison: (From left) Bacon, Basil, and Garlic; Pineapple; Fresh



Me: (From left) Jalapeño and Andouille Sausage; Greek; Fresh




New Orleans: A++++ Would nom again~~~