THE GURGLING COD

Foodtruck Tweetgate - random thoughts

So, that kid in the Awl wrote about getting fired for calling out a corporate food truck patron for not leaving a tip. Some thoughts, in no partcular order:

1) The headline is "Millennial Fired for Tweet." This seems unfortunate, in that "Millennial" is emerging as a designation that automatically trivializes the concerns of the person identified as such. Generational namecalling seems to be a persistent phenomenon, rather than something unique to this moment -- a generation or two ago it would have been something about storming the beaches of Normandy at your age, and you're sitting there watching WKRP.

2) The author, Brendan O'Conor's, response to getting zero tip on a check of $170 would be reasonable - in a restaurant. At a food truck, I am not sure. Once upon a time, you went to a restaurant, sat down, and someone performed the service of telling you about the specials, answering questions about the food, bringing you food and drinks, etc, and you compensated them for this service by tipping them 15% or more of the check total. Similarly, there is an understanding at bars that a tip is appropriate for having someone fix you a drink or pour you a beer. More recently, the range of services deemed tipworthy has expanded, to the degree that one sometimes sees a tip cup next to the register at some retail stores. (I was thinking about this over the weekend during my stops at Diesel cafe, where I tipped a dollar on my three dollar iced coffee, and wondered if that kind of outlay might warrant having the server put a lid on the drink -- evidently not, BTW.) It's not clear to me where a food truck fits on this continuum, but it seems like it might be a case where tipping would be appropriate, but not compulsory. 

3) This is kind of terrifying: 

One of the unusual things about this particular food service job was that the owner used customer comments and pictures on social media—especially Twitter and Instagram—to monitor his workers. Grilled cheese: gamified.

And it was explicitly framed as a game for workers. Members of whichever 'crew' got the most positive feedback on social media each month would win a $25 iTunes gift card.

The Cod has been tussling w/ some social media questions elsewhere, but a) the Instagram Panopticon is a pretty terrible development. Also, the golden ring on this particular merry-go-round is a $25 iTunes gift card every month? I like music as much as the next person, but this does not seem like it would motivate me to pretend I was working for Danny Meyer.

4) Also, speaking of small potatoes and social media, the offending stiffers are Glass, Lewis, "The leading independent corporate governance and proxy adviser," evidently corporate governance and proxy advising is not so time-consuming that you don't have time to scan twitter for tweets about your employees' twitter practices. (It is not clear to me how a) Mr. O'Connor knew that his party was from Glass, Lewis, or how Glass, Lewis knew it was from this particular food truck that the Tweet had emanated.) And it's improbable that someone from Glass, Lewis would contact this food truck, and complain. Imagine making the call where you say "um, yeah, we bought $170 of grilled cheese sandwiches from you and didn't tip and your employee pointed that out, and we are mad about that." 

5) More improbable still, the owner of the food truck, The Milk Truck, responded by firing the offending employee. I understand that the customer is always right, but if you don't back up your employees, you won't have customers, because you won't have a a business, because, you guessed it, you won't have employees. Perhaps, as we've seen in Boston, success in the food truck business brings out the despot in us all. 

 

@cloverfoodlab Shutdown? Paging Alanis.

It's surprising that a fastgrowing Boston resto/food truck chain w/ a brand that is all about healthy would shut down b/c of food poisoning concerns. It's more surprising that a food business would have a CEO who is so fanatical about how his employees grind coffee for their own drinks, and evidently so cavalier about food safety.  

Grindgate, in full

Got that sadness

10 February, 2012 in Team by ayr | 20 comments

I’ve gotten over being mad, now I’m just sort of sad. Found some stuff this morning and I’m having trouble not taking it personally. This is the worst I’ve felt since taking on the adventure of building Clover. Not sure what to do about it.

I discovered this morning that a bunch of our employees including some of my most trusted managers are setting the coffee grinder to a very very fine setting when making coffee for themselves. I was assured “we always do it right for customers,” and before that sentence was finished I just felt worse. This isn’t a case of poor training on technique, it’s a case of employees not buying into what we’re doing.

This is in a world where Rolando and I have literally criss-crossed the country to meet roasters, tasted thousands of coffees, tested every paper filter we could find, scrutinized every type of pouring method, invested in water filtration equipment, spent days and weeks training on coffee. So it sort of feels like having some of my most trusted managers spit on me.

And when I get out of the really bad mood this has put me in I’m going to have to start the hard work of figuring out what to do about this. Our coffee is built on a fundamental belief that we’re building the future of coffee. We’re serving beans from the best growers in the world, carefully selected by the best roasters, and sweating to make sure we get that cup to you just right each day. I don’t mind that we screw it up sometimes, never like it when that happens, but I know that’s part of what’s going to happen. But to know that we have managers that are just not bought in at all is really defeating. I don’t know what I’m going to do to fix that.

 

You catch more flies with artisanal honey liqueur than you do with vinegar...

FOC MerseyMac made this short doc about the Bros. Vigalys, who are making artisanal Lithuanian honey liqueur in NC. The cinetrix brought some back with her, and it's the truth:

 

The Brother Vilgalys from Center for Documentary Studies on Vimeo.

Mississippi Burning er, Slow Cooking?

So, this landed in the inbox this AM:

Granted, it's "clan" w/ a "c," not "klan" with a "k,"but still it does not seem like the very best word. "Family," "operation," "concern," "cabal," etc, all seem like better choices. It is, however, a reminder that unlike professors, Guiteau Monday does not get the summer off! 

Forget Oreos, eat Longhorn uterus shaped cookies.

Sometimes you say, "what up, Internet?", and sometimes the Internet just tells you what's up. In rapid succession, this, at left, and this, a thing that allows you to make a cookie cutter in the shape of anything you can draw on a computer. Given the current attempt to impose Redneck Sharia on the bodies of Texas women, and the many folks standing against that, baking a tray of cookies shaped like the Longhorn uterus seems like a good way to refresh the bodies and spirits of the folks standing up for Texas women. 

Chicken soup for the hipster's* soul

This was all over the internets yesterday - hipsters go back to the land, raise chickens, and then get bored of them. (BTW, blessings to whomever makes running a chicken shelter their life's work.) 

Do you have a chicken that has stopped laying? Or a rooster that is wearing out its welcome? Good news - the Internet has almost thirty million chicken soup receipts. Click around, and you are sure to find one that appeals. You will find that the stock from an older bird will give you much more robust flavor. So all you have to do is kill the chicken, pluck the chicken, gut the chicken, feed the entrails to a pig or something, make your stock, and there you are. Problem solved, and dinner served. The sticking point, I guess, is in the killing and butchering. Two observations: I don't know if all of these folks looking for chicken shelters don't eat meat, but it seems sort of naive to imagine that if you eat non-meat animal products such as milk and eggs that the inevitable animals that do not produce these products (roosters, older hens, boy cows, etc), have a cushy plan B, like a high paid adjunct gig at CUNY a la Gen. Petraeus. A failure to recognize this reality points to the risk of these kinds of neo-agricultural ventures being a reboot of Marie Anoinette in a milkmaid costume, previously mentioned here, and here. The issue seems to be a moral blindness caused by privileging the aesthetic over the pragmatic, though it's hard for me to imagine who would want to live in a DIY Potemkin village. 

*That said, it's hard for me to understand just how this is a hipster problem, because the word ceased to have meaning some time ago. 

It takes two, (or maybe three) to make a thing go right for Chris Kimball.

Last week, we warmed to the story of  a boss marrying his younger subordinate. (And mad props to any guest who gave them something like a Good Grips potato peeler.) As we've discussed previously, the groom is a man who has built a food brand around precision and consistency. As the man himself says:

"Dear Friend,

These days, it’s pretty easy to get free recipes on the Internet. I’m sure a search for “roast chicken recipe” will turn up thousands and thousands. But, as with so much on the web, you should tread lightly if you don’t know the source."

What makes Cooks' worth paying for is precision. As in his potato salad is worth legal protection because it tells you that you need two, and not three, pounds of potatoes. However, this precision does not seem to extend to other areas of Mr. Kimball's life, in that he forgot how many times he had been married:

(Tip of the fin to my tipster.) It happens to the best of us, right? Hard to keep track of all the women, right, Chris? Somewhat more surprising is a) that Kimball tried to sneak this past the NYT wedding fact checkers, who are Pinkertons. When the Cod and cinetrix got hitched, the NYT called my crappy adjunct gig to confirm that it was, in fact, a real crappy adjunct gig. Play us off, Rob Base and DJ EZ Rock:

 

Er, play us off, De La Soul:

 

"Dr. Magical Negro, Paula Deen on line one."

In the history of bad ideas, there is this:

Crisis expert Mike Paul, aka "The Reputation Doctor," offers up some advice for Paula Deen on how to save her brand: "I'd have her reach out to a historically black college and have a historically black college professor [specializing in] anthropology or history take her through a scared-straight [educational] slave experience." This would apparently allow Deen to say, "I can now authentically say I get it." [Ad Age,previously]

If you have some free time this morning, call up history and anthropology depts at your favorite HBCU pretending to be from Paula Deen's peopleand see if they can rustle up an historically black college professor to take her through a a "scared-straight [educational] slave experience." The mind reels, especially in the context of the recent Paula Deen porn speculation. 

More seriously, this "Reputation Doctor" is terrible at his job -- his notion suggests Magical Negro thinking taken to its logical extreme. Using Powers, a kindly Negro professor can help Paula Deen put her life back together by teaching her not to be a racist? 

The Cod's first higher ed gig was at an HBCU, so I may be dwelling on this more than otherwise, but how would this look in a tenure file. "This year I wrote two articles, presented at three conferences, and built a replica slave ship so disgraced food personality Paula Deen could grasp the horrors of the Middle Passage."