Chus On Chow

Just recently I was relaxing and watching the boob tube, when I saw the new Domino’s Pizza ad.  At first I wasn’t sure what was going on.  As I recall, a fellow standing in a professional kitchen (possibly the CEO) was saying that customers had told the Domino’s management that their pizza wasn’t good.  The language he quoted was pretty blunt.  Wow.  He went on to say that they had taken this to heart and changed their recipes (and possibly the ingredients?).  Finally, he asked the viewer to please come in and try the new pizza.  It was hard to believe that this was an ad, with simple candor.  What a concept – no slick sales pitch, and even more amazing, an admission of error by a corporate boss.  Unbelievable!  And refreshing.  Finally somebody who gets it.  Now that I think about it, I wonder if it’s cheaper to make this type of ad than some dazzling, slick, completely phony production.

In the Internet age, with everyone blogging and commenting everywhere, and with news organizations publishing online countless times per day, it’s very hard for a huge business to hide.  If your stuff sucks, people will find out very quickly, whether or not you admit it.  As such, corporate heads can no longer count on preventing negative press from being seen, which they were able to do when distribution of news and information was very tightly controlled.  But it’s still the rare CEO who seems to grasp this.  I suppose that if upper management has been there a long time, and no longer is in touch with rapid changes that make up our modern reality, then you’ll still see the tired, outmoded ad techniques trickling down from their remote ivory tower.  Fortunately, this seems to be changing.

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We just got back from a couple days’ visit to New York City during which our nearly sole focus was to try new places to eat.  Staying with family in SoHo, we found it delightfully easy to fall out of bed and into a restaurant, chocolate shop, specialty grocery store or patisserie.

Our first stop after a long trip with too little caffeine was a Vietnamese restaurant called Bún Soho. With family members, we ordered a couple of bún, a beef salad and duck confit, all really tasty. The coffee showed up slowly (we expect this with Vietnamese coffee) and in a startlingly large quantity, without the little Vietnamese coffee maker sitting on the top. It was very satisfying, but just not the knock-out coffee we get at New Century in Syracuse. I suspect it was not made in the traditional way.  The service, too, was lacking. Seemed it was her first day on the job. All in all, though, the experience was quite nice, and I later experienced a longing for that cup of coffee that was not sated  by the Italian coffee nearby.

Later in the evening, looking for a hot drink to balance out the bitterly cold weather, we wandered into Maribelle chocolate shop and cacao bar. Yes, it’s pricey, but so is most of New York. And yes, it is an experience worth having at least once in your life. We went to the charming cacao bar in the back and ordered one Aztec spicy chocolate and one dark chocolate. I judge all hot chocolate by the chocolate I drank in Bar Odeón in the north of Spain some thirty years ago. It must be thick, very dark, and so rich you have to eat it with a spoon. Maribelle provided exactly that. I’m just sorry we didn’t have time to do it again.

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A couple days ago I sent this email to a friend of ours, Mike Sweetman, the meat manager at Green Hills Farms, “the best little grocery store in America“, according to Inc. Magazine.

Hey, Mike!  Here’s a question for Mr. Meat Manager: Does Green Hills serve up ground beef with ammonia in it?  Read this New York Times article and send me a pithy comment that I can blog.

He was aghast. Actually, his response was unprintable. So I asked him to explain why we can trust the meat at Green Hills. Here’s what he said:

This is the first place I have seen that does NOT use tube beef to grind burger out of. I order cases of Certified Black Angus, Choice grade shoulder clods to grind our 81% burger. We also use… get this… whole top rounds for our 90% and we use prime sirloin tips for our 93%. This is one reason our ground beef cost a little more. As I get along here I realize our prices are a bit more, but for good reason.

I was at the store on the boulevard (I won’t say the name) and it was a mess. The case looked awful, the chicken breast was in the fresh case, but it was frozen. At Green Hills we hand inspect every cut in the morning for date; if they don’t look good we pull ‘em anyway regardless of date. Our beef is all CAB (Certified Angus Beef). We do not sell it as that because our Erie Boulevard competition has a CAB program. They bring you in under the thinking that all of their beef is CAB when only a few cuts are.

So we have good reason to charge a little more for our meat. Not to mention our attention to customer service is second to none. And then you have me, with cooking instruction and my witty sarcastic humor to make your shopping fun. I’m also going to be getting in some all-natural angus beef soon.

Michael Sweetman-Meat Department

That was enough to convince me. As it turns out, unless your grocer is grinding your beef for you, you are likely buying beef parts and scraps that may come together in that “tube beef” from over a dozen different places, even different countries. That means that E. coli has many different pathways into your hamburger.

If you stop in at Green Hills and have a chat with Mike, be sure to mention how you heard of him. Then leave a comment here to tell us about your experience.

Buy local, eat well.

It’s a lazy Sunday (yeah, right! Just before Christmas!) and I’m not going to write today because Kathrine Gustafson has written what we all need to read: Coke is killing us. Not just Coke, but everything containing high fructose corn syrup. Read the labels, folks, and at least stop killing your kids. I’ll let Katherine take over from here. Her entire post on this is well worth a read.

Well, I must say, we’ve really managed to screw ourselves over in this country food-wise. Left and right there’s tainted meat and salmonella-laced lettuce, BPA-lined cans and chemically enhanced food-like products that will give you “anal oil leakage.”

Now there’s evidence that the reason for our obesity epidemic is that something we consume a lot of — at least 60 pounds a year — is actively damaging our ability to stay healthy. Yes, my friends, apparently high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) alters our body chemistry, causing it to grow more fat cells around vital organs and to spark early stages of diabetes and heart disease.

The problem isn’t just that we consume too much of the corny sweetener — though surely we do — it’s that HFCS actually damages human metabolisms in ways that promote the specific problems we’ve got.

You can read the rest of this, plus some really good comments, at Katherine’s Sustainable Food blog at change.org.

Lonnie and I were very disappointed to find that the Melt Shop suddenly closed. Jennifer was extremely friendly, we enjoyed the food, and best of all, we could walk there. Even the decor was original and fun. It wasn’t entirely clear to us why they closed. I think it may have had something to do with the rent being increased, and if that’s true, I suspect that their profit margin may have been too tight to afford it.

Already, another sandwich shop has moved into that spot.  (At least I think that’s what it is – it has looked mostly empty each time I’ve gone by)  That location is like a revolving door, I’m afraid – many small restaurants right in a row. You have to wonder why they have the notion that they will succeed where so many others have failed, something I’ve written about elsewhere. For instance, no matter how many pizza joints there are all over, and how many have failed, we’ll always see more – it’s a nearly scientific fact.  Apart from most people’s unwillingness to do any market research at all, I imagine that having kitchen equipment there is the deciding factor. Maybe the landlord has no choice but to try to find other aspiring sandwich shop owners – other businesses may find the location to be a bad fit.

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