Robert David Sullivan

Is it anti-democratic to eat at Chipotle instead of McDonald’s?

The Washington Post ’s Roberto A. Ferdman writes about the success of “fast casual food,” a type of counter-service restaurant that “has grown by 550 percent since 1999, more than ten times the growth seen in the fast food industry over the same period.” The best-known example of the genre is the burrito chain Chipotle, with Panera and Shake Shack also thriving.

What does “fast casual” mean? “It’s surprisingly hard to define what it is exactly,” Ferdman writes. One industry analyst reels off 10 criteria, most of them vague (“food that is wholesome”) or not exclusive to Chipotle and company (you can get “flexible offerings” at Burger King if you insist on it). He does not mention the key characteristic of fast casual restaurants: They don’t have poor people in them.

Ferdman does write that fast casual places are more expensive (“$9 to $13 dollars per receipt, compared to an average ticket closer to $5 for fast food restaurants”), but Chipotle fans gingerly avoid the effects on the chain’s clientele. It’s supposed to be the fresh ingredients that keep people coming back, not the tasteful clothes of the customers.

I go to Chipotle a lot, as well as to Boston-area fast casual chains like Boloco and B. good. McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and Burger King are off-limits to me, as is New England’s beloved Dunkin’ Donuts. One reason is that the fast casual chains do tend to have healthier options (such as vegetable alternatives to French fries), but equally important is that they so much more pleasant to spend time in.

Sugar monstrosities

No Halloween costume for me this year. I have no desire to show up on Twitter as an Ebola patient, or an ISIS terrorist, or in any other garb that I will instantly regret. And I’m not going to repeat my attempt to go out as Unnecessary Apostrophe Man. (It involved a paisley shirt, a name tag reading “Happy ‘All ‘Saint’s’ Day,’” and construction-paper punctuation marks that weren’t worth the trouble to make.)

I will be eating sweets, which is both cause and compensation of sleeping alone, but I won’t be going locovore. BDCwire’s Kevin Slane explains why in a story called “Dear America, We Invented All the Worst Candy. Sorry. Love, Boston.” Maybe because of its Puritan roots, Boston has come up with some of the hateful things to throw in someone’s Halloween bag: Charleston Chews, Mary Janes, Sugar Daddies, Sweethearts, and Necco Wafers. Most of these leave a quick-hardening residue of regret on your back teeth. None of them are preferable to the rocks given to poor Charlie Brown.

The only decent vending-machine treats to come out of Boston are Junior Mints and the elusive, always musty Sky Bar.

There are three acceptable sugar-delivery systems: real fruit, chocolate, and alcohol. No cheesecake. No carrot cake. And no sticky or chalky crap that punishes your teeth. (A Facebook friend protested, “Wait, what? You have to be 115 years old to like the taste of molasses?” OK, I’ll grant a narrow exemption for Panda licorice.)

Americans eat far too much sugar, as John Oliver reported last Sunday—an average of 75 pounds a year. Much of that is in the form of added sugar and corn syrup that makes food taste worse. Most ketchup is too sweet. It’s tough to find bread that couldn’t just as easily be cake. (Nutella on toast is chocolate cake.) Fruit juices are so over-sweetened that they all taste the same. Sweet tea is an abomination to God.

Avoid all these things so that you won’t feel guilty when you have sugar in its proper forms: warm cherry cobbler, a dark chocolate Mounds bar, and a whisky sour.

Guy walks into a bar, gets the rubber glove treatment

NPR reports that getting a drink in California may become a more sterile experience:

Bartender Cameron Hall hadn't heard of a new California law that bans culinary workers from touching uncooked food with their bare hands.

The rule applies to bartenders, who are now supposed to wear gloves to put limes in the mojitos and cherries in the Manhattans — even to scoop ice into a glass.

[...]

What would be the hardest thing to do with gloves on? Hall answers, "Shake hands."

The law could be a boon to psychiatrists, now able to offer a less clinical atmosphere in which people can vent about their problems.

I hope this law doesn't spread to Massachusetts. I was once at an almost empty restaurant where the bored bartender passed around samples of his homemade pickled vegetables, his hands dripping brine everywhere. One of the best nights out ever.

There is an effort in California to exempt barenders from the rule, but if it fails, some restaurants may want to make the gloves a feature rather than a bug. They can follow the lead of an eatery in Latvia featured on the website Fun Fever:

A unique, weird restaurant has opened in Riga, Latvia named "Hospitalis." It is a must-see place if you like gore things. The restaurant looks like a medicine cabinet, while you are treated as a patient and taken good care by the long-legged waitresses in nurses uniforms.

The food is served in flasks and operating-room’s dishes and isn’t that cheap (7 and more lats per meal), but this is a bizarre experience that is worth breaking the bank. Besides, the place is owned by local doctors, but unfortunately, the president of Latvia, who is also a doctor, declined his appearance at the opening once he realized how weird this place actually is.

That description is a bit judgmental, no? Maybe the straitjackets for customers are a bit much, but the skirted nurses' uniforms could catch on here, especially if nondiscrimination laws mean that male servers will have to wear them too.

Photo of Hosptalis from Fun Fever. I know that the bartenders aren't wearing gloves.

The latest urban craze is toast

We hate cupcakes now. This year, we'll be entranced by hot pieces of bread topped with homemade Smuckers. The toast will start out thick, then get skimpier as the craze spreads from city to city. Eventually, the buttered toast made from bread heels will become $12 tapas ($2 extra for a dusting of Ceylonese cinnamon).

Pacific Standard's John Gravois reports on the trend from San Francisco (in a piece that somehow swerves into an examination of schizo affective disorder):

The coffee shop, called the Red Door, was a spare little operation tucked into the corner of a chic industrial-style art gallery and event space (clients include Facebook, Microsoft, Evernote, Google) in downtown San Francisco. There were just three employees working behind the counter: one making coffee, one taking orders, and the soulful guy making toast. In front of him, laid out in a neat row, were a few long Pullman loaves—the boxy Wonder Bread shape, like a train car, but recognizably handmade and freshly baked. And on the brief menu, toast was a standalone item—at $3 per slice.

It took me just a few seconds to digest what this meant: that toast, like the cupcake and the dill pickle before it, had been elevated to the artisanal plane. So I ordered some. It was pretty good. It tasted just like toast, but better.

Watch for a toast bar in your up-and-coming neighborhood! But don't bother setting up a Tumblr account; Fuck Yeah Toast got there first.

As with so many things, Bob and Ray anticipated this. See the ad for House of Toast after a promo for another type of business that's sure to pop up any day now:

 

Gay bars unlikely to benefit from any improvements to Boston’s nightlife

Slate’s June Thomas has a post titled “A Texas Ban on Gay Two-Stepping Shows Why We Still Need Gay Bars,” focusing on a case from that state’s 54th-largest city:

According to the Victoria Advocate, a gay couple was pulled from the dance floor of the Cactus Canyon on Dec. 20 and told that club policy prohibits gay couples from dancing to country music. Justin Meyer, 21, and James Douglas, 30, had already danced several songs without incident, but a manager intervened when the music switched to Dustin Lynch’s “Cowboys and Angels.” […]

Several [newspaper] commenters said that if gay men want to dance together, they need to go to a gay bar. Except, of course, that there isn’t one in Victoria. Indeed, there are fewer and fewer gay bars all across the United States. Back in 2011, when I wrote a series about gay bars, I reported that between 2005 and 2011, the number dropped from 1,605 to 1,405, a 12.5 percent decrease.

My recent conversations with gay men in their 20s leave me skeptical that the couple would even want to go to a gay bar. They may prefer a place like Cactus Canyon because they don’t want to be pursued by older — probably much older — gay men. I’d love to read about a gay bar opening in Victoria because of this story, but I wouldn’t consider it a wise business investment.

Lively debate on Boston nightlife typically takes place on Sunday afternoon

The debate over Boston's dull nightlife, and the possibility of improving it, has flared up again in recent weeks. The spark was the launch of the Future Boston Alliance, a group that advocates for a "loosened-up" city; it was unsurprisingly brushed off by the 19-year-old Menino adminstration. (Note to blog followers primarily interested in my Top 100 Sitcom Episodes countdown: This is not off-topic, as the depiction of community-building is one thing that interests me about sitcoms.)

This morning, on the Sunday of a long weekend when just about everyone with the means has fled Boston, the Globe's Dante Ramos weighed with an indictment of the "Boston bar buzz-kill":

Nightlife — the bars, clubs, and restaurants where people hang out after hours — is a major part of the image a city presents to the world, or at least to a crucial sliver of entrepreneurial, highly mobile workers who are prone to comparison-shopping among cities. Yet Boston’s anti-fun image isn’t just bad publicity; it’s written into the law. Happy-hour drink promotions are banned statewide under a Dukakis-era state measure meant to curb drunk driving. Another state law requires bars to obtain a specific license before they allow patrons to dance. Boston’s entertainment license application asks venues to quantify their dartboards and wide-screen TVs. The rules are enforced. At a February concert at the House of Blues, Boston police broke up a mosh pit they deemed insufficiently supervised.

The Noshing Economy continues to grow

Matthew Yglesias crunches the latest employment numbers and returns to a theme that he and I are fascinated with:

General Merchandise Stores stores got killed with 35,400 job losses while Food Services and Drinking Places added a stellar 40,800 jobs. That's the future of the retail environment if you ask me. Fewer stores, more eating and boozing. Health care (as ever) adds lots of jobs.

I've noted this trend in downtown Boston, both in terms of the growth in eateries and in the disappearance of department stores.

New York restaurants up 42% in past decade; Boston up 14%

A few weeks ago I wrote a piece for the Boston Globe on the explosion of eateries in the Hub (in contrast to the shuttering of retail stores like Borders). Yesterday's New York Post suggests that the trend is even stronger in the five boroughs.

The number of restaurants citywide skyrocketed by 42 percent -- from 5,610 to a gut-busting 7,966 -- between 1999 and 2009, a Post analysis of Census data released last month reveals.

For the record, the number of "full-service restaurants" (the category used by the Post) in Boston's Suffolk County increased 14 percent over the same period, from 661 to 754.

We've got to catch up. It just won't do to have New Yorkers look down on us as people who actually use our kitchens.

Give us burritos, not books

I have a new piece in today's Globe about the bars, restaurants, and food trucks that seem to be the only businesses opening in downtown Boston. I see some good things in the trend; bibliophiles and anti-obesity warriors may disagree. Here is a sample, but please check out the whole essay at Boston.com:

The city has always been about the spaces where people can run into each other. So cocktail bars and food trucks will fill the gap left by Filene’s Basement and Tower Records. Instead of checking out the new record releases every week, we can now peruse the city’s increasingly inventive cocktail menus or see what’s new on the board at J.P. Licks.

This probably isn’t great for our waists or our productivity. Downtown office buildings will have to offer nap rooms for workers who can’t resist three-taco lunches. But psychologically, a new emphasis on eating rather than buying things may be a healthy trend. In a Cornell University study published last year, people reported more long-term satisfaction from experiences (such as vacations) than from cars, TVs, and other consumer goods.

Photo of Boloco burrito shop on School Street from Boloco website.

In praise of "You'll eat it and like it!" restaurants

Shortly after I wrote a post about how much I loved the "no ketchup!" burger place Louis' Lunch and the "no brand names!" beer bar McSorley's, the New York Times' Diane Cardwell wrote a piece declaring no-choice restaurants to be a trend:

At a pea-size Lower East Side bistro known for its fries, the admonition is spelled out on a chalkboard: No ketchup. At a popular gastropub in the West Village, customers cannot have the burger with any cheese other than Roquefort...

New York has spawned a breed of hard-line restaurants and cafes that are saying no. No to pouring takeout espressos, or grinding more than a pound of coffee at a time. No to taming the intensity of a magma-spicy dish. And most of all, no to the 21st-century conviction that everything can be accessorized to the customer’s taste.

This is a movement that I completely support. I do not go to a restaurant (or even a take-out place) so that the staff can question me on how to best use the ingredients they have on hand. If they care about their work, they already know how to prepare a meal. Good restauranteurs are like artists, musicians, scientists, and architects, and I'm not going to mess with the formulas they've spent countless hours (10,000 of them, according to Malcolm Gladwell!) getting just right.

Freedom from choice: Louis' Lunch in New Haven and McSorley's in New York

Do people get along better when they don't have too many decisions to make? I wondered about this during a trip to New York this weekend; some of my most enjoyable moments were in places with limited options.

There was McSorley's, a bar that serves no spirits, no wine, and only two kinds of beer ("light" and "dark"). I may write more about McSorley's later, but I suspect that the limited menu had something to do with the bonhomie of the crowd on Saturday night. No agonizing over wine choices! No fear of picking a passé cocktail! Five bucks gets you two mugs of beer. No other options.

Like most true urbanites, I have a low tolerance for places where people are packed so tightly that one can hardly move, but the mood at McSorley's was so convivial that I never minded being hemmed in. And it was a perfect example of an urban phenomenon: One of the best things about a big city is that it has room for places that each do one thing well. (If you don't like it, go find the nearest Olive Garden.) I think most cities could use more of these.

Another example: On the way down from Boston, my friend and I stopped in New Haven to check out Louis' Lunch, a 116-year-old diner that claims to have invented the hamburger and now cooks nothing else. We were there at the height of the lunch rush on Friday, and it took more than a half hour to get my burger "with the works," which came between two pieces of white toast and was dressed with cheese, onion, and tomato. (Ketchup and mustard, never mind "special sauce," are forbidden here.) It was so rare that it tasted more like a very good roast beef sandwich than any hamburger I'm used to, and the thin white bread cut down on the empty calories that buns usually provide. (Photo from Roadfood.com, which has a review of Louis' Lunch and a gallery of images.)

As at McSorley's, it was too crowded to move at Louis', but we eventually snagged two of the barstools. The photo below, from Louis' website, shows about half of the whole place, and the three things on the left that look like big bottles are actually the grills in which vertical racks of burgers (six each) are cooked. But it was amazingly quiet, with little of the shouts for attention and rising chatter one would expect in Boston or New York. I don't know if this was a New Haven thing or if the historical setting prompted church-like reverence, the calm friendliness of the two guys behind the counter set the tone (no Durgin-Park vibe here!), or everyone was simply mesmerized by the process of toasting hundreds of slices of bread (on a Ferris wheel-like contraption) and grilling dozens of burgers without a pause.

I'd love to have something like this in Boston, but I'm not sure it would work. We're probably not patient enough for it; hungry people constantly demanding how many burgers are ahead of theirs on the handwritten order sheets would crash the system. And even in New Haven, a sizable minority of customers ignored Louis' preference for rare meat and gave their own cooking instructions, which I consider unforgivably rude. (It's like demanding a specific tempo from a jazz quartet.) I'm sure it would be worse in Boston, with people whining about the ratio of onion to tomato and thinking that if they just ask enough times, the place will break down and put out a basket of ketchup packets. And, yes, maybe it would kill them to do that.

Like McSorley's, Louis' Lunch is an example of how nice it is to enjoy a tradition instead of trying to impose one's own preferences on everything. And I can't think of a better way to spend a vacation in a big city.

 

Four Loko merely an homage to 1940s swing music

The authorities are getting nervous about the latest craze among people who like to get drunk but don't like the taste of alcohol (in other words, free riders). From NPR:

In Washington state, nine college freshmen landed in the hospital recently with near-lethal blood alcohol levels after drinking a caffeinated malt beverage called Four Loko, according to law enforcement officials.

Police reports describe chaos at the October incident, where officers found female freshmen unable to talk or sit up, lying on mattresses in a basement near Central Washington University, about two hours east of Seattle.

Police shuttled loads of intoxicated freshmen back to campus and took the worst cases to the hospital. One student almost died, according to the police reports. At first, investigators thought the students had been drugged, but it turns out they were drinking Four Loko.

Of course, apprentice drinkers have long tried to make alcohol more palatable, and less of a "downer,"  by mixing it with sugary caffeine drinks. That's why Coke and Pepsi (and Red Bull if expense is no object) are essential mixers at any off-campus apartment party.

I prefer rum and Moxie myself. (And I just learned of the New Englander cocktail, which contains Moxie and gin.) Moxie is a caffeinated drink that's far less sweet than Coke and even slightly bitter. I used to tell people it was like sasparilla, but now I realize that's even more obscure than Moxie among people under 40. Anyway, when Moxie is mixed with alcohol, both ingredients reduce each other's bite. The result doesn't seem as quick as Four Loko in inducing blackouts, however.

I don't know if the Andrew Sisters were renowned for their ability to acheive quick blackouts, but I wonder how many rum and Cokes it took for them to get up the nerve to attempt Caribbean accents. I swear that when I listened to the song, I thought the refrain was about "working for the alky dollar."