Survey Says...

You finish a meal and your server sidles over sheepishly and asks you to spend a minute filling out a written survey. A) You do it because you’re mad as heck and someone’s head is going to roll. B) You do it because it’s your favorite waitress, like, ever. C) You would have done it, except you’re in a big hurry to get home because your show is on tonight.

The cumulative value of these surveys to a restaurant is nebulous. On average between 1 and 5 percent of the dining public will fill out a paper comment card, and these responders are generally the disgruntled and the cheerleaders—in other words, the statistical outliers.

Long Range System’s electronic comment card, used at Bd Mongolian Barbeque (see today’s review), captures the opinions of 75 percent of diners. It’s the brainchild of Ken Todd.

“I was in the restaurant business for 14 years. Back in 1995, I was out to dinner with the wife one night and had a typical bad experience. The manager came around and asked how everything had been. I said it was fine and my wife gave me a hard time. I just hadn’t wanted to make a scene. A light bulb went off.”

Todd started a business, got a patent in 2000 and ended up partnering in 2002 with Dallas-based Long Range Systems, a producer of restaurant paging systems. The idea is simple: At meal’s end, your check arrives on a black clipboard with a keyboard embedded in it. Hmm, that’s fun. Feel like taking a quick survey? Sure.

Survey pads are placed in a docking station, the data is downloaded every night and the restaurant is sent a pdf of the results the next morning. “A lot of measurement devices don’t isolate individual servers,” says Todd. “We generate a report every day that rates individual servers on whatever the restaurant is trying to measure. A restaurant can instantly react, and servers can be coached and counseled.”

It sounds a little Big Brother, but this new technology could mean positive change for the dining public. Transmitters in the survey pad mean that some survey responses trigger a page to the on-site manager—an affirmative response to “Is this your first visit?” or a negative response to “Would you recommend this restaurant to a friend?” mean that a manager is heading your way to guide or to solve a problem. The system was used in only 5 restaurants last year—now it’s up near 300 internationally, with names like Chili’s, Shoney’s and Buffalo Wild Wings jumping onboard. With the potential to capture demographic information—age, income, gender, zip code—other applications are numerous. Already it’s being used at Mercy Hospital in Miami as a satisfaction measurement.

Serious stuff, but still it’s novel fun for the restaurant-goer.

“Kids like to play with it and some people perceive it as a toy,” says Todd.

Who says you shouldn’t play at the table?

SPAMendment

My brother just sent me a photo of SPAM Musubi (Hawaiian SPAM sushi delight) but I couldn't copy it to paste here. It was stunning. I did find this one, though, which captures some of the glories of nori-wrapped SPAM.

A PhD in canned meat

The year 1937 was a big one.

Amelia Earhart, disappears in her attempt to be the first woman to fly around the world.

Route 66 is officially completed, total distance: 2,448 miles.

The Golden Gate Bridge opens.

Yeah, yeah, forget all that. The year's big breakthrough: SPAM is born!

It was originally called HORMEL Spiced Ham when the company held a contest to create a name as distinctive as the taste. The winner, Kenneth Daigneau, received the grand prize... $100.

And now, to celebrate SPAM's golden anniversary, The Book of Spam has been published.

I learned a lot, I tell ya. SPAM was responsible for our victory in WWII. There is lite SPAM and SPAM singles. SPAM lasts forever, "on your shelf and in your soul."

For more SPAMlore, visit here.

One toque over the line

Riddle me this.

In a government study released a couple weeks ago, workers who prepare and serve food (cooks, bartenders, servers) had the second highest rate of depression among full-time employees, at 10.3 percent. Government officials tracked depression within 21 major occupational categories. They combined data from 2004 through 2006 to estimate episodes of depression within the past year. That information came from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, which registers lifetime and past-year depression episodes.

Conclusion: Working in a kitchen can be a crappy, soul-flattening job that beats you down until your amygdala is the consistency of loose Cream of Wheat.

Yet, Ludia Inc. announced yesterday that it will unveil video games based on the Hell’s Kitchen television series next year. Ludia founder and CEO Alex Thabet says, “The show has millions of viewers, and the game will bring the fun of the kitchen boot camp experience from the TVs to the PCs and consoles of this rapidly growing audience.” 

An electronic hell-spawn Gordon Ramsay will taste and comment on the culinary creations of players--browbeating, posturing and sprinkling those angry specks of spit all the while.

Conclusion: Working in an electronic kitchen presided over by a tiny, preening, British electronic chef is not a crappy, soul-flattening job that beats you down? Good times, good times.

Oh, and the video game comes with a recipe book.

Hold the phones

I'm back. I got in my car yesterday, obeying most essential traffic signals in my quest to worship at the altar of boutique-and-largely-organic-or-sustainably-grown-or-just-plain-fancy foods. I walked into Whole Foods and...

it was still, um, just like Wild Oats. The signage hasn't been changed, the house brands still say Wild Oats, the shopping bags emblazoned still with Wild Oats. I went straight to produce, hoping to encounter the vegetable-obsessed hirsute hippies that are a Whole Foods trademark. Not a one (although one smiley produce boy said I have nice hair, so that one can stay). The checkers, unfortunately, are still of the Wild Oats ilk (holding up a fennel bulb or a crookneck squash, furrowed brow, hoping for SKU illumination). The bakery: still Oatsey, not WF-ey (meaning, find me a baguette you'd want to put in your mouth).

I want Whole Foods prepared foods! I want the absence of this stuff! I want the cheeses and the wall of good vinegars and sauces. They say it will happen incrementally as the Wild Oats inventory runs down.

Alright, I'm not totally a slavering devotee. I understand that Whole Foods Market has had some dubiously ethical labor practices (anti-union). And that, essentially, WF is the organic food equivalent to Borders Books or Wal-Mart--meaning consumers benefit from economies-of-scale due to the juggernaut's vast purchasing power, but that a force that large can influence what gets made, how it gets made and what hoops the little farmer/producer/vendor has to jump through to be considered for the big league. That's a lot of power to wield.

Whereby my prayers are answered

Oh mercy me. Today I'm cooking a "Bouillabaisse, Florida Style" for Terry Tomalin's Gulf & Bay section. For this, I need a bunch of Florida seafood--clams, shrimp, grouper, stone crab. I got up and made my grocery list. I thought to myself, "Where can I go for one-stop shopping? Dang, sure wish there were a Whole Foods around here."

I called Wild Oats. A lady answers and says, "Whole Foods, may I help you?"

What?!

I was flummoxed and sputtering. I think she thought it was a crank call, like I was going to ask her if she had Prince Albert in a can.

How has Wild Oats  quietly, secretly, craftily become a Whole Foods right under my nose (alright, it's a big nose)? (Food editor Janet Keeler then told me that the business section had a story about this months ago. But still.)

I know Michael Pollan doesn't like Whole Foods. Fine, Michael, enjoy the Piggly Wiggly or whatever. For me, Whole Foods' cheese selection, meats and sausages, boutique produce (blood oranges, abundant wild mushrooms), dried pastas--it all makes me happy in my heart.

The change occurred two weeks ago and they are slowly sweeping out all the Wild Oats products and ushering in the Whole Foods ones.

I'm going shopping. If you need me, I'll be at 1548 N Dale Mabry Hwy., Tampa, FL 33607. (813) 874-9435.

Last supper

There's this new book I heard about on Zagat.com. Released on Tuesday, it's by photographer Melanie Dunea and it's called My Last Supper: 50 Great Chefs and Their Final Meals. Why didn't I think of that? A cheap way to call up all those heroes and villains of the culinary world and weasel my way into their kitchens, maybe even their homes. We'd sit down, I'd ask some questions and they'd be charmed by my devilish wit, and as they formulated their dream last meal on earth, they'd decide to cook it up for me, right there on the spot....

Sorry for that brief reverie. Got a little lost in it. Anyway, it's got me thinking about what my own last supper would be.

I guess health concerns aren't an issue (who cares about saturated fat if you have six hours to live?), so I could have a big pile of saturated fat. But I'd need something spicy. And also something nurturing, like miso soup or chocolate bread pudding. Should it be ethnically coherent? Alright, here goes, my last meal:

Start with pan-seared foie gras on some little toasted brioche thing, topped with a sour cherry compote (maybe with a glass of Talley Vineyards Arroyo Grande Valley pinot noir).

Then tempura green beans with a spicy ponzu dipping sauce. No, that's stupid. How about a next course that pairs fried tofu with a really spicy peanut sauce and a pile of that Japanese sesame seed spinach (goma ae?). Add some noodles--those really wide chow fun noodles pan-fried so they get a little browned, with cabbage and snow peas and bean sprouts. No booze with this course, unless there's a little riesling laying around. Maybe a JJ Prum spatlese.

That's still just my second course. For entree, hmm. I'd need a stunning potato gratin, and maybe something classic and retro like a filet with a bordelaise sauce. And long, crisp stalks of asparagus that's been peeled at the bottom part. Hollandaise would be too much, right? Verging on gross? I want it anyway. I don't really feel like a cab or something and it's my party. A glass of big, fat California chardonnay. I don't care if it makes me a plebe.

For dessert, how about one of those individual chocolate cakes that ooze when you cut into the middle. With a big poof of unsweetened whipped cream. And a butt-kicking cup of coffee.

Alright, I'll go quietly.

Who cares what I've eaten?

When I was a kid, my family was friends with another family in Oak Ridge, Tenn. My parents would go out with this couple for dinner and all four kids would get one babysitter. At the night's end, the other mom would come into the kids' room and, in a quiet, murmuring voice, she would proceed to recite to her children exactly what she had eaten that night.

I mean, the whole dang dinner, explicated endlessly. I would drift off to sleep listening to her saying things like, "green peas with those little onions, and soft, pillowy rolls with foil-wrapped butter...."

The takeaway, for me, was that listening to someone talk about what he or she has eaten is fundamentally boring. I grew up to be a food writer and I still thought this. Good food writing is not about listing what you ate. A restaurant review should be edifying, sure (should I go to this restaurant or should I save my money?), but it should also be entertaining. Fun to read. There should be painting a picture (the dishes, the ambiance, the service, etc.) as well as thoughtful synthesis, hilarity and hijinks, drawing of larger conclusions, jokes, verbal slights of hand.

I was saying all this at a staff meeting a couple weeks ago, when Eric Deggans basically told me I'm wrong. He told me about an entertainment blog that he likes. At the end of each entry, this woman lists what she has eaten for lunch. Just lists the stuff like this: pulled pork, beans, beets, corn.

I'm not willing to totally concede, but there is something perversely interesting about her daily chronicling of foodstuffs. A strange form of voyeurism.

Latte art

Both last weekend in New York and this weekend in San Francisco I experienced a small thrill: Latte art.

You go to a coffee shop and order a cappuccino. And the barista goes hog-mad and creates a stunning work of art out of foam. These designs are  created in espresso-based drinks in one of two ways. First, the barista may manipulate the flow of milk from a metal jug into the espresso (this is called "free pour" latte art). Second, designs may be drawn on with a little metal instrument or using stencils or powders.

Watch this video to get a feel for what I'm talking about.

The beauty of it is that latte art is coming to a coffee shop near you. The Southeast Regional Barista Competition takes place this weekend at The Harborview Center (300 Cleveland St., Clearwater), with baristas from all over the southeastern states competing for foam supremacy. It's free and open to the public, 10:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, with the finals held Sunday 10:30 a.m.-1 p.m.

Dinner and a show

I just emerged from a truly nightmarish 36 hours of travel. No, I wasn't coming from Calcutta. Only Northern California, with multiple hours spent idling on various tarmacs, sleeping on the airport floor, that kind of thing.

But then I got home to find the first copy of my new book at my front door. It looks like this. And you can buy it here.

Leafing through it with wonderment and joy, it dawned on me that Kissimmee has a raw deal. Kissimmee has a love/hate relationship with Orlando. Orlando is the big Kahuna, the main event, and Kissimmee seems fated to be the red-headed stepchild, an also-ran. Even the convention and visitor’s bureau tagline subtly reinforces this: “Make more dreams come true.” So, your main dream involves mouse ears, but if you’re not done dreaming, we’ve got some others we’d like you to test drive.

Well, there’s one arena in which Kissimmee dominates, leaving Orlando quivering and chagrined. It’s the phenomenon of the Dinner Adventure. This is not your father’s murder-mystery dinner theater. We’re talking pageantry, death-defying feats of agility and cunning, costumes, whooping-and-hollering, all witnessed while gnawing on regulation medieval turkey legs and such. Many of these shows draw 1,000 people at a time, two shows a night, every night of the year.

The granddaddy of them all is the Medieval Times Dinner & Tournament (mostly because there are too few places where you have a waitress in medieval garb saying, “Hi, I’m Heather and I’ll be your wench tonight” and in which you eat sans utensil, with only a napkin assist), but Arabian Nights Dinner Attraction is way up there, too. Orlando has Dolly Parton's Dixie Stampede Dinner & Show and Pirate's Dinner Adventure, and SeaWorld has Makahiki Luau Polynesian Feast & Celebration and Disney has the Hoop-Dee-Doo Musical Revue, but Kissimmee's offerings really kick all their butts.

What makes these things good is that the tables set up in long rows around an arena and each diner gets a color marker (in the case of Medieval Times you wear a colored paper "crown" of crepe paper) that identifies them with a section of fellow diners and a particular knight—it encourages tribal behavior, bonding and robust catcalling. All things you want maximize while dining.

You can read about it in my book.