Tag Archives: Foodie

June 13, 2014 · 10:13 am

Cooking Trolls.

Our Foodie Friday Fun this week deals with cooking trolls.

English: Troll Federlandese

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Of course I don’t mean actually cooking them but then again those evil creatures don’t actually exist either.  Restaurants – and every other business – have to deal with negative reviews in social and other media.  Sometimes they’re warranted and sometimes they drift over into troll-dom.  Today’s screed is about how one restaurant owner handled a troll and hopefully we can all learn a little something from his method.

As the folks at ABC reported:

After a customer posted a review on UrbanSpoon — which has since been deleted — requesting that the servers show more skin, owner Daniel McCawley took matters into his own hands.

“It was brutish. I was upset. I’m a father of a 12-year-old girl and I’ve got five sisters,” McCawley said. “The way that women are treated is pretty personal as far as I’m concerned.”

He did show more skin by offering a potato skin special. 100% of the proceeds will go directly to the West Virginia Foundation for Rape Information Services.  Clever, non-confrontational, and it generated a ton of positive buzz for his business.  That’s the right way to handle this sort of thing.  Suing the trolls (if you can find out their real identities), forcing review sites to delete the negative reviews, or responding in kind with defamatory comments about the poster do nothing but make you appear small.  My lawyer friends would tell you that it also opens you up to a series of legal issues when you start making allegations.

We forget sometime that if we serve 10,000 people and make 99.99% of them happy, there is still one unhappy customer.  In fact, some people who post these reviews had a great experience but, like the idiot above, find something about which to complain.  You can ignore it (which is probably what I would have done in this case) or use it to do something smart to cook the troll (which is where the owner proves he’s smarter than me!) or choose to jump down into the mud with them.  Your call.

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June 6, 2014 · 8:41 am

Meatballs

For our Foodie Friday Fun I’d like to challenge you.

A batch of Danish meatballs, also known as &qu...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Name a culture that doesn’t have a meatball on the menu. Chinese? Got a lot of them. German? Not even Klopse (see what I did there?). No, they’re pretty common everywhere, and why not? They’re a wonderful way to stretch meat as well as to make use of the scraps left when trimming larger cuts.

In most cultures, the meat is ground or finely chopped and some sort of panade – a moistened mass of bread – or breadcrumbs are added both for moisture and lightness.  The herbs and other seasonings are added, as is a binder such as egg.  The mixture is rolled into balls and then fried, steamed, boiled, or cooked in some combination of those methods.  Of course meat is optional.  Once can make excellent meatballs with beans and vegetables and bind them with soaked ground flax-seed in place of eggs to keep them vegan.  What does this have to do with business?

A lot.  First, meatballs are the common food across cultures.  NYC is the crossroads of the world.  Is it a coincidence that a place called The Meatball Shop has done really well here?  If I’m creating a product that I want to sell around the world, or at least to a diverse customer base, I look to the ubiquity of the meatball as a guide.  What do this culture’s meatballs have to do with other with respect to methods and materials?  How can that guide me from a product and marketing perspective (I’m looking for affinities here, not for the types of spice they prefer.  Are they more in tune with, say, England than with Denmark?).

Next, I look to the meatball to remind me that there is no one way to do anything.  Most meatballs are relatively simple although they’re equally simple to screw up by making them too dry or under-seasoned.  Keeping things simple prevents errors, as does clean instruction and detailed recipes.  That said, allowing people to do things their way and to build a better ball can move the business forward.  Embrace their mistakes and help them feel free to make them.

Finally, meatballs can be a bonus product created from the detritus of the main dish.  What can be made from the by-products of what you do every day?

Amazing what we can learn from something so simple, isn’t it?

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May 30, 2014 · 9:07 am

That’s Just Rude

Foodie Friday and I hope you had a chance over the past week to go out to eat.

Waiter

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Maybe it was to a holiday barbecue to begin the Summer or maybe you just needed a night off from the kitchen.  I’ve spent the week dining out a lot and it gave me a chance to reflect on something I see as a truism in life and in business.

Have you ever dined out with someone who is abominable to the server?  They treat someone who is doing their job with indifference at best and outright rudeness at worst.  Most servers, as you might know, are working for minimum wage plus tips.  It’s obviously in their best interest to keep their tables happy and I find it rare that a server warrants anything but polite, respectful treatment.  If you don’t like the food, the server didn’t cook it (or order it).  If they hover and you find it distracting, they’re probably just doing as their manager is instructing them.  Yet some people treat the wait staff as indentured servants, ordering them around without a “thank you” or “please.”  It embarrasses me, but it does something else.  It tells me a lot about the person with whom I’m dining.

You know that I subscribe to the “customer is almost always right” theory.  That “rightness” ends when they stop behaving like a reasonable adult.  I find that the people who need to demean other people generally have issues themselves – insecurity, low self-esteem among them.  So why is this on a business blog?

Bad managers can be like bad customers.  They treat their staff as “that guy” does a server.  Instead, just as you won’t get fed without a server doing their job, managers forget that it’s the work of their subordinates that makes their job necessary.  Just as servers can make a meal memorable or a disaster, staff can make the boss look great or incompetent.  I’ve always felt that we get what we give in both instances.  Which will it be for you?

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