Tag Archives: Foodie

March 20, 2015 · 10:35 am

Let Me In

This Foodie Friday I’d like us to have a think about accessibility and food.  No, I don’t mean wheelchair ramps into restaurants or menus for the blind.  Maybe a better word might be “pretense.”  Let me say what I’m thinking about and you can fill in the blanks.  Either way, it relates to business as well (what a shock!).

I watch a lot of cooking and food shows.  Some of them feature chefs who give off an air of superiority – they know a lot more than you do.  That may be true about the methods but it’s not true about the taste.  Any of us knows what we like and dislike and I, for one, am not going to let some dolt with a few years for cooking school under his belt tell me what tastes good.  Let’s face it – many of us probably know as much about cooking techniques as they do.  What really good chefs have that we might not are moments of inspiration through which they transform food into something etherial.

I don’t want to paint with too wide a brush.  As this piece pointed out:

Plenty of big name chefs are popular in large part because of how accessible they want food culture to be (Anthony Bourdain has made an entire career of sharing his love and understanding of food), or how they want to share their knowledge rather than lording it over us simple peons (Wiley Dufresne is as much an enthusiastic Culinary Biophysicist as he is a Chef). Chefs who want to join in the conversation rather than control it are myriad, and they’re a vital part of the discussion.

All of this is applicable to you no matter what business you’re in.  We need to spend time making what we do accessible – to our consumers, to our partners, to our team.  What I mean is that we need to demystify it – take the very complex and help others to understand it so they in turn can engage in the conversation.  It may mean a meeting to explain the types of data you’re gathering.  It could be a video inside your factory to explain how a product is made.  It’s all really a recognition that the benefits of letting others in and engaging in conversation far outweigh the downsides.  No chef is going to tell me what I like.  No brand is going to either.  Be accessible – ask me the question and I’ll answer and hopefully you’ll respond.

That’s my take.  Yours?

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March 13, 2015 · 10:46 am

Will It Blend

the cheeseburger burrito from California Tortilla

Cheeseburger burrito from California Tortilla

It’s Foodie Friday and this week I have trendiness on my mind.  I came across a report recently from the National Restaurant Association. The What’s Hot in 2015 survey was conducted in October 2014.  They surveyed 1,276 members of the American Culinary Federation. The chefs were given a list of 231 items and were asked to rate each item as a “hot trend,” “yesterday’s news” or “perennial favorite” on restaurant menus in 2015.  You can read the results here – consider it “coming attractions” for what you might find on a menu when you dine out this year.

I’m not sorry to say the biggest declining trend (#1 in “yesterday’s news”) is the use of insects in dishes.  It appears that foams have run their course as well. Locally sourced ingredients – meat, seafood and vegetables – is the top trend.  How they’re used is a different matter and the winner there as a general trend is ethnic fusion.  These dishes are mash-ups from different cultures resulting in things such as a cheeseburger burrito or a poutine taco.  Since we live in a country of many cultures, this isn’t surprising.  But it is instructive well beyond food.

Great ideas are all around us.  Maybe they’re buried in the ways a competitor does business.  Maybe it’s something in an unrelated field (kind of like how we look at what food tells us about business each Friday).  We need to be looking constantly for sources of inspiration.  Mark Turner, in his book The Origin of Ideas: Blending, Creativity, and the Human Spark, says that “humans are innovative and good at creative thinking due to the ability of our brains to blend two or more ideas and create a new idea.”  While we can argue about how great an idea topping Kung Pao Chicken with crumbled goat cheese might be, the important thing is that as business people we need to avoid the Not Invented Here thinking and look everywhere for inspiration.

I read a quote that “anyone can combine hoisin sauce with chutney and put it over pasta, but the end result has to taste good.”  That’s a great point.  Not every piece of fusion business thinking is great just as not every blending of ethnic foods quite works (Curried goat ceviche?  Nah…).  Thinking out of the box and trying to combine good ideas into great ones is the point.  If they blend, it just might be magic.

 

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March 6, 2015 · 11:55 am

Indian Food And Your Team

It’s Foodie Friday and what has my attention today is an article in the Washington Post Wonkblog.  Anything titled “Scientists have figured out what makes Indian food so delicious” has my full attention. After all, anyone who cooks wants to learn some secret to make everything taste better, right? As it turns out there was a business secret in there as well.

English: Thali

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As reported in GeekWire:

The researchers broke each dish down to ingredients and compared how often and heavily those ingredients shared flavor compounds. What they found was the less often dishes “shared” flavor compounds, the more delicious they tended to be. “The unique makeup of Indian cuisine can be seen in some dishes more than others, and it seems to be tied to the use of specific ingredients,” they reported. “Spices usually indicate dishes with flavors that have no chemical common ground.”

In other words, in the West many of us try to find flavors that “go together”.  The MIT Technology Review put it this way:

The food pairing hypothesis is the idea that ingredients that share the same flavors ought to combine well in recipes. For example, the English chef Heston Blumenthal discovered that white chocolate and caviar share many flavors and turn out to be a good combination. Other unusual combinations that seem to confirm the hypothesis include strawberries and peas, asparagus and butter, and chocolate and blue cheese.

And of course, as with so many things in this world, that’s a right answer, not THE right answer.  The lesson from Indian – and as it turns out many other Asian –  cuisine is that more flavors with less overlap makes for a better dish. And that is a great business point too.

Many of us build teams that are way too homogeneous.  In our effort to hire people who will “fit in” to the team, we don’t optimize our flavor profiles – how well the team functions.  The team would be much better with people who have less overlap.  You need members who will challenge ideas and not just go along.  More perspectives, more skills, more voices equals a better product.  Just as what makes a great chef is the ability to get those contrasting flavors to mesh so too is the test of a great manager how well he or she can bring together a diverse team of strong people.

Recipes as a network – who’d have thought that?!?!

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