Clover Food Lab

My expectations were low. Ecco was bought by Intelligentsia recently. They’re best known for “seasonal coffee,” something I think is marketing hype. I don’t like the name. I don’t like the packaging. But everybody was telling me I should check them out, so I made the trip up to Ecco.

Wow, this was an experience I’m not going to forget. Andrew, the founder, was amazing. He and his head roaster, Drew, took a very generous chunk out of their day with me. We had a great time. And afterward I felt as though I’d eaten a meal. Some of the coffees were light, like appetizers, some satisfying like a main course, others felt like wine, and one in particular felt like dessert. A flowery yummy dessert.

I loved their philosophy, and approach. But above all, the coffee just tasted delicious. Yum.

Brooke and my sister got to listen to me say yum about 1000 times on the trip back to SF.

We’re going to be sharing these coffees at the truck. Really really special.

If you’ve been frequenting the truck lately you’ll notice all of those bags. This picture was taken at Barista, no kidding, that’s what they named their coffee shop. The place has an approach to coffee that we like: they serve many roasters. But beyond that there isn’t much creativity (as if the name itself wasn’t enough of a tip-off). Still, Rolando and I had great cups of coffee, even if we did feel like yuppies sitting there sipping our expensive cups of joe.

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What did I love so much about Stumptown? First, the door to their roastery was wide open, welcoming us in. Everybody in there was hustling, and there were a bunch of folks working. The place was stacked, floor to ceiling. The roaster wasn’t huge, but is was working non-stop. We learned they fire it up at 6am and shut it down at 8pm every day.

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While in LA we visited Intelligentsia’s roastery. This isn’t their primary roastery (Chicago). But they’ve been at it for a few years and use this facility to service the West Coast.

This visit was a ton of fun for us. The classic quote from the trip: “Adding any dairy product is a corrective action.” In other words, from their point of view milk and cream only belong in bad coffee.

At Clover we’re loving our quality coffees black, but don’t worry, our milk and cream aren’t disappearing anytime soon.

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The lists vary slightly, but talk to coffee folks and the following will typically show up on lists of “top roasters in the US”

• Stumptown (Portland)
• Intelligensia (Chicago)
• Verve (Santa Cruz)
• Barefoot (San Jose)
• Ritual (San Francisco)
• Four Barrel (San Francisco)
• George Howell (Acton, MA)
• Barismo (Arlington, MA)
• Barrington Coffee Roasters (Lee, MA)

Stumptown has some crazy status that I’ll admit I don’t fully appreciate. They’ve been at it for a while (10 years +) and have a ton of respect from new and old roasters. Their coffee is really yummy and we loved the folks there (more later).

This post is about Intelligensia, or at least their most recent flagship shop. They must have hired some MBAs recently. Intelly started in Chicago but are on a crazy expansion path.

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Rolando and I just got back from a trip out to the West Coast. We visited LA, SF, Portland. We ate, and ate, and ate, and ate. Coffee shops and roasters for breakfast, taco trucks for lunch and dinner, fast food joints everywhere in between, and a few fine dinning experiences just to make sure we didn’t starve.

When we got started we decided we’d force ourselves to take a culinary adventure once a year. The idea is that we’ll keep ourselves up to date and inspired, and bring back great ideas to Clover. Someday this may involve tasting the fruit nectars of Brazil, or sampling street vendors in India. This year: a $109 JetBlue flight across country and staying with friends.

I’m going to be rolling out little posts covering some of our adventures. This picture above is of Rolando holding Kogi, the most hyped food-truck in the world. This was on day 1, at 12:30am PT, jetlag what?

This is Enzo. Vincenzo is OK, but don’t call him Vinny.

Enzo ran into Rolando a while ago, I don’t know, maybe 9 months back? He’s a chef at the Four Seasons and used to be a student at JWU. Enzo came by the truck and has been digging Clover since. We have him by as often as we can. He’s always a ton of fun to have around, a very hard worker, and a great chef. Next time you hear a loud voice back there peak in and say hi, it’s likely Enzo.

Have you been wondering where our favorite burrito truck went? Us too. Jose’s truck is normally parked behind ours, but has been MIA for a few weeks. I drove over to Jose’s restaurant the other day to see what was going on, and see if I could help them in any way.

They were having problems with the old truck and are getting a new one. So look forward to a new Jose’s coming soon. Hurry up, we miss you guys!

About 10 days ago this came in the mail. If you haven’t noticed we’re in the middle of a major breakfast upgrade. This includes coffee, menu items, consistency of opening and availability, everything.

I’ve been trying out a better way to heat water for coffee. We’ve been running out when busy, our kettles use a ton of energy, and it’s hard to control the heat precisely with the kettles.

I found this 2.5L Japanese water heater online. It has some handy pre-sets for temperature and digital control. It’s insulated, which means much much lower energy consumption. Best of all it plays a happy little tune when the water is ready!

This is the beginning of another coffee journey. Or rather the end. Rolando and I just got back from a big research trip that included food trucks, fast food, juice shops, some fine dining, and lots and lots of coffee. We’ve known for a while that coffee is really important to breakfast. We want our coffee to be:

- Your absolute favorite cup
- Cheap
- Simple and approachable
- Robust

There is a ton happening in the coffee world right now and Rolando and I, neither of us coffee insiders, are trying to sort it all out. We are starting to understand how Clover’s philosophy of food applies to the coffee world.

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Our sandwich boards are getting a bit ratty aren’t they? I need to find a more durable solution.

That said, we really don’t want them to look like the example on the left above, or like anything that would ever be anywhere near a Starbuck’s. Don’t get me wrong, I’d really like them to be cleaner than they are.

That said, I’m very proud that we write on our boards daily. They’re far from perfect, some have even complained about my handwriting. But they reflect where we are on a day to day basis. That’s the timescale on which our food is made, that’s the timescale our communications should obey.

I made the trek down to Berkshire Products. This place is about as far as you can get from Boston and still be in MA. But they mill some of the most beautiful wood anywhere. It’s just amazing. I’ve always loved wood. In the context of Clover I think wood can bring warmth to what is going to otherwise be a very cold and modern aesthetic. There are other things we do to ensure things don’t feel to sterile (e.g., breaking up planes and rectangles). But the wood plays a huge role for us. Those counters carry a lot of weight design-wise.

We went with a New England red oak. Well, there’s no way to be entirely sure it’s New England based. I pressed these guys on this issue this time and they admitted that they don’t track. So “almost all” maple, ash, and oak is New England in origin, but they can’t be certain.

They had a production sander this time. They either didn’t have it last time, or I just didn’t see it. Awesome. For $40 they ran it through for me down to 120 grit. That means I got a board that had been planed and sanded. Awesome.

After the break I’ve included pictures of the counter getting sanded and packed on top of my car. I spent the weekend building and finishing the counters. I’ll post the final product when it is installed.

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Our yogurt supplier, Narraganset Creamery, makes up some of the best yogurt in the Northeast. The only other producer that I’d put at their quality would be Sidehill Farm back from W. Mass (where I grew up). Sidehill is great, but they don’t really sell around here.

What’s good yogurt? Mostly it has to do with freshness, and lack of additives — stabilizers, preservatives, etc. The cultures are happy and active. It comes through in the taste, and also in the texture. You’ll notice if you get to breakfast early in the morning that we always stir the yogurt quickly 40-50 stirs before serving anybody. This creates a silky texture, it’s really beautiful.

If you haven’t had our yogurt it can be found with granola and seasonal fruit compote every morning.

The picture above is from a recent trip to Narraganset. It’s a huge operation, and they make a lot of cheese. More pictures after the break.

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So when you are building a new restaurant you talk to your equipment supplier, and they help you design the kitchen. They charge you of course, but then you buy away the charge as you buy equipment from the supplier.

You can understand why restaurants go for this, it appears to reduce your cash outlay. And you can see why suppliers offer this service, this way they can lock in purchases before all of that price comparing goes on (the kitchen has not yet been specified and designed, so what are you going to compare at this stage?)

I interviewed TriMark, they may be the largest equipment supplier in North America. I also talked to Eastern (pictured above). They are a smaller local supplier and have helped me with the truck. Believe me, I have my complaints about Eastern. They’re a bit disorganized, and only recently have they started to treat me decently, before that it was very gruff. And I’ve seen them treat other customers in ways that cannot be excused.

That said, they have been helping me to date, and they are local. Very local. We decided to use them for the design phase. Didn’t hurt that they are faster and less expensive than TriMark for this stage, but whatever the reason the choice makes me feel good.

My first day at Clover, back in August, was also the last day of order-taking by pen and paper. The next day, we got our POS system, with a server, an iPod Touch for order-taking, one at each sandwich station, and one for the expeditor, the person who hands out your food.

Yesterday the server wasn’t working and we were back to pen and paper – or in my case, pen and paper bag (or when the pen ran out of ink – expo-marker and paper bag). Columns for name, sandwich, drink, soup, and fries. Ayr was calling out orders to the folks on the truck (like: “I need one egg-and-eggplant followed by two chickpeas, a barbeque, and four fries”), and crossing orders off by hand.

If you stopped by yesterday during the lunch rush, you might have noticed we were a much noisier truck. iPod system is back up and running.

We’re working out our new restaurant. Here’s a rough sketch as we figure out the kitchen arrangement.

There is a ton going on regarding the new restaurant and the truck. I need to set up a new page to handle all of that stuff. I’ve been hesitant to post it all here for fear it will quickly overwhelm this page. But in the meantime I’ll trickle a few posts here and there.

Our approach to kitchen design? Shouldn’t surprise any of you: we expect we’re going to get it wrong. We’re doing our best to build for testing and flexibility (e.g., equipment on casters). And we’ve learned a few things from the truck. Let’s just say we’re preparing for lines.

OK, so you’re going to be putting up with a lot of coffee talk from us over coming weeks as we tweak our offerings. We’ve got a few goals: (a) we want to better match your coffee tastes, meaning tons of customer feedback, (b) we want to make our offering better and more consistent, (c) we want to know what we’re doing.

On the last you’ll hear a lot from us. There’s a ton of fetishism around coffee. And with “pour over” (the buzzword for what we do) becoming all the rage, espresso geeks are bringing their finicky ways over to our world. I’ve read that Starbucks is about to offer pour over coffee nation wide, and Intelligencia has already converted all of their Chicago stores but one.

But before we get into all that subtle stuff we have a big improvement we can make without any testing. Right now we use straight Boston tap water for everything. We should be using filtered Boston tap water. We’ve known this but have just been too busy with everything else to get it fixed.

We need one of these, an Everpure industrial filter. Brian is going to be helping me locate, buy, and get one of these bad-boys installed.

We’re determined to develop Clover as fast food. I know, it doesn’t always feel that way when you’re stuck in the 12:15pm line, but believe us, we’re doing everything we can to serve this stuff up as fast as possible.

We’re committed to fast food despite many customer’s desire to compare us to fine dining or gourmet fair, or even calling us a (gasp) “gourmet truck.”

This is where these photos come in. I’m always stopping in at places to check out what they are offering. This one was particularly funny. You see that poster? Reality is slightly frozen in the center (where the microwave didn’t get to it). Wow. There’s actually a website that does this. Pretty funny hunh?

http://thewvsr.com/adsvsreality.htm

Those are our coffee beans. Raw. These are the ones I wrote a long post about a few weeks ago. Casa Ruiz, Panama.

I had a chance to stop by Barrington Roasters the other day, when I was picking up wood for the counters for the new truck. It was a ton of fun. A guy named Heck showed me around, and I had a chance to meet up with Barth (who runs the place) and chat coffee.

The timing is great. We’re getting ready for our restaurant and returning to some of our basic operations to tweak and improve. Breakfast is in the crosshairs. Expect changes to muffins, coffee, and perhaps some new offerings in coming weeks.

I’m getting a ton of coffee paraphernalia and we’re going to be upgrading our process, from start to finish. And you’re going to get to help. Tomorrow Rolando is coming up to the truck and we’re going to be going through the first round of testing. This is going to be a ton of fun.

As some of you know, when one of our staff has a birthday, we make cupcakes and give them away to customers first come first serve. Today was Jeremiah’s birthday. If you came by the truck early this afternoon, you got a birthday cupcake combining two of Jeremiah’s favorite things – chocolate and stout beer. You might have also seen these folks. They saw it was Jeremiah’s birthday on our Twitter post this morning and brought him a handmade card (notice the cupcake). We may have another birthday coming this month : )