1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5

Parsnip explanation

By on 20 May, 2013 in Menu, Operations, Suppliers

IMG_6515

We’re learning that storage is as important as growing when it comes to root vegetables. Did you know that parsnips stop growing while they’re under the ground? During this time, all the starches get converted to sugar. If they aren’t harvested fast enough in the spring, they start to grow again and can become bitter and woody.

Hugh of Sugar Mountain has been growing the sweet parsnips you’ve been enjoying in the Parsnip sandwich. They’ve been just beautiful. Then last week we noticed some were tasting like soap. Hugh called. Apparently one of his root cellars was installed improperly, meaning some of our parsnips were bitter and woody. He’s removed all those parsnips, given us a refund on 120lbs, and sending us the remaining ones, which are as sweet as sugar.

We pulled the parsnip sandwich last week when we noticed this problem. Which is why it’s been missing on the menu. We’ll have it back on the menu Wednesday.

 

Comments { 0 }

Burlington truck-hunters + UPDATED BURLINGTON SCHEDULE

By on 20 May, 2013 in Burlington (BUR), Location

photo-6

We’re parking a truck at office parks in Burlington. One thing we didn’t expect was customers following us from site to site in cars.

This group started with one customer: D.E. Light, the first guy on the left. Yes, that’s his name. We even checked on his credit card. He brought one friend the first time, and more and more kept joining.

This gave us an idea. We’re making up little passports: if you visit every Burlington location and get your card stamped, we’ll buy you lunch for you and a friend. We’ll have these Wednesday at 20 Blanchard Rd.

Updated Schedule (follow @cloverBUR for daily updates):

MON: OFF
TUE: OFF
WED: 20 Blanchard Rd, Burlington, MA (our oldest site now)
THUR: 113 Hartwell Ave, Lexington, MA
FRI: 168 Middlesex Turnpike, Burlington, MA (Northwest Park)
SAT: Parking lot of 100 Burlington Rd, off for Memorial Day, starts 6/1/13
SUN: Parking lot of 100 Burlington Rd, off for Memorial Day, 6/1/13

Comments { 0 }

No sanitary line

By on 20 May, 2013 in Burlington (BUR), Construction, Design, Operations

IMG_5955

I checked in with Al, our construction supervisor on the Burlington restaurant the other day. We have an issue. They finished trenching, which means tearing up the concrete floors (see image above). But they didn’t find the sanitary waste line where they thought it was going to be. Uhgg.

There are a couple of problems here. First, our landlord built bathrooms for us. That sounds great on the face of it, like it would speed our project up and reduce costs. But that’s not how it’s turned out. I’m going to make sure we never have landlord build bathrooms in the future. They aren’t the way we want them to be, so we’re going to re-do them (the landlord is helping us with that). But we have other issues, like this sanitary line. We had bad information from our engineers. Anyway, turns out the sanitary line is right beneath the bathrooms. The landlords contractors dug it up, connected to it, then covered, poured cement, and build bathrooms over the line.

Of course these issues will all be worked out. Al’s a pro. But it has me thinking hard about our approach to construction and how to avoid things like this. It’s crazy to think we’re going to have to spend tens of thousands of dollars to uncover a pipe that was just sitting there open to the air a month ago.

I’ll keep you posted on our progress. In the meantime we’re parking in Burlington with the truck this week!

Comments { 0 }

Spring pea soup

By on 18 May, 2013 in Menu

IMG_8086

Spring pea soup is coming into the chilled soup rotation.

You can make this soup at home if you have a blender. We use caramelized onions, a touch of coconut & soy milks, frozen peas, vegetable stock and mint. It’s garnished with yogurt and pistachios. The secret is to blend it and thin it out so that it’s NOT A SMOOTHIE. You want a nice thin viscosity if you want it to taste good.

We’re doing a bunch of cooking classes this summer, including one on chilled soups. Sign up here.

Comments { 2 }

Fresh kimchi

By on 17 May, 2013 in Menu, Team

IMG_8082

What do you think of kimchi?

Michael Sutton, veteran of OYa, is running Clover Burlington. He had an idea to do something with kimchi. It’s something we’ve been thinking about for a while, but we never wanted to do it because we were worried about the smell. But Mike said it doesn’t have to be fermented. He made up a batch of fresh kimchi for us to taste. It was really yummy. Maybe a component for a seasonal sandwich?

Comments { 1 }

CSA bag mockups

By on 17 May, 2013 in Design

Screen Shot 2013-05-17 at 4.52.25 PM

Ryan and Adelyn of Harvard came up with the idea to give custom tote bags to every CSA customer. Peter of QRST in Somerville (who prints all our shirts) is going to make these up. The actual bags will be bright colors (pink, neon yellow), not “natural” fabric.

I’ve been having fun making mockups using my free trial of Indesign that expires in a few hours. What do you think?

[If you want to carry one of these packed with produce in a few weeks, we still have a few shares left at Brookline Village and Burlington. Act now to reserve your spot!]

Comments { 0 }

Packaging and rehydrated oat product

By on 16 May, 2013 in Construction, Menu, Operations, Packaging

IMG_5954-1

I’ve been at Starbucks Burlington since 6am.

I got a note from our construction supervisor last night saying there was a problem with the trenching they’re doing. Apparently the drawings we had from our engineers (BLW engineering) were not accurate. So I’m meeting him up here to review the situation.

I’m waiting for him at Starbucks. I tried to find an independent coffee shop in the area and had no luck. I’m constantly trying products doing my best to learn where competitors are and what they do. And while Starbucks isn’t exactly a company we think of as a competitor, there is a lot to admire and learn from them.

I bought a medium latte and an oatmeal. It was the oatmeal that really caught my attention. Check out that picture. That’s the packaging I got for ONE OATMEAL! Isn’t that sort of amazing? Really! I count 7 pieces of packaging for this product: a bag, a plastic bag wrapped plastic straw, a nut pack in plastic, “fresh blueberries” in plastic (packaged 4/27/13, they actually list that on there which I think is sort of cool, but not exactly fresh as they are almost a month old and from California), a packet of sweetener (that I didn’t ask for) and the oatmeal itself with a lid. Wow!

I don’t know if this amazes anyone else, but I’ve been really obsessed with packaging lately. We’re trying to make our food better togo. And I think we’re on a great track. But do you know how many items you get when you order oatmeal from us? 1. A cup of oatmeal. To be fair most customers will help themselves to a spoon. That’s 2 items. What do you think about the excess packaging you get when you order food out? Does it bother you? Do you think about it at all? Where does it go?

Comments { 4 }

Putting the team back together

By on 16 May, 2013 in Team

photo (2)

Vertex asked if we wanted to join our friends Roxy’s and Momogoose to cater lunch for all their 1200+ employees. We needed to serve 400+ people in under 1.5 hours. Even for us, this required an insane level of throughput (that’s about 6 chickpea fritters/minute).

Ayr said, there’s no way we’ll be able to do this unless we have the fastest crew ever. So Ayr assigned all of corporate and management to work stations on the truck. Vincenzo (manager of trucks) worked fryer. Chris (manager of restaurants) ran oven. Sara (MIT truck manager) worked BBQ station. John (finance) and Joey (chef’s assistant) worked drinks. And I worked chickpea station with Rolando (chef) and Pedro (best soup-maker at Clover). Megan (HR) managed the line (which got to be 80 deep at the height of lunch).

I hadn’t gotten to work side by side with everyone since…maybe never! I think I read something about how In-n-Out does this for all their new location openings. And we had a ton of fun giving each other a hard time, working really really fast, and hopefully banging out some amazing food. If you were in that line, tell us what you thought of everything. If you manage an office and think it might be fun to have Clover serve lunch, reach out.

(more…)

Comments { 2 }

These are agricultural food bins, not toys…

By on 15 May, 2013 in CSA

photo (1)

(Even though they’re on a child’s floor mat at Clover headquarters). Last year customers kept walking away with the cardboard boxes that farmers packed their produce in. Farmers kept having to pay to buy more. So we’re buying a set of 2 heavy plastic boxes for each produce share. They’re going to be the Clover CSA fleet of boxes. We’re looking at buying over 600!

A bunch of farmers pointed me to the Orbis website. They’re out of Wisconsin. And they’re super nice. When Kathy saw Cambridge on my order form, she asked how we were doing after all the marathon stuff.

They sent us 3 bins they thought would work well. It’s kind of scary deciding what bin to use, because to be honest, I’m not the one packing the vegetables. We asked farmers to weigh in. We liked the green one best for volume, but it’s super heavy and a little unweildy with the bale (that stainless handle). Plus it would cost $32 for a set of two. The yellow ($16 for 2) was way too light, and didn’t seem to hold enough. The red looks like the best bet. It’s durable, holds a lot, and will only cost us $20 for two bins. What do you think?

Comments { 1 }

Burlington ready to trench

By on 15 May, 2013 in Burlington (BUR), Construction

IMG_5946

Over the past couple of years I’ve had this problem: when the most exciting stuff is happening at Clover I have the least amount of time to write. Sorry I’ve been a bit quiet here these past few weeks. These are exciting times for us at Clover. Thankfully I have Lucia and Rolando keeping the posts current.

This is a picture of the floor of our Burlington restaurant ready to trench. When you have a construction where concrete is laid on top of earth it’s called “slab on grade.” And if you want to run plumbing you have to cut up the concrete, lay the pipe, then cover it all up again. It’s a pretty expensive job and seems sort of crazy to me, but that’s how it’s done. We had to do this over at the HUB as well (HSQ has a parking garage underneath).

They’re cutting this floor our tonight. I’m going to check it out in the morning. We have building permits now for both Burlington and Brookline. I’ll keep you updated as well as I can manage.

Comments { 2 }

Hello Brookline Village!

By on 13 May, 2013 in Brookline Village

IMG_4062

I’m writing this from the public library in Brookline Village. I kind of feel like I’m home in the suburbs of Austin. There’s grass outside, and cars, and the sound of kids playing. Everyone is really, really nice.

And I’m really happy because next door is Town Hall, where we were just approved for our building permit for our 6 Harvard St spot!

 

Comments { 8 }

Playlist

By on 13 May, 2013 in Customers

IMG_4097

I saw this at my new favorite restaurant in NYC, Xian Famous Foods. If you’re in NYC you should definitely check it out.

I’m always looking at communications in restaurants. The in-store communications here felt pretty honest, friendly, and open. Like this one about the playlist, or one about why they don’t do delivery. Sort of in contrast to this other place I wandered into later in the day… (more…)

Comments { 1 }

Kickoff meeting with 451

By on 12 May, 2013 in Customers, Environmental

IMG_3989

We’re working with a PR team to publicize our Burlington store opening in June. It’s a first for us. But there are a lot of stories to tell. Street food heads to the suburbs…high-ranking cook from NYT Best New Restaurant joins fast food leadership team… startup company rethinking how America can eat…

We decided to work with 451 Marketing. They have a ton of experience representing restaurants. Ayr and I met with Nancy and Jessica to kick everything off.

They’re going to be sending press kit to journalists flung all across the country. And we’re going to include a little Clover gift with each one (a hot-sauce-making kit).

Comments { 0 }

In the gray

By on 11 May, 2013 in Team

IMG_4134

Daniel is a new employee on the DWY truck. Enzo asked Daniel if he was in the green the other day. He said, “No, man, I’m in the GRAY!” Enzo looked at him with shock and delight. “No one has ever said that before!”

Let me explain. Early on we realized we didn’t want to use someone else’s POS (point of sale) system. Too much about Clover is too different than any other type of restaurant. So we designed our POS system ourselves to maximize speed and efficiency. Ayr built the first version with help from an MIT grad.

Our POS does a couple of really different things:
-Items get sent to whatever station they are prepped on. So drinks go to drinks-station, sandwiches to specific sandwich stations, etc.
-Food is made in the order it was received. But not totally. For example, your friend who ordered a BBQ after you might get it before you if the BBQ station is really fast that day.
-Items turn from GREEN–>ORANGE–> RED based on how long customers are waiting. When all the items are cleared and all customers have been served, the color goes back to GRAY.

So to be “in the GRAY” is the ultimate challenge…

Comments { 1 }

Sugar Mountain Parsnips

By on 10 May, 2013 in Menu, Suppliers

photo-5

Here is some parsnip trivia for you.

1. Parsnips are the first thing to come out of the ground after a New England winter. Before asparagus. Before rhubarb. They are sweeter than fall parsnips because they’ve spent months underground and some of the starches have converted to sugars.

2. We are buying 500 pounds of parsnips every week to supply the Parsnip cheddar sandwich in our seasonal slot.

3. Our parsnip farmer, Hugh Manheim, also has a plastic bag manufacturing company. I talked to him a while back about supplying Clover with clear takeout bags. He was telling me that he inherited the plastic bag-manufacturing machine as part of the farm.

Comments { 1 }