Not to make all my posts about my bad qualities (like my inability to find plantains) but here’s another. I’m becoming a bit accident prone.

Last week I was biking down a very quiet Inman street. I hit a small
pothole, crashed into a parked car, and did some damage to my shoulder. I’m not supposed to lift anything with my left hand, which is why you haven’t seen much of me on board the truck (lots of lifting up there).

Today I was taking orders and slipped in the rain. The iPod hit the ground, and now the screen looks like this. I’m sorry, guys.

It still works, but it’s not pretty. I know one of our customers works at the Apple store. This post is for you. I’ll personally buy you a week of sandwiches if you can give me a fix.

Just in time for the summer, a power hose has arrived at Clover.

Ayr drilled holes in the floor of the trucks, which means we can scrub the floors and then use the hose to spray the floors down. The water drains right out. It’s easier and more fun than mopping.

Systems are improving back at the kitchen. These pickled onions and cabbage are inside “third pan” Cambros (clear kitchen-grade containers).

We used to make pickled veg inside huge 22-quart Cambros. Every evening when we restocked for the next day, some of the pickled veg went into 8-quart Cambros. Then, when we set up for lunch on the truck, pickled veg would go from the 8-quarts to even smaller containers on the sandwich stations.

All these transfers wasted time, they wasted latex gloves, they wasted pickled veg, and they created dirty dishes. Now we make the pickled veg straight into “third pan” Cambros that sit right on the sandwich stations.

Can you see the message on the screen of our credit-card machine? I’m sure some of you have had the pleasure. It says “waiting on net” and then the word “fatal.” Not a good message.

For the past week at MIT, we didn’t have a credit card machine. When the machine returned Thursday, it made one transaction and died. Friday we got it fixed, and maybe twenty of you were able to pay with cards. Then, while one of you was paying for lunch around 2:30, it reverted to its favorite message: “waiting on net,” and died.

These machines work on pager networks, and the networks around MIT aren’t very good. Back at the kitchen, the machine connected to the network just fine.

These poor awnings. They’ve been scraped on trees, whipped by the wind, and now crushed by colliding with a light pole. Uhg.

Rolando and Enzo were trying to move the Dewey truck and WHACK! down came a lightpost and crush went the awning. Uhg. Sorry lightpost. Sorry awning.

I don’t have a large car. To get the new truck up in time I had to do some serious running around last week. Including driving to 3 different places to track down the right plastic for the awnings. When I finally found what I was looking for it was 10′ long. I strapped it to the Mini. Not a great idea. About 1/2 way across the Zeekum bridge (is that what it’s called?) the plastic folded in 2 in the wind. Uhg. Another trip…

That’s me. It’s a terrible picture. I took it myself, with the iPhone. You’re not going to notice dramatic changes between the current and the new trucks. But they are there. The counter this time is from a single slab (last time both were from the same tree, but not continuous). The counters are also a bit less deep, and thicker. And I’ve done a better job finishing them. But they are the same wood (red oak).

Other changes include a gravity-fed water system (vs. the current electric pump-operated one), a separate self-contained hand-wash sink (very cool), a much larger sandwich station on the left hand side, room for up to 9 employees in the truck (we max out at 6 right now), double the fryer capacity, better placement of everything in the truck, about 10x the propane we can currently carry, and a killer generator that allows us to keep the refrigerators running even while the truck is driving. Oh, and did I say awning? More on that shortly.

I’ve been sneaking a few Truck #2 posts in here lately. Soon that truck will have its own Blog. For now they will show up here.

I met this week with the folks over at the City of Boston business development office. They are doing a ton to help us with the new truck. Not least of which is providing us with a loan. That’s right, the City of Boston is loaning us money to grow, $25,000. Of course we’re excited to pay it back with interest, but just as excited to report new jobs we’ll be creating, and most importantly, the number of Bostonians we’ll be feeding.

We suspect a few Boston residents have snuck over Cambridge side to eat with us, but soon Clover will be in Boston proper. We can’t wait. There’s still a ton to get ready (truck, staff, site location), but we’re working hard on it and things are moving forward.

So we’ve graduated from the one-cup-one melitta set-up that got us going. I’ve been thinking about some sort of a coffee station upgrade just as long as I’ve been planning the restaurant. Here you get 2 pictures. We’ve experienced this before. We need something new. We look everywhere. All of the existing solutions are expensive and terrible. We design our own.

The first one is an ugly prototype I made. I just bought some copper pipe and a bender and free-form bent this. I’d study many designs and decided there were basically 3-4 types of pour-over coffee station set-ups. I didn’t love any of them, so I imagined this version with minimal material, minimal weight. All that frame has to do is hold the filter cups at the right spot. That doesn’t take much.

The second is version 1. The folks over at Bostonian Body fabricated this for me out of stainless steel. We are now pouring on version 2, a slightly refined iteration.

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.