Here’s what we’re looking at for the next 4 days. Most locations are open regular hours tomorrow. Monday the PRK truck and both restaurants are open regular hours. You can get more details on exact hours of operations by clicking on the Locations tab of this website, or by following the Twitter feed for your location.
Have a great holiday weekend everyone!
A customer came up with that name for our latest experiment. Here’s the idea. You work in an office. A Clover order-taker appears. You place your order and pay. The order gets magically transmitted to the truck, and 5 minutes later, a runner brings the food right up to you.
An awesome law firm many many stories above our truck on Dewey Square agreed to be the pilot for this program. Hiroko (a Harvard Business School student) set it all up.
Results from our initial week-long experiment:
If we handed you a survey card at Clover today, click here to fill out the survey.
The survey will take you about 2-3 minutes. Your answers are going to help us serve you faster, better food. And as promised, there is a reward in it for you too.
A huge thanks for helping us with this!
When I was in 7th grade my Algebra teacher celebrated Pi Day. We all got to bring in round foods. I think it was the one day in Algebra where I excelled. I brought in kumquats.
Last week Karen, an MIT regular, wrote to our catering page asking if we would cater whoopie pies Thursday 3/14 in honor of Pi Day. We thought it was such a great idea that we’re going to make chocolate whoopie pies and run them EVERYWHERE at lunch tomorrow.
We’ll have 1 batch of whoopie pies for sale at all Clover trucks and restaurants Thursday at lunch. Keep an eye on your location’s Twitter feed to find out when they’re live (you can use this neat link to find out your location’s Twitter). I told everyone we should sell them for $3.14159 but John (finance) told me that was entirely impossible.
Pi Day at Clover
$2 Whoopie Pies for sale at all locations
Follow Twitter to see when they hit
SATURDAY 2/9/13: ALL LOCATIONS CLOSED
SUNDAY 2/10/13: RESTAURANTS OPEN
MONDAY 2/11/13: ALL LOCATIONS OPEN (HSQ, HUB, MIT, DWY, LMA)
All Clover restaurants and trucks are closed today. Stay tuned to Twitter for updates. We plan to re-open the restaurants tomorrow and return to normal operations Monday pending MBTA operations and a lift of the driving ban.
Hope you’re enjoying the snow. I just finished a pancake breakfast with my family. We’ve already been out to play in the snow and plan to spend as much time as we can having fun today. Violet (not 2 years old yet) has never seen anything like this. It’s all new for her and really fun.
That picture? We skipped out manager meeting this past Tuesday and took everybody ice skating. When we take outings we try to do things that are new/ different for our managers. Given how much time we spend teaching new things to employees and customers, I think it’s great for us to remind ourselves once a month or so how it feels to do something that is new and hard. Only a few of us knew how to skate, for the rest this was a new-ish experience.
Believe it or not we’re on the way out of winter. By March the cold is mostly gone, and that’s only 6 weeks away. If you haven’t been by, we still have 3 trucks operating in this weather: MIT, DWY, LMA. The rest come back on line around March.
I spent an hour at DWY this morning. My lips are a bit chapped. Guess I’m not as tough as I was that first winter we were open at MIT and worked 14 hour days in the cold. That winter, 2008 – 2009, there wasn’t a single mobile operator who ran year-round. Gooseberries (now momogoose) watched what we were up to and decided to give it a try the following winter. And now here we are, lots of folks freezing in the cold.
My lips are chapped but I feel invigorated. My favorite things about operating in the cold:
- People come out for us, just like rainy days, it’s a really warm feeling to see people braving the elements for what you’re doing
- You feel sort of tough. Especially at the end of the season when you’re comfortable in a T-shirt at 34°F
- Feeling the elements. I suspect this is part of what most of us who love the trucks enjoy. You’re outdoors. And so what if it’s in the city surrounded by concrete. You’re still feeling nature act upon you. It fills you with humility and wonder.
- The sunrises: they’re awesome in the winter
We juice fresh oranges for orange juice at the restaurants. That means we create a lot of orange rinds. 3 years ago, Jeremiah (early manager) started playing around with marmalades. It went well, but got put on the back burner for a while.
Last week Rolando and I started making orange marmalade again. We washed the rinds, chopped them, boiled them with sugar, orange juice, and water. It has that nice mix of sweet and bitter that I am a big fan of. It lets us create something beautiful using something that would have gotten thrown away otherwise.
We’re launching this tomorrow at MIT, DWY, and HSQ, so if you’re coming for breakfast, try it on your Popover or Muffin. If folks are liking it, we might consider selling big containers, and working in other preserves and jams.
Orange Marmalade Launches
Tomorrow at breakfast: CloverMIT, CloverDWY, CloverHSQ
$1 for 2oz, while it lasts
Alright, we had to put the brakes on the fried 3pm specials for a while. Starting tomorrow we’ll be baking up sweet potatoes in the afternoons. We’ll add pecans, butter, salt, cinnamon and sugar. If you try one, let us know what you think.
Well, sort of. We handed these cards to every customer on PRK’s last day of the winter. We’re re-opening there March 1. But we wanted customers to know they’d be welcome at DWY during the winter.
So we printed up 100 of these cards. If you got one, you can redeem it for a hot cider, soup, or coffee at your temporary home truck.
Unfortunately this meant you guys got to experience my map-making skills. If you know me, you know I’m hopeless at directions. I looked at the new Maps function on my IOS, which just kept giving me turn signals, etc. So I just zoomed out and copied the important intersections. The cool thing was that I got to see that the Clover truck is a “featured location” on Apple Maps, right alongside Subway, McDonalds, 7-11. I think it’s because Apple Maps is now linked to Yelp?
Ayr said at the last Food Dev meeting, why not try doing latkes during December? I think the idea came from an MIT customer who asked if we could cater 1000 potato latkes for an event.
Everyone was worried potatoes would fall apart in the fryer. Rolando came back with this version, using sweet potatoes. That’s one that I fried up, you can see I’m still getting the technique down. But they taste just awesome.
We’re going to serve them with sour cream and apple sauce. $3, launching everywhere this Thursday 12/13, at 3pm.
We’re here to make food you love, the kind you talk about and look forward to eating. The Clover Food Lab is serving up a new type of fast food. This food is local, it’s just-cut, when we can it is organic.
You can learn more about
our origins,
our food,
our mistakes,
and everything else about us at this website.
Ayr Muir
Founder and CEO
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