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!
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
When I was 5 or 6, there was a Peach man who parked in the parking lot of Randall’s, a grocery store in Austin. He would drive in, probably from Fredricksburg, during peach season and sell peaches to everyone.
I had completely forgotten about this until I was reading Re-thinking A Lot, the first-ever urban planning book about the role of parking lots. Eran is a customer and head of urban studies at MIT. We invited him to be a panelist at the Food Truck 101 Conference we’re helping organize, so I went and bought his book from the MIT Press Bookstore.
I’m always happy whenever I see a little kiosk or truck in a parking lot. I always have to stop. When my friends road-tripped to Maine, I made everyone go to the lobster-roll shack in the parking lot of this outerwear store. I read Ayr’s post about an ATM restaurant before I ever started working at Clover.
Do you love parking lots, food trucks, or just want to learn about the direction of street food in our cities? There are still a few tickets left for Thursday’s Food Truck 101 conference. Signups end tonight at midnight. We’re featuring top food truck operators (Roxy’s, Bon Me, Mei Mei), Edith Murnane (City of Boston Food czar), Christine Liu (one of the first writers to identify the food truck trend in Boston), Merry White (food anthropologist), and Zenovia Toloudi, an architect who thinks about food and public spaces.
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
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.
Some of you may have noticed we’re changing the logo color 4 times a year. We decided on “Great Country Blue,” a pretty bright blue, to kick off 2013.
My companion during these logo changes is a bottle of Windex from the dollar store. It works incredibly well to remove the previous color of paint. I’m sure there’s some great chemical change happening, but it’s also something about the concentrated spraying action, it just tears the paint off.
I got most of the logos done on New Years Day, when all of the trucks were closed, but my Montana paint pen ran out right as I was doing LMA’s logo, so I figured I’d get it done today. If you’re in Boston today I don’t need to tell you that it’s around 16 degrees outside. We’re keeping the trucks open for lunch. Our employees are warriors! The Windex on the other hand, couldn’t quite keep up. It froze on contact. That’s me trying to scrub the Windex ice crystals off, seconds after I sprayed it. I guess this will have to wait til this weekend when we’re supposed to get some warmer temperatures.
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.
Joe here. I’m Rolando’s new assistant. Don’t worry, Rachel didn’t go anywhere, she just got promoted to Assistant Manager at HSQ.
I’ve lived in New England (CT) my whole life and grew up eating apple pie this time of year. So I was really excited that I got to work on the roll-out of the apple rings in the 3pm special slot. Here’s the step where we dredge the apple rings in cinnamon and sugar.
I’m helping Rolando create easier setups for training and menu rollouts. We are putting together photo sets and training videos to help our different locations produce awesome 3pms. You can test us. Try these and let us know how we’re doing.
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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