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Last parsnips of the season

By on 4 June, 2013 in Menu, Operations

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We all get excited when parsnips hit our menu. They are the first vegetable to be harvested in New England. That’s because they winter underground. There are 2 crops: autumn and spring. The spring crop is more rare, more work, many farmers don’t bother. But if you can find them they are amazing. The parsnips are like sugar after the winter underground. We’ve noticed you can tell you have a spring dug if there is a little green at the top, not much, just starting to sprout.

If you treat the parsnips right (keep them cool), they are sugary and soft and irresistible. If you let them sit out in warm weather they turn sort of woody in the center. It’s funny, they look sort of gnarly and tough, but they’re super fragile. We get ours from Western Mass and Rhode Island.

We’re about to run through the last of our spring parsnips this year. Look for them in our salads, soups, and our Parsnip Cheddar sandwich, which has been a huge hit. We’re days away from moving on to the next bounty of the season.

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Parsnip explanation

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

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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.

 

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No sanitary line

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

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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!

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Packaging and rehydrated oat product

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

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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?

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New Burlington Truck Schedule

By on 22 April, 2013 in Customers, Operations

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We’re still waiting on our building permit from the town of Burlington for our restaurant that will be at 100 Burlington Mall Rd. In the meantime we’re parking our food truck at local office parks hoping to introduce you all to our food and build awareness for the restaurant. The response has been awesome. I’ve been at 20 Blanchard St. each week, and each week our most recent customers return with friends, and new customers find us.

This week’s Burlington schedule:

Lunch 11-2pm

MON: 44 Mall Rd, Burlington, MA (near Fidelity)
TUE: OFF
WED: 20 Blanchard Rd, Burlington, MA (our oldest site now)
THUR: 113 Hartwell Ave, Lexington, MA (LAUNCHES 5/2, WAITING ON PERMIT)
FRI: 168 Middlesex Turnpike, Burlington, MA (Northwest Park)

AT THE RESTAURANT (100 Burlington Mall Rd):

FRI: 3-6pm
SAT: 9am-2pm

 

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CAPTURED!

By on 19 April, 2013 in Customers, Operations, Team

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We’re back. As of Saturday 4-20-13 Clover will be back in business. We’re open this weekend at:

Clover HSQ (Harvard Square), 7am – midnight
Clover HUB (East Cambridge, right near the action), 7am – 10pm
Clover MIT (Kendall Square), 11am-3pm

All trucks will be up Monday. See our locations page for more details. This photo is courtesy of Floyd, one of our employees at the HUB. We’re a block away from Norfolk St. And like all of us, he was pretty surprised and shocked when the nation’s eyes turned on our little part of Inman Square.

 

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ALL CLOVER LOCATIONS CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE DUE TO SUSPECT AT LARGE. OFFICIALS ADVISE TO STAY HOME, STAY INSIDE

By on 19 April, 2013 in Customers, Operations

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This is one of the happiest photos I could find. That’s Enzo at 5:20am (a year ago) showing off some skills between trips loading his truck.

Those times will be back again, but for now we’re shut down. Please join us in staying home until City Officials tell us everything is clear.

ALL CLOVER LOCATIONS CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE DUE TO SUSPECT AT LARGE. OFFICIALS ADVISE TO STAY HOME, STAY INSIDE.

FRIDAY 4/19/2013

Stay safe Clover Nation.

 

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Could this be the next big thing for Clover’s coffee?

By on 12 April, 2013 in Menu, Operations, Suppliers

Baratza Reconnect

If you’re not part of the coffee world, you may not know that all the coffee growers, roasters, and coffeeshop owners in the world are converging on Boston right now for the Specialty Coffee Association Exposition.

Ayr and I were shocked by how many booths Clover had connections with. We said hi to Melitta, Vegware, Counter Culture, Kuma, George Howell, Bunn.

But the most exciting discovery may have been this grinder. We used Baratza grinders for the first 2 years of Clover. They grind coffee beautifully. But the dials would constantly break. The gears would go out of alignment. So we switched to Ditting.

But check this out. This is the latest Baratza. Hasn’t even been released yet (July 2013). Might be the answer to all our problems. Right now we measure beans by volume. We’ve been worried about consistency from cup to cup (some employees over-measure, some under-measure). This grinder has an internal scale, which you can set to a specific weight. So we would spec our weight when we set up a grinder, and then never touch it again. They’ve promised that they’ve ironed out some of the issues of previous models. If that’s the case we might consider a return to Baratza…

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Closing checklist

By on 11 April, 2013 in Cleaning, Operations, Team, Training

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The first time I closed the truck, Leah asked me what I wanted to listen to on the radio while I cleaned. I said, tentatively, Emerson Radio? She said, you’re gonna want to listen to 107.9 Kiss FM. It was the most intense workout I’d ever done. And the reggae/folk that Emerson played at night wasn’t going to get me amped up to clean the Clover way. I hauled everything off the truck onto the loading dock, scrubbed everything with hot soapy water, wiped, sanitized everything. Then I put everything back where it belonged.

That was 2009. Back then we had no way of knowing whether we had done everything. You just had it all in your head. Which meant if you were a closer and you forgot something, your colleague was in trouble the next day when they opened the truck. Later we moved to laminated checklists, or Notes on iPods.

A bunch of team leaders are working on checklists using Wufoo, a form-building platform. The great thing is that you can edit the checklist from anywhere. So if we add or subtract a new task, we only have to update it once. It’s a lot more efficient than printing and re-laminating new checklists.

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Clover North: Find us in Burlington, MA

By on 9 April, 2013 in Burlington (BUR), Operations

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That’s a Clover truck, parked in a parking lot in Burlington. This site may look like an empty lot, but it’s going to be packed tomorrow (Wed). Well maybe not packed, but I’m hoping everybody who was there last week comes back with at least 2 friends. That would be enough to keep us busy.

I’ll be there tomorrow with Mike and Rolando. It’s going to be great. Hope to see you (or your suburban friends) there.

FIND CLOVER IN BURLINGTON, MA:
Follow on Twitter: @cloverBUR

Mondays
11am – 2pm
44 Burlington Mall Rd

Wednesdays
11am – 2pm
20 Blanchard St.

More sites to be added soon…

 

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