13 January, 2017: I keep wondering how can we do this better? Our coffee is really beautiful. We’re so careful with it. And it’s helped us develop a reputation in the City of Boston. I taste coffee everywhere I go and our cup is really head-to-head with anything anywhere, which is something we’re really proud of. A lot of this… Read More
11 January, 2017: We do employee surveys periodically, but this was different. The other day I was sitting at CloverLMA scribbling away plans for 2017. And as I was writing ideas of how we can make Clover a better place to work I looked around and thought: I should just talk to some of the folks working here and see… Read More
9 January, 2017: We haven’t done a great job in the past making it clear to Clover employees what jobs are available and when. We promote tons of people internally. We’d always prefer to bring an existing employee into a new role rather than hire externally. But I don’t think that’s always clear to folks. It’s something we just aren’t… Read More
1 October, 2009: Some of you may have seen me wandering around Davis, Harvard, Kenmore, Coolidge in recent weeks. We’ve been scoping real estate for our restaurant. We’re funded now (raised money the other week), and one of the next steps involves prototyping Clover in a restaurant setting. We’re really excited and are looking to building new Clover communities. We… Read More
9 January, 2017: That’s Chris tasting daikon radish straight from the field at Michael Docter’s farm in Hadley, MA. It was a really really good crop, better than Michael had expected. And this created a big problem. This November, there were 10,000 pounds of beautiful spicy sweet daikon lying under the soil. But there are not a lot of restaurants in Boston that would know… Read More
4 January, 2017: I have this growing feeling that Clover is about to transform. I’m not sure when I started feeling this, it might have been a background sense a couple of months ago. I did a bunch of customer research for Order Ahead Beta end of November/ early December, and that probably had a huge impact. It’s no longer a… Read More
23 December, 2016: Our goal next year is to teach 1000 customers to cook at home. We’re teaching all the skills we know. Soups, sodas, pickles, hot sauce, and the foundation of everything: knife skills. Classes are happening weeknights, they’ve gone down in price, they’re at a Clover near you. When you cook even 1 meal a week at home, you have the power to… Read More
5 December, 2016: A beautiful soup can be transcendent. Inhale. Taste. Rolando was our chef when we first started. He learned soup when working at the French Laundry with Thomas Keller. He taught me the joys of a beautiful soup. Our soups are made in-house daily, even the soup stocks. We never freeze anything. This makes us entirely unique in… Read More
8 March, 2016: That’s Dave Luz, welcoming our first customer to CloverDTX, the first restaurant that Dave was completely responsible for opening. The other day Dave told me he was leaving Clover. I can’t think of many things in my life that have caused me so much shock. I mean shocked to the point where I almost didn’t believe this could… Read More
21 November, 2016: I don’t remember when I first took a new manager to NYC for a tour. Like many things at Clover it’s likely it was pretty organic. Rolando, then Chris. I definitely remember the time I first took Enzo. He was food drunk at the end of the trip and literally fell off a stool. But this is one… Read More
16 November, 2016: If we handed you a survey card today at Clover, click here to take the survey. A big thank-you in advance for helping us improve! Read More
14 November, 2016: I’ve been doing some photo work this past weekend. It’s a ton of fun. I’m working to prepare some presentations that need vivid imagery. And at one point I did all or at least most of the documentation for Clover. But as we’ve grown I have less and less of a hand in that. So it’s been… Read More
11 November, 2016: Wow. What a week. One of my employees lost her brother this past weekend. Shot and killed. There’s not really anything I can do to help. It’s a horrible helpless feeling. I’m so sorry. I had a board meeting Wednesday morning. Yes. 7am Wednesday morning. … Arvia (Clover Guide at CloverFIN) told me Wednesday that multiple customers had cried… Read More
13 September, 2008: For obvious reasons I have not mentioned this here, but the truck arrived without any keys to any of the locks. This means my truck has been sitting unsecured on the road for the past few weeks. Luckily there’s nothing of value in the truck, but it’s still had me a bit uncomfortable at night. After receiving… Read More
30 October, 2016: This was the headline for a note Martina sent out following our most recent food dev. I laughed out loud. It’s sort of poking fun at me. On my notes for food dev I was a little brief on my feedback for 2 of the items. On one (a hot malt beverage Chris came up with) I wrote… Read More