The other day I
was driving through my mother-in-law's neighborhood on my way to see
her and I spied a new restaurant in the chain ridden stucco jungle
that is South Orange County. Seeing that it had something to do with
craft beer I was naturally interested, so I looked it up online.
“..we
are independent and locally owned. We do things differently and
believe in using only the freshest and highest quality ingredients.
Our foods are largely organic, our brews and signature cocktails are
all craft...Our Eats are farm to table, local, in-season, sustainable
and organic. [Chef] visits the farmer’s markets and tours local
farms weekly. Our meats are of exceptional quality and are
all-natural, antibiotic and hormone free. Our [beers] are strictly
craft and our [wine is] largely boutique. Our menu will change
frequently as we transition seasons to provide for only the freshest
and best products available. Like we said, we do it differently.”
Seems
normal, right? Seems like a place I'd like to eat for sure. However,
if they're a locally owned, sit down, non-chain restaurant, shouldn't
they naturally be using only the freshest and highest quality
ingredients? Where I grew up we have many family owned restaurants.
They aren't chains, they're locally owned and run. Their menus note
the like of “Covelo Beef” or “Roundman's Smoked Bacon” or
“Cypress Grove Lamb Chopper” reflecting that the menu is indeed
local and mostly organic. I have indeed been spoiled, however my
spoilage has perhaps turned to the resentment of people I feel are
trying to make a quick buck.
I'm
at the point that when I see a restaurant boasting their organic,
fresh, slow, sustainable, morning-greeted, tucked-in-at-night,
holding-hands-sing-kum-bay-ya produce I immediately associate it with
snobby beertenders, stingy portions and a wallet enema. The best
example was the first episode of that show “Portlandia” when they
want to know the name of the chicken they're going to eat! It's
gotten ridiculous. No one expects Denny's or Coco's to be
farm-to-table here, no one expects healthy food at Taco Bell, but it
is not too much to expect your typical family owned restaurant to do
it's best in the name of sustainability and health without trying to
appeal to the thick framed hipster crowd.
So,
what were they trying to accomplish here? Were the new owners scared
of their potential customers' past experiences being tainted by the
ubiquity of the TGIF's, Chilli's and Applebees which more or less
bookend their new location? In all honesty, I've never eaten here.
But I intend to. I can't wait to check out their beer selection. The
food might even be sensational! What I'm curious about is why did the
new owners feel the need to publish their mission statement and menu
in such a grossly hipster fashion? Was it the the above-mentioned
fear of customer ignorance? Was it a desire to cash in on a growing
trend in urban/suburban cuisine culture? If so, I have to question
their strategy. The suburbanites living around them who are content
with BJ's and Sizzler's are likely not their target audience anyway.
And the slightly more dialed in yoga mat toting crowd ,no doubt
plugged in to Twitter and Yelp and those platforms, will have
obviously come to expect a family owned restaurant that isn't
pretentiously self congratulatory of the fact that they aren't using
Sysco distributed foods!
I
intend to eat here for my husbands birthday in May and I can't wait
to pick the owner's brain about their philosophy behind all this bravado. And I will report back to you, gentle reader, on my
investigation. I'm not ragging (too much at least) on the slow food
movement here but it reminds me of a story: An investor was getting
his shoes shined early in October of 1929 when the guy shining his
shoes started giving him investment tips. The investor, quite
worried, thought to himself, “If everyone is investing how long
could this possibly last” and pulled out of the market before Black
Tuesday hit later that month.
Living
in urban San Diego this would be “so ten minutes ago.” A
marketing pitch like this would have been eaten up and spit out in
the blink of an eye. Hell you try this in North Park and I bet it
would be less than a week before you were shaken down for some sort
of holistic “protection” money with the understanding that if you
did not pay up you would get worked over by a fixie chain. San Diego
is beyond saturated with hipster rhetoric: farm-to-table, chicken's
holding hands etc. (Yeah it's a love/hate thing.)
These
guys are more than likely sincere in their love of real food, and
I'll find out more about what motivated their angle when I eat there.
But for the record, I can't wait to live in a world when the
platitudes expressed in their menu are taken for granted by most
restaurant goers, and such adjectives need not be thrown in my face.
Instead I would get intrigued by a bold advertisement that reads
“Cheap Sit Down Stoner/Gamer Food: Fast!” “Come to Joe's, I will
deep fry your pre-packaged Sysco snacks and have them to your table
in under seven minutes—and there's never a charge for extra ranch.”
Next week is the Craft Brewers Conference here in San Diego. With over 2,600 brewing professionals in attendance, CBC12 is the ultimate in professional conferences. There will be lectures, demonstrations and roundtable mentoring sessions to chose from and I have had quite the difficult time trying to figure out which ones were of greater importance to me. After great deliberation I managed to come up with a rough schedule for myself over the course of the event.
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