Fancy Food Show Recap / Restaurant Design / Wine Tasting

Class started with a discussion of the Fancy Food Show. The main issue attendees have is that it's really two shows in one. Some of the vendors there are showing off a product to sell to restaurants and food services right now, while others are there to find a distributor so they can sell at some point down the line. One of my classmates, who helps run a large family restaurant, spent a lot of time sampling wines, and when he found one that blew his mind, it turned out the wine is not available in this country yet, that they need a distributor to get them through the extensive legal hurdle of importation.

While the restaurant show during the winter was more about equipment, hardware and stuff, this show was all about the look, taste and marketability of food stuffs. Fellow students marvelled at sheer quantity in certain food categories -- how many soy-based vinaigrettes do people need? Why are there so many flavored cheddars? And how often does one have a craving for lemongrass water? The person working the booth for an Austrian sports drink (BIG on taurine, which rhymes with urine for a reason) admitted, when confronted, that it indeed did taste like ass.

We introduced ourselves to restaurant design. One has to take into consideration level of concept (fast food/pub, casual, luxury) and location (urban, non-urban) to really determine how many square feet per customer one will need to provide. Urban fast food, 8squft no prob, non-urban luxury, you can start at 25 sqft and go up. Based on the size and concept, one can work out budgets for monthly rent as well as how much it will cost to build out.

Building out a restaurant depends on a variety of factors, whether it's a raw space or an old restaurant, depends on what equipment is needed to cook everything on the menu, and, well, real estate markets.

At the restaurant I've been working at, the build out was from raw space, and quite ornate. As time has gone on, the corners cut came into strong contrast. For example, there is a stage for a piano and there has been live music played...but no more. The neighbors in the condo upstairs complained. Why did they hear it enough to complain? Because no sound proofing was installed between the ceiling and the bottom of the floor foundation of the apartments directly above. To install sound proofing after the fact would be a huge job that would shut the restaurant down, so the music is out.

The final part of the class was a wine tasting, preceded by a short documentary about the history of Burgundy, home of the vineyards that make the most expensive wines in the world. The monks of the medieval ages owned all the land and studied it, tailoring the wine to the soil. When Napoleon came in and took the land away, it got broken up into many different plots with many different owners. Unlike some regions, the local government decided instead of trying to make a standardized, blended product to stand in for the region, in Burgundy only one grape would be planted everywhere (pinot noir), and each vineyard would have a product which reflected it's own soil. Now the wines of the region can be priced out practically by where the vineyard lays in the valley. Towards the top, the good whites, the middle the good reds, and the bottom the 2ndary reds where the drainage isn't too hot.

The tasting was a wide variety of whites, from a tepid young pinot grigio to a sweet, thick Sauternes. Richard clearly gets off on this stuff, and the class ran 30 minutes long for the first time.

Fancy Food Show

What I ate, between 10-11:30am this morning: various chocolates, cookies, small moz and tomato panini, brownies, 5 shots of various Manhattan Special products, 2 little cheese cake cups, a bit of duck sausage, 2 little wedges of Batali pizza, some things I forget...

Spent the morning at the Fancy Food Show at Jacob Javits, officially on school business for the second year, but I hope to be able to swing this every year -- all the new products, some established products, different countries showing off their culture, all on overload, most wanting you to taste a sample or talk about what they do.

Highlights: Manhattan Special had a booth, a company really hard to wrangle as a product buyer at the restaurant. I had some words with them, they promise to make some calls. Low and behold they have a whole line of different sodas, but I would of never known because no one ever tried to sell me on them.

Then there was the Metromint people from last year, which was quite shocking -- various mint-flavored mildly-sweetened waters. I almost barfed last year when I tried it, because I thought I was drinking someones toothpaste backwash. I was sure they would be out of business by now.

Batali's brand was hawking a new pizza sauce, which tasted exactly like a thousand other jarred sauces. They were making pizzas on soft pita-like shells and baking them in a toaster oven. The only good thing about the sample is that it was heavy on the sauce, usually shitty pizza is heavy on the cheese.

In other pizza-related things there, there was a booth for a horrible nightmare some company is trying to bring to the freezer aisle:

Pizza in a cone, baked in your microwave in a box that keeps it upright. In the literature, one of the selling points is "acceptable taste and aroma", I kid you not. Yikes!

It was nice to see a booth/pavilion for Fage yogurt, what I call the "good" yogurt. I was happy to see it, and felt compelled to take a picture not because I'm a huge fan, but because it's one of the few foods me and B eat and love (though she eats the crappy fat-free version), and I remember when I was wooing her, we'd go food shopping in her neighborhood, like a trial run as a real couple. When ever we'd go, we'd always end up buying some Fage, and also talking about the prices of the stuff in various markets in the neighborhood. The foundation of my marriage was cemented thanks to Fage!