Shut Up and Eat Your Rosemary-Cheese Bread

We’re told that the restaurant business is the toughest on earth, and that the vast majority of them fail. Over the years, I’ve become less convinced that is a phenomenon of the universe and more convinced it's because a lot of restaurateurs are marginal businesspeople.

Cafe Maude is the hot restaurant in Minneapolis’s far southwest Armatage neighborhood. (The neighborhood’s only restaurant, to be accurate.) It’s been open a few months and has garnered favorable press, including from our critic Peter Lilienthal. Owner Kevin Sheehy described his restaurant to me several weeks ago as family-friendly. So when I dined there with friends last Sunday, we brought our kids.

As we were seated for brunch at 11 a.m., the busser placed a tall glass filled to the brim with ice and water in front of my three-year-old. Moments later our server told me there was no kids menu or special portions offered at any of the restaurant’s mealtimes. The kitchen did agree to make a half-size burger for my nine-year-old, after I asked.

The food took about forty-five minutes to arrive. The restaurant was half full. At about the forty-minute mark we asked for some bread for our three-year-old. It came slathered in “cheese and rosemary,” as the server described it. When my son’s burger arrived it had been slimmed down, but the kitchen’s seasoning was so intense he would not eat it. (It was also cooked past well-done, and the heavy char made the taste more intense.) Though it was a half-portion, we were charged the full $11 on our bill. I’d like to believe even a non-parent can find at least half a dozen aspects of the experience above that are the opposite of family-friendly.

You may find it surprising then, that I like Cafe Maude. It’s charming, exceedingly comfortable, and has an interesting, reasonably priced menu. What it is not, though, is family-friendly.

That can’t be good news for Maude, because I will never return with my kids in tow. Which means I’m likely to go a lot less often than I might otherwise. I’m sure the same can be said for other southwest Minneapolis parents who’ve had experiences similar to ours at Maude and other area restaurants.

A day later, I heard from one of my colleagues about a nearly three-hour dinner (which didn’t even get them to the end of dessert) with his grandkids at Stewart and Heidi Woodman’s Heidi’s, a restaurant that offers a kids menu.

My conclusion is a lot of this “family-friendliness” is half-hearted.

Independent restaurateurs in the Twin Cities regularly feign incredulity to me over the popularity of chains. They talk as if their only choice is between selling their soul or losing customers. They want family patrons. They understand there are more family-dining dollars than date-night dollars in Highland Park, Lynnhurst, and Armatage. But they more strongly want to make an aesthetic statement, and crayons, plastic tumblers, and chicken strips with carrot nibs aren’t how they see themselves.

But they are also businesspeople—that could do an additional 5:30 p.m. seating of customers who don’t want to linger into the peak 7 p.m. meal hour. Of folks like me who love the idea of eating better food in a less-contrived setting than chains offer, and have the disposable income to do so. But who, six nights a week, have kids in tow, and need the restaurant to understand why these littlest guests are the lynchpin to the success or failure of the evening.

Is it really compromising your integrity to buy some classy-looking plastic glassware? To have paper and crayons on hand? To come up with a handful of simple, small-portion recipes kids will eat, and price them accordingly? To invite an area parent to speak to your staff on the dos and don’ts of making families welcome? I’d gladly create a checklist for independent restaurateurs.

Most restaurants that go under do so because of some major strategic or operational failing. When you pick a location, you are, in effect, picking your customers. The hordes of grazers and samplers eventually move on to what’s new and hot, and your neighbors become your regulars.

When a restaurant can’t deal with half the inhabitants of its neighborhood, it puts itself well behind the eight-ball.

Longing for a Forced Smile

One of the things that I know puzzles many of my peers is America’s taste for chains. And I agree that their sameness, contrived quality (Welcome to XXXX, how may I provide you with excellent service today?), and unrootedness to the community frustrate me as well. But nowhere is the service and friendliness ethos more deeply ingrained than in the USA. In the UK, they refer to overtly friendly and helpful service as “American-style,” and it’s not always meant as a compliment.

But I just spent a week in Florida and was reminded why Americans like chains. We were in a part of Florida where most of the merchants and restaurateurs were mom-and-pops. And frequently we were treated to sour, snippy, exasperated service. Yes, it was a holiday week in a holiday part of the country, but that’s not my problem. I’m paying your bills.

My daughter got sick and I had to get her a prescription. I had a choice of a large chain retailer or a local druggist. I know how beleaguered independent pharmacists are by chains, so I direct all my hometown business to our neighborhood pharmacy. I decided to do the same this time round. After waiting for over a half-hour for the meds, as the pharmacist shot the breeze with locals, I became pretty sure he didn’t value my business the way I valued his existence. I could have saved more of my vacation by going to the chain store.

The local market was selling turkeys and I went in to inquire about what was on offer. “We have twelve- and fourteen-pound turkeys. That’s all we have" . . . Sigh . . . "No, we’re not making crab cakes this week. Do you know how busy we are? No, we cannot"—Don’t you love it when an independent merchant states that he cannot do something? Who’s stopping him?—"take orders. We cannot pre-reserve. We cannot guarantee anything will be here at any given time.” That’d drive me to Whole Foods pretty quick.

At one beachside lunch spot, the menu board noted “no refills,” “no substitutions,” “no checks or credit cards,” and “food that is not picked up when your number is called will be discarded.” Translated, that’s: “we’re greedy, unaccommodating, penny-wise, and contemptuous of you.” I guarantee TGIFriday’s will not throw out your to-go order if you’re late picking it up.

Now, I did encounter friendly service as well, but the protocols, service standards, and enforced customer relations of the chains can be reassuring in the face of local businesspeople who know you’re not from “around here” and treat you accordingly.

I understand it’s a two-way street, and a lot of customers, especially tourists, act like cretins. But spend enough time around ungrateful merchants and you may find yourself grateful for the canned servility of chained-up America.

Terminal Insecurity

I boarded a plane the other day at MSP. If you haven’t run the TSA gauntlet yet this month, and perhaps you are about to for Thanksgiving, you’re in for more than you bargained for. New additions to the security gauntlet include flashlight examinations of your driver’s license and new handling rules for any electronic device bigger than an iPod.

Here’s my step-by-step inspection:
1. Show boarding pass to TSA agent. Remove ID from wallet sleeve for flashlight examination at screener’s podium. (Told this new procedure is now applied to everyone.)
2. Remove jacket and shoes, place in plastic tub 1. Add coins from pocket and place in shoes.
3. Remove laptop from case and place in tub 2. Nothing else can go in this tub.
4. Remove camcorder from case and place in tub 3. Nothing else allowed in tub.
5. Remove liquids/gels and place in tub 4. Nothing else allowed in tub.
6. Place camcorder and laptop case in tub 5. Nothing else allowed in tub.
7. Place carry-on bag on belt.
8. Walk through.
9. Return all items to cases, put on jacket and shoes, return coins to pocket, liquids/gels to suitcase.

When I shook my head, a TSA screener said I should have “come prepared.” I told him that was impossible when the rules change every sixty days.

The only way I could have streamlined the process would have been to place the coins in my coat pocket before I reached the checkpoints. Sure, I could have checked my toiletries, laptop, video camera, etc. But who in their right mind does that? You end up with thousands of dollars in broken/stolen goods or conditioner all over your clothes.

Perhaps you saw that TSA got another poor report card last week from the latest independent tests conducted on them. They missed a lot of “bombs.” The response has been to add even more steps to the process and more contraband that needs separate analysis. Five plastic tubs and one carry-on bag for one person!

But do I feel any safer? It’s been six years since 9/11. Where is the new technology? Where is the smart profiling? And we still don’t x-ray cargo. There has got to be a better way.

As Thanksgiving approaches, I’m thankful America has not been the victim of another terrorist attack. But if our airport security checkpoints are indicative of our overall efforts to combat terrorism, we’re winning through sheer luck and lack of determined opponents. This system is broken.

Capitalist Tools

The news is rife with stories of impending airline mergers, all centered around number-three carrier Delta, and the thinking is if Delta and United combine, as an investment fund is urging, a whole chain reaction of airline mergers will follow. What makes this story so interesting, and dispiriting, is that the merger momentum is being driven largely by hedge funds and other Wall Street manipulators. And Delta’s management, for one, seems to be paying close attention.

The mergers are driven by the premise that consolidation will take airline seats out of the skies and that reduction in supply will drive up the cost of air travel, thus increasing airline profitability, currently threatened by high oil prices. Problem is, this theory has not been borne out over the last thirty years of deregulation

The hedge funds, investment bankers, and brokerages are in it for a quick buck: the pre-merger run-up in the price of the stock they hold and the massive transaction percentages reaped doing the deals. It’s the same logic that has fueled the boom-to-bust American economy for over a decade. Are we better off for it? Look at the strength of our economy, currency, and infrastructure and compare it to Europe’s, the UK’s, or Canada’s. It’s not pretty. When we short-term greed-fuel the future of our transportation infrastructure, which needs to grow, not shrink, we put our economic health at even greater risk.

It’s been more than two years since America West bought US Airways, a transaction dwarfed in size and complexity by the mergers being advocated today, but US Airways remains dogged by terrible operational and labor problems brought on by the merger.

The Twin Cities relies on Northwest Airlines for the vast majority of its transportation lift. We have an interest in seeing it remain healthy and stable as a stand-alone or merged carrier. I doubt Pardus Capital Management cares what happens once it earns its multiples.

Airline mergers face Justice and Transportation Department scrutiny. (One of the factors driving the current merger mania is the perception that the Bush administration would look more favorably on airline mergers than a Democratic administration that would take office in early 2009.) North Dakota Senator Byron Dorgan (D) has already spoken out against such mergers, but it’s not clear that Congress has the power to intercede.

There may well be airline industry mergers that make good sense in the years ahead. They may even involve Northwest. And the outcome may be a net plus or minus for the Twin Cities. What matters is that they take place for reasons that are in the broad national interest as well as the interest of the financial services industry.

The Great Green Equivocator

Last March, we devoted our annual and popular Best Restaurants issue to the local foods movement. I conceptualized the effort in fall 2006, which was reasonably early in the national awareness cycle of the topic. (In a nutshell, there is no downside to seeking out local foods—it reduces the carbon footprint of the food economy, the food is fresher, more flavorful, and you bring critical economic mass to a locally food economy that was moribund a decade ago.)

But I am sick of it. I can’t read the latest (there are, like, four) tome by an award-winning author regarding their year of “eating locally.” I ignore the obligatory “farmer profile” in the Times Wednesday food section. I don’t really even want to know which grower my food came from when I’m dining in a local restaurant.

Yet the local foods movement has lost none of its essential salience or goodness. But everyone that is going to get it, gets it. So it’s time to live the values but stop the yammering—it’s still food, and the basic issue is how it tastes.

I just finished the November Travel & Leisure mag. It was their all-green issue. Parts of it were OK, but most was hype and diffidence. Last week was NBC Universal’s “green” week, nicely skewered by the writers on 30 Rock. (I’d work for Jack Donaghy any day.)

I even endured an article about a NY couple who is using no fuel or petroleum-based products for an entire year. Their fanaticism trivializes the issue. I don’t want to eat with them, I don’t want to talk with them, I don’t want to smell them.

And we are still doing nothing but talking about climate change.

The problem, perhaps, is that when the nation’s media leaders get wind of an important topic they sincerely want to spread the word. Or want to wrap themselves in it as a fashion statement. Or a marketing exercise.

Cynicism good. Denial bad.

It’s all quite simple, actually. But we make it very complicated. Don’t purchase carbon offsets before you fly. Take the LRT to the airport and use the subway when you’re in NYC. Don’t cover your house in solar cells. Just turn the lights off and buy compact fluorescent bulbs. You don’t have to avoid tomatoes all winter (not that the ones we get are worth eating anyway), but order a couple fewer tomato salads and eat some more pumpkin soup.

When California went through its Enron-induced energy crisis a couple of summers ago, the state found it required almost no sacrifice of its citizens to get them to reduce their peak energy consumption by nearly a quarter. It just required brownouts and electric bill surcharges. Which suggests that most of us don’t act until we are told to.

Or we turn it into a religion or an obsession or a fad. Why so many of us want to is an ongoing puzzlement. But can we stop talking and start living it already?

Six Rules for MinnPost

It’s debut week for Joel Kramer’s MinnPost.com. I’m excited about the prospect of a web-based alternative to two weak local dailies and the snooze-fest that is MPR, but the sheer volume of excessed/retired Star Tribune staffers on Kramer’s masthead gives me pause.

The Strib has not been a great newspaper in my quarter-century in the Twin Cities, but one that underperformed for its size and reach. The people who made it what it was over that period are not the folks I’d hand-select to reinvent the local journalism wheel. But that’s what we’ve got, so I’d like to offer the MinnPost gang some unsolicited advice about Star Tribune tendencies they need to avoid to be truly relevant.

1) Can the Provincialism: Please, no stories about how healthy we are, how well-educated we are, or how much we love to golf. The Strib loves nothing better than some tenuous national ranking of this or that to make into page-one fodder. Especially when it allows us to wallow in self-satisfaction, something this community is frequently drowning in anyway.

2) Access Is Less Important Than Insight: Star Tribune reporters have long manifest an awful tendency to flake out in the face of fear that a corporation or elected official will limits access if he/she doesn’t like the coverage. The net result is minimal enterprise journalism, rarely taking readers behind the scenes (at the Capitol, for example), and an overall tendency to focus on only information in the public domain (see #3).

3) Grow Some: Former Stribber Eric Black’s summer revelation that he failed to report in the paper that then-Congressional candidate Michele Bachman had angrily threatened a local GOPer—because of worries that conservatives would condemn the story—confirmed many fears about the paper. This is less about Black, whose intellect I respect, than a culture of nervousness that the paper adopted under ex-editor Anders Gyllenhaal. Highly ideological people are never going to like what you do, because it will never fit their world-view.

4) Your Trip to Manhattan Is Not Newsworthy: Another recent phenomenon in the paper’s (now depleted) arts/culture pages are insidery dispatches from some editor or critic’s trip to New York. Yes, we’re impressed that you know how to use the subway, but we don’t really care how some ex-local actor that debuted at the Guthrie is being received (see #1).

5) Stifle the Social Agenda: I’m a left-leaning moderate, but I have been nonetheless shocked at how deeply steeped the paper’s local news coverage has been in a liberal social agenda. In an era of dwindling resources, celebrating multiculturalism is a waste of space, yet seemingly every Metro section covers for years had a daily story validating some ethnic or racial group. Nor is inequity, in and of itself, newsworthy. These two tropes of contemporary liberalism drove so much of the ST’s news judgment that you wondered what was being ignored to delve into the scandal that is low access to high-speed internet access among the homeless.

6) Medina School Board Update—Even Medinans Don’t Care: The latest scheme—zoned metro sections with pages of news of relevance to only a single suburb—is a desperate folly which needs no further explanation.

Zygi: Soul Man

Did my eyes deceive me, or is the Zigster soul-shaking Adrian Peterson after his NFL record 296-yard game on Sunday? (Sign of the apocalypse #474-A: The Wilfs go hip-hop.)

Public Radio: Stop the Begging!

It’s safe to turn on Minnesota Public Radio again— membership week is over. I’ve only been a MPR member for one or two of my twenty-six years in the Twin Cities. I listen most every day, though, especially to The Current.

I’m a member of Twin Cities Public Television, and I probably watch two hours of TPT programming a week. Not much. But I just sent them $50. It’s worth it just to have the program guide. And I want to support Frontline, which is the best journalism on TV. But I’ll never send a check during TPT’s horrendous fund drives, packed with programming diametrically different from what it normally airs. It seems like bait-and-switch, and I have no idea why it works.

But TV is generally appointment viewing, so the fund drives are merely an annoyance. Whereas radio is not. You expect radio to be there when you need it. Which is why I find the begging so much more irritating on MPR. If it is the price we pay for the service being “non-commercial” then we’re better off with ads.

One day I’m going to produce a transcript of a KNOW pledge break. I’m sure it would be as painful for Gary Eichten or Cathy Wurzer to read as it is for us to listen to. It’s only a bit more subtle than back in the eighties, when cranky Marilyn Heltzer would scold KSJN listeners: “This programming isn’t free, you know,” she’d screech.

My classical music friends tell me that KSJN (like most classical music stations) is largely a greatest-hits-of-the-eighteenth-century service; while my ears tell me that MPR’s (locally originated) news and information programming is conventional, establishment-oriented, predictable, and lacking in creative spark. There’s nothing alternative about it. But Bill Kling did not want to create a news service that was true to the mission of public radio. He wanted to create something big and safe that suited his mission of a public broadcasting conglomerate. He succeeded.

Minnesota Public Radio (oops, its programming arm, American Public Media) would never produce a show like This American Life. Something edgy, quirky, personal, and unconventional. Instead it mines the zeitgeist and creates soft, conventional programming designed to attract underwriting dollars. Remember Sound Money? It’s hard to imagine our local boys green-lighting A Prairie Home Companion if something similar came along today.

And I wonder what MPR will do without the Star Tribune to guide its morning news coverage? As big and as authoritative as KNOW has gotten, too many days I hear a story lineup that hews way too similarly to the metro section of the paper. And MPR may not have it around much longer.

So, imagine my surprise with The Current. I know there are music-heads who beef about its flaws, but it’s truly a smart, innovative, and unconventional (though polished) take on popular music radio. It’s the antithesis of the MPR ethos, and perhaps it’s taught the Klingons something about creative risk. It’s a lesson lost on PBS thus far.

But I can’t abide the begging. So I turn MPR off, in all its venues, for weeks out of the year. Say what you will about MPR’s many for-profit subsidiaries, its preoccupation with national expansion, and the sums its executives earn (I know it doesn’t need my money). If it’d merely find a way to end the beg-a-thons, I’d join up. The Current is that good, and I still hold out hope for the newsroom. And at that point, the check’s in the mail.

(Conflict of interest note: A subsidiary of MPR publishes Minnesota Monthly, a competitor of Mpls.St.Paul.)