They creeped me out when I was a kid. Baby A thought they were just wrong the one time she went to Chuck E Cheese. (It was for a classmate's birthday party.)
You know those robotic animals? Well, somone's finally found a good use for them.
Does anyone have kids who like these animated animal things—I mean, the ones still doing their day jobs?
[Thanks to Parent Dish for the tip.]
There's a bit of nutritional irony in nearly every quick-serve order: People don't put their money where their mouths are. Offer a fried chicken sandwich and a grilled one, and they'll choose the greasier one. French fries with that, or fruit salad? Um, well...most people choose the fries.
People talk healthy but usually don't eat that way in restaurants. (There are plenty of studies showing consumers think of home-cooking as the place to be health-conscious.)
Now a recent study from industry analyst Technomic Inc. shows a strong majority of consumers back new regulations that would require restaurants to make big changes to their nutrition disclosure practices.
Technomic's NUTRITRACK study of 2,500 American adults showed, in particular, that 74 percent of adults said they support new regulations requiring restaurants to provide a section on all menus or menu boards showing complete nutritional information for all items served.
Similarly, Technomic said, 71 percent of adults said they support new regulations that would require restaurants to show the number of calories contained in each food item on the menu or menu board next to its price.
I think seeing the hard numbers would definitely affect what I order. Imagine you're considering two sandwiches, and the turkey variety has more than 800 calories. Add a bag of chips and a drink and that's half of what the average woman should eat in a day. But if the numbers aren't in front of you, that count is literally out of sight, out of mind.
How about you? Would you want to require restaurants to disclose nutrition information—which they already have on hand—more prominently? If those numbers were highly visible, would it change your order?
We took A. to hear some jazz outdoors last evening, then took her to "that piggy store," meaning the The Q Shack, for dinner. Rude as it might be, I slipped next door to snag a burger from Five Guys—something I've been craving for weeks. Little Burger (meaning one patty) with fried onions, lettuce, pickles, ketchup, mustard, and—this is the key part—fresh jalapenos.
Uh HUH.
While I was waiting (only a few minutes, I might add, not bad for a fresh-cooked burger), I noticed a whiteboard with a hand-written note:
"Today's potatoes come from [something, I forget] Ridge, Idaho."
Nice touch, I thought. Today's consumers are more and more concerned about buying locally, for many good reasons. And when you can't buy local, a quick note like that one at least makes you feel like the ingredients were local to SOMEplace, even if it wasn't close to you—like it came from real farmers and real dirt.
What a brilliant, and inexpensive, marketing move. For the cost of a white board and a minute's time, it gives customers the feeling their food came from a place, not a black box, and that's a feeling all chain restaurants would do well to foster. Parents care, more and more.
Is your family trying to buy more local ingredients? Would you like to see more locally sourced ingredients in the restaurants where you take your family?
Before you comment, check out the amazing simplicity of the Five Guys menu. THIS is why it works:
Lots of Quicksies around here started the new school year yesterday. And as the kids go back, the debate goes on about what public schools ought to serve for lunch. Ten years ago, school lunches were the vast, unexplored frontier to the nation's largest quick-serve chains, and today there are rumblings again in the industry about the promises of the school lunch market.
Me, I didn't like it, and I had trouble at the time publishing stories about how quick-serve companies could exploit (take that word as positively or negatively as you'd like) the school lunch market. Now that I have a small child, I feel even more strongly about it.
Of course, that position assumes that quick-serve meals are inherently bad, and that is less the case now than ten years ago. What if Panera put its Panera Kids menu, with organic and all-natural ingredients and no trans fats, into schools? Good by me. Or how about Subway's FreshFit menu of sandwiches and sides for kids? I could be happy with Baby A's school serving that.
Here's a pretty balanced look at U.S. school lunch reform efforts. And take a look at the efforts of Two Angry Moms, who have made a movie and started a movement to better U.S. school lunches. And the TreeHugger site has visited this topic regularly.
These reform efforts (and the underlying problems) aren't particular to the United States. Take, for instance, celebrity chef Jamie Oliver's attempts to better the lunch programs in England, which have met with mixed success.
As your Quicksies head back to school, is the lunch program on you mind? How would you feel if a quick-serve chain won the rights to run your local schools' lunch programs? What standards would you want them to adhere to?
Oh yes, well, let's just count them: twelve days since my last post. There are some technical changes in the works here—a switch to a new host and software—but I haven't finished those yet. Stay tuned. You will find an updated and expanded list of links. Look to the right-hand column for an array of wonderful parent bloggers and restaurant resources. Meanwhile, stopping at chain restaurants hasn't been a big part of our summer. There's probably meaning in that, but I'll leave that exploration for another post.
So here's what we have done, lately.
We went to my family's lake house on Lake Murray in South Carolina, a lovely place I've visited my whole life. I re-introduced Baby A to the culinary wonder of warm boiled peanuts. At three, she's able to open the shell and work out those salty, earthy treasures—and work it she did. (That's a peanut she's showing you in the picture above.) She bogarted almost the whole bag.
And we swam and skiied and floated and got ridiculously tan. No restaurant tie-ins here. We had local tomatoes, butter beans, barbecue, all consumed as quickly as possible so mom could get back into the lakewater I love so much. We did have one big Sunday dinner during which Baby A tore into a dinner roll like a Viking, as if she had never seen spherical bread before.
Which, dinner rolls? She really hadn't seen them much, so I hadn't had a chance to teach her the tear-butter-bite routine. I have a feeling adults would eat dinner rolls in a Viking way, too, given the chance. It would be a lot more fun.
We also spent a week with friends in a large house on the intracoastal waterway. Only-child Baby A swam and played happily with their four children, and we parents put them to bed early and pounded a night's worth of wine and poker into the two hours we could manage to stay awake ourselves.
We then followed The Wonderful Husband down to Greenville, South Carolina (yes, there's a theme here), where he was consulting on quality assurance for a manufacturer. ("Daddy helps make engines, only better!," Baby A will tell you.) What a great little city, Greenville, full of parks and fountains and a zoo and a river running down a rocky waterfall right there in the middle of it. Again, no chain restaurant tie-ins here. Main Street in Greenville is lined with little eateries, all with cafe-style streetside dining. Baby A and I had homemade Mexican one day for lunch. After forgoing it for more than a year, A. ate a whole bowl of salsa ("SHALSHAAAAA!" was actually one of her earliest words, she loved it that much early on) and made her own guacamole burrito. The next day, we shared red-curry beef in a lovely little Thai place. Simply awesome. Both of those days, I felt like I was hanging out with the Future A, getting glimpses into what it'll be like when she's five and eight and ten. She wasn't my little baby.
Until, of course, I looked over and saw she was pulling her underwear out from under her dress, right there in the street-facing picture window of the Port City Java we'd ducked into when a thunderstorm rolled up. "BUT I HAVE A WEDGIE!," she protested. Note to self: Wait until child has develped a sense of propriety before introducing words like "wedgie."
I'll have more posts soon, plus more good technical changes and podcasts and some really good reads—interviews, book reviews, that kind of stuff. But for today? I'll throw in another picture or two and call it a summer day.
Maybe it's the warm memories I have from visits to San Francisco. Or maybe it's the warmth spreading through me fron this early-Friday-afternoon Tanqueray and tonic and Trader Joe's Blackberry Crush blend I'm sipping up.
But this story got me, and even though it's not restaurant related, I'm posting about it. And don't ever tell me today's Quicksies aren't as thoughtful as any other generation. All that "it was better in my day" booshiznit...I'm not having it.
A fifth-grade class at Mangum Elementary in Durham, North Carolina, led the way with fundraising to send the school's 71-year-old custodian and his wife on a trip to San Francisco. Mr. Venable, pictured above, said his lifelong dream had been to see the Golden Gate Bridge, and thanks to those fifth-graders, along with faculty, other students, and local churches, his dream is coming true right now.
What a great note to end a hard week on. This is the best kind of Friday Fun I can think of.
[Shout-out to Wade: How much for the bridge?]
[Picture via WRAL-TV]
Whoa, horrible dining experience related by a blogger at the San Francisco Chronicle. And they they left the Burger King bags on the table? How would you have reacted, if at all?
Closest we've come to this is getting Chick-fil-A for Baby A and burgers from Five Guys for us, then eating outside at a cafe table between the two restaurants. Do you ever take other kinds of food along for your kids? On my Parenting Scale of Things, that is overindulgent. How about you?
A couple of days ago, The Wonderful Husband took Baby A to see the new animated movie "Ratatouille." Afterwards, they went next door to an awesome little quick-serve BBQ place called The Q Shack. (She's had a thing for BBQ chicken lately.)
TWH is holding Baby A in his arms as they place their order. Baby A blurts out to the server,
"Have you got a bunch of rats cooking back there in the kitchen?"
Now, someone from Taco Bell or KFC might have taken that question a little hard. But the server laughed and said, "Let me guess—you just saw 'Ratatouille.' Am I right?"
To which Baby A just laughed, nodded, and hid her face in TWH's shoulder in true three-year-old fashion. Little jokester, she.
Q Shack has turned out to be one of our favorite options for quick and inexpensive family meals out. In spite of being Southern through and through, I don't care much for BBQ—I'm too picky about meat—but the generous veggie-based sides, like cole slaw, collards, and baked beans are perfect. I get a four-side plate (cheap! it's like $3.50), TWH gets a BBQ chicken sandwich, and we make a plate for Baby A with chicken, mac and cheese, and some veggies.
So if you're a meat-eatin' family and your Quicksie is into some of those things, give a BBQ place a try. If you don't have a Q Shack, maybe look for Famous Dave's. One contact who knows the quick-serve industry inside and out told me last week that BBQ is the next big thing in fast food—so your options will probably only grow over the next few years.
When I was a kid, we'd go to Captain D's (or the similar Long John Silver's) maybe every couple of months. Mmmmmmmm, malt vinegar on bready things—and what kid could resist that treasure chest full of free toys and prizes at the exit? I think I even signed up for the birthday club, which is now called the Aqua Kids program.
Now, the Captain is steering for a new course. Yesterday the company opened a new pilot restaurant in Clarksville, Tennessee, featuring a new menu and look. Over the summer, the other two Clarksville locations will be converted to the new paradigm. From there, it's on to Nashville and, I assume, the rest of the system.
What's changed? The pilot store offers an array of grilled items, including wild Alaskan salmon, tilapia, mahi mahi, deep sea flounder, and shrimp skewers. (A piece of cooking equipment called a clamshell grill makes the grilling possible.) And there are new pasta selections, like shrimp scampi, creamy shrimp alfredo, and chicken parmesan. Many of the old favorites are still on the menu.
[Aside: Wonder how the FDA's recent ban on seafood imports from China is affecting Captain D's and other quick-serve seafood menus?]
Looks-wise, the revamped Captain D's restaurant aims to create a more welcoming and laid-back atmosphere. There's also a new logo, shown above. Sounds like the company is going for the full-on fast casual strategy, leaving its fast-food days behind.
From my point of view, that's a smart approach to the future—a comfy interior, a menu with more variety, which makes it even easier for families. What do you think? If you haven't been to a Captain D's in a while, would this new menu convince you to give it another try?
Burger King announced last Friday it will use trans-fat-free cooking oil at all of its U.S. restaurants by the end of 2008. The move will bring Burger King in line with other leading fast-food restaurants.
Burger King, which is the world's second-largest hamburger chain, noted that hundreds of its 7,100 U.S. restaurants already use zero trans-fat oil. Sounds like the remaining work centers around logistics and operations, instead of the bigger task of adapting the menu to the new oil.
PLUS: Have you listened to the Quick Serve Kids podcast on trans fats? Quick! Do it now!
A few weeks ago, Noah's New York Bagels rolled out all natural, grilled salmon sandwiches, salads, and new low fat drink selections for the hot summer months. There really are some interesting flavors here: miso, lemon-caper sauce, Thai chili lime. And Challah bread? That's a nice alternative to fluffy white buns.
Who says fast menus (or, in this case, fast-casual menus) can't be creative? Remember, especially for smaller kids, it's easy to order a premium salad and give your little Quicksie some of the meat or fish and fruit and vegetable toppings. (You'll want to do that before adding the dressing, if your Quicksie is like Baby A. I don't get it—I loved salad dressing as a kid. Maybe that comes later.)
Here are the details on those new options...
* Grilled Blackened Salmon Sandwich: Made with 100 percent wild Alaskan Pink salmon, this hot grilled fillet with a lemon caper sauce, lettuce, cucumber and red onion is served on an onion Challah roll
* Grilled Miso Salmon—Miso flavoring is baked into this hot grilled salmon fillet, served on a Challah roll and topped with lettuce, cucumber, and red onion.
* Blackened Salmon Caesar Salad—Noah's tops off their signature Caesar salad with a blackened salmon fillet.
* Miso Salmon Salad—This Thai-inspired salad offers mixed greens, Asian cabbage, cucumbers, peanuts and chow mein noodles. The is topped with a piping-hot salmon fillet flavored with miso and served with a signature Thai chili lime dressing.
Guests at Noah's Bagels can also cool down this summer with one of the two new low-fat blended drinks, Guava Banana or Papaya Yogurt. Or, there's Noah's Strawberry, Vanilla or Cookies & Cream frozen drink, also available with caramel, cappuccino, or Mocha flavors.
The Einstein Noah Restaurant Group has about 600 restaurants in 36 states and the District of Columbia.
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First came the job: founding editor of a magazine for fast-food industry executives. Then came marriage.
Then came the baby in the baby carriage—and a new perspective on the world in which that baby will grow up.
Now I'm using my fast-food (quick-serve) industry expertise to filter restaurant news and information to other parents. Join me and other parents as we figure out how to raise our Quicksies to make good choices in a world where fast food is part of life.
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