Hasta La Ideas

With Halloween festivities more or less underway this weekend, the holiday season is just around the corner and shopping aside, I imagine most of us are anticipating yet another stretch of eating, drinking and making merry. Here, we’ll look at several stories related to the former. Service and packaging notwithstanding, some of these news items aren’t explicitly related to design, but they certainly hold lessons for designers of all stripes.

First up, a couple of articles that examine food as a ‘manufactured’ product; not so much the industrial food complex but rather the entrepreneurial, product-driven side of how and what we eat. In contrast to, say, the riveting true stories behind Apple or Twitter—tech companies whose success is precisely why they remain compelling to the general public—food may seem an unlikely area of innovation. Yet it’s an interesting topic for almost the exact opposite reason as bleeding-edge technology: Although food is essential to our continued existence in a way that iPhones and followers are not, we remain (at times blissfully) unaware of where, exactly, it comes from. From prepping potatoes by the pallet-load to harvesting hundreds of hectares of jalapeños, we got a closer look at the unsung line cooks and idiosyncratic entrepreneur behind New York City’s Balthazar and Southern California-based Huy Fong Foods (of Sri Racha fame), respectively.

Photo by Marvin Orellana for the New York Times

I’ll spare you the NYC-insider take (the restaurant is around the corner from Core HQ), but Willy Staley does well to establish the context of Balthazar’s ‘downtown-ness,’ setting the scene with Soho’s manufacturing heritage before diving into the details, which might apply to any major restaurant operation. Of course, this being Lower Manhattan, the stakes (cue rimshot) are higher, and restauranteur Keith McNally’s iconic brasserie would not have become a veritable institution if not for its quality and consistency. “During the busy season—roughly fall Fashion Week to Memorial Day—the restaurant spends $90,000 a week on food to feed some 10,000 guests.”

I highly recommend the custom-styled/art-directed Times Magazine feature “22 Hours in Balthazar” to non-NYCers and non-foodies alike: local flavor and jargon aside, it’s a fascinating case study in both service design and how things are made.

Roughly one in 10 people who enter Balthazar orders the steak frites. It is far and away the restaurant’s best-selling dish, and Balthazar can sell as many as 200 on a busy day. A plate of steak and potatoes requires a tremendous input of labor if you’re going to charge $38 for it. At a smaller restaurant, cooks are typically responsible for setting up their own mise-en-place—preparing food for their stations—before each service begins, but at Balthazar, things are necessarily more atomized. The fries, for example, go through numerous steps of prep, done by a few different people, before they wind up on a plate.

(I should also add that the Frites video makes for a fascinating contrast to the Mac Pro manufacturing vid that has made rounds this week…)

Photo by Amit Dave / Reuters, via Quartz

Sri Racha, on the other hand, should need no introduction, though a bit a backstory is in order. Roberto Ferdman of Quartz reports that David Tran founded Huy Fong foods shortly after he landed in Los Angeles in 1980. Longing for the signature spice of his native Vietnam, made his own hot sauce (the ingredients read “Chilis, sugar, salt, garlic, distilled vinegar,” plus a few less savory preservatives) and started selling it in the now-iconic squeeze bottle with the green cap as a community service. The rest, of course, is history: Rooster sauce, as one of my friends calls it, is now a staple in all variety of Asian eatery and beyond.

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