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For more than a year now, Starbucks has been working on improving their breakfast offerings. In spring of 2007, they launched a line of breakfast sandwiches, only to announce a year later that they were pulling them from the stores (they then changed their minds again, announcing that they were only going to retool the sandwiches). Earlier this summer, they started selling a line of whole grain pastries, cups of "perfect oatmeal" and a platter that lives in the refrigerated case that contains a hard boiled egg, a small whole wheat bagel, a few slices of cheese and some fruit.
This morning, they launched the latest addition to the breakfast line-up. Called the Piadini, this savory breakfast pastry comes in two varieties - Portobello Mushroom or Sausage, Egg and Cheddar. Energized by a Starbucks-led breakfast and coffee pairing event I attended last week, I stopped by my local Starbucks today to try out this new breakfast option.
I ended up ordering the Portabello Mushroom Piadini. I actually wanted to order both (offering my stomach in the name of blogging science) but as soon as I ordered the first one, the Starbucks partner taking my order moved on to the next person in line, so I wasn't able to get my hands on the Sausage, Egg and Cheese Piadini.
They handed it to me a few minutes later, swaddled in that multi-layer insulating bag that Starbucks was so proud of when they first brought the warming ovens into their stores last year. I hightailed it over to my office, so that I could take a picture and get a bite before it cooled down too much.
The Piadini has a really nice aroma, similar to a pizza shop where the dough is fresh and they are baking all day long. The flavor is good, although I didn't taste much more than spinach and mushrooms in mine. It is supposed to contain portobello mushrooms, spinach, feta and ricotta cheeses and eggs, but everything else disappears in the face of the mushroom and spinach flavors.
One problem I find with this item is that it's mostly bread. The filling was pretty skimpy and I'm afraid that if this were something I was depending on for breakfast on a regular basis, I'd be hungry an hour after I ate it (I also had a chocolate banana Vivanno this morning, so I think I'll be okay today). It's a nice effort, but when it just doesn't feel substantial enough for the $3.25 price tag.
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10-05-2008 @9:49AM henry yamada said... We have been to many,many restaurants in between the "busy hours" and have
found not only is the service slow but the kitchen staff must also be asleep.
Is this something that is our bad luck or this is very, very common?
It's nice to enjoy a meal when you have the time but we've been really hestitant
because of our previous experiences......
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10-05-2008 @1:23PM Silvio said... Sorry to be such a curmudgeon, but "piadina" is the famous Romagna flatbread you can get with melted cheese and arugula in it. It comes from Arabic flatbread (from the days that Ravenna was an imperial capital city). So, now SB has taken the (incorrect) plural of this word, turned it into a singular, and came up with a much heavier dish.
It would be like some chain restaurant in Italy came up with a new dish called "a hambergers" which was a hamburger bun filled with ice cream.
(Okay, in fact, you CAN get ice cream in bread in Italy, with whipped cream too, but they call it "focaccia con panna".)
Don't get me started about how Starbucks took the term "short" and changed the meaning (try getting a short espresso in Starbucks). Or how somehow we took the singular word for "sandwich" in Italian, pluralized it, and assigned it as the singular for a grilled sandwich that usually has way too much filling in it to be like any panino you'd find in Italy. Or, the difference between peperone and pepperoni. Mutter, grumble.
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