"chain" news and stories

Get ready to laugh: among Health magazine's top healthiest restaurants are - drum roll, please - Denny's, Bob Evans, and Romano's Macaroni Grill.

Hmm - the kings of maple syrup-drenched sausage and carb-heavy pasta dishes, respectively, are also the healthiest?

Granted, I don't go out to eat very often. But - are these places actually healthy? I find it hard to believe.

The magazine's other choices are equally as confusing: Olive Garden? Uno Chicago Grill? Last time I checked, phrases like "extra cheese" and "more breadsticks" were the norm at these haunts.

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It has long been suggested that the oversized portions offered to diners at many restaurants are responsible for the expanding waistlines of Americans. Now, the health/lifestyle watchdog group Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) is implying that "table-service chain restaurants," such as The Cheesecake Factory, T.G.I. Fridays and Ruby Tuesday, are cramming their dishes full of fattening, unhealthy ingredients on purpose, encouraging "extreme eating." Sometimes described as the "food police," CSPI cites the fact that these restaurants are not entirely forthcoming with the nutritional information on their foods, pointing out that Ruby Tuesday's Fresh Chicken & Broccoli Pasta entree has 2,060 calories and 128 grams of fat, while The Cheesecake Factory's Chris' Outrageous Chocolate Cake (layers of chocolate cake, brownies, coconut pecan filling and chocolate-chip coconut cheesecake) had 1,380 calories.

However misleading it may seem to call a dish "Fresh Chicken and Broccoli Pasta" and cram it with (mostly) cheese, it doesn't sound like there is any ill intent there, does it? The restaurants say that their menus change so frequently that it would be impractical to put together nutritional stats for individual dishes and change the menus all the time. They cite value-conscious consumers, who view large portion sizes as one of their highest priorities when eating out. Looking at both sides of this issue begs one question: which came first, huge portion sizes or the desire for them?

Earlier this month, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz wrote a company memo that expressed concern over what he termed the "Commoditization of the Starbucks Experience." StarbucksGossip.com first posted the memo online and its authenticity was later confirmed by Starbucks, then picked up by more traditional media outlets.

The memo basically said that because of the rapid and wide-reaching expansion of the company, as well as the desire to do so quickly and efficiently, there has been a "watering down of the Starbucks experience." For example, switching to automatic espresso machines removed "much of the romance and theater that was in play with the use of the La Marzocca machines (the manual machines the stores used to have)." Another issue Schultz had was with the store designs, which have become too standard, too sterile and, in some cases, too distanced from actual coffee.

Speed and quality are important to any food service business, but not at the expense of experience of the customers' enjoyment and Shultz is proposing that they start making some changes to recapture that coffee shop experience that Starbucks first offered. There won't be a full-scale reversal in company strategy in pursuit of this goal. Instead, changes will be implemented gradually to move the stores away from the cookie-cutter, fast food chain genre while still chasing a larger global presence. Examples of this include having baristas measure out freshly roasted coffee beans, rather than having them in prepackaged bags, and changing the merchandise to have more coffee-centric merchandise, like grinders and brewers, instead of stuffed animals.

The changes planned for now seem small, but getting the aroma of freshly roasted beans back into the stores is a step in the right direction.

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New York's Board of Health is getting a lot of attention for their proposed ban on trans fats at restaurants in the city, but there is another proposal on the table that could have an even bigger impact on the dining community in NYC. The Board of Health is considering requiring some restaurants - beginning with chains and fast food establishments - to list the caloric content of their menu items on the menu. Not only that, but the calorie count must be "in type that is as large 'as the name or price of the item.'"

The NY Department of Health and Mental Hygiene is "intent on creating the nation's most rigorous system of calorie disclosure in restaurants" - which has restaurant owners worried about what they're going to serve. Chefs already admit that calories and fat aren't exactly major considerations when they are planning menus and restaurant owners are concerned that their offerings will have to change to such a degree that people won't want to eat out anymore. But the smaller eateries don't have to worry just yet because the rules will only apply to "restaurants with highly standardized menu items" that "already make their caloric content available on the Internet, in brochures or in some other format."

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I'm beginning to get the impression that writing about Trader Joe's is some sort of fall-back for food writers who don't have any other good ideas. On the surface, this seems like a good idea. There are plenty of good things to say about it and they come out with new things frequently, most of which are worth a mention. Unfortunately, the new things - products, store locations, etc - aren't what seem to attract the press. They seem to enjoy writing about how they are or are not impressed with the store and why it is popular.

Here is yet another article from an east coast paper where the author wondered why Trader Joe's was so popular, tried it and decided that it was a store worth visiting, at least from time to time. The problem with the piece is that the Washington DC area already has several Trader Joe's locations, so the chance that this revelation is actually news to residents, or to anyone else who has shopped at Trader Joe's, is slight.

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