Restaurant Rants

Government Intrusion - Restaurants in New York are now required to publish nutritional information about their food. While I generally dislike government intrusion or mandates, this is one I agree with. This is not onerous on the restaurants and gives consumers the information they need to make good choices. Now, if we could all just make those good choices…

Slimy Employees - Both Coldstone Creamery and Pei Wei get awards. Coldstone has huge posters in their windows with huge letters touting that their new yogurt (nrgize?) is only 25 calories! In very small type they note that this is per ounce. According to the gal behind the counter the smallest portion they serve is officially 5 ounces but in reality is probably about 7. At least they did put the small type on there…Pei-Wei, a division of P. F. Changs, lists some relatively healthy looking nutritional information on their website and tout that it is for ONE SERVING. But they won’t sell you that one serving. If you try to order one serving they’ll refuse. Everything they sell is TWO SERVINGS. I think I’d trust a snake-oil salesman before Pei-Wei. What kind of slimy people work for this company? I worked in marketing for a number of years and I could spin the benefits of my product with the best of them, but I don’t think I’d have ever stooped as low as Pei-Wei or Coldstone.

Subway and Noodles get my award for health and honesty. They both publish nutritional info for all of their meals and they’re not misleading about it. They both also offer a number of meals that are both good tasting and healthy (low calories, high fiber, etc.)

An energy solution better than proper tire pressure - It’s not unusual in the summer for my wife to grab a jacket when we’re going out to dinner. Even when it’s 90F outside. Because though it might be 90F outside, it’ll likely be about 60F inside. When I jokingly ordered ‘some heat’ at Don Pablos the other night the waitress offered to switch places with me and I’d understand why it’s so cold in there. I guess I’d rather be cold than have some hairy waiters sweat dripping in my food, but I’d think that maybe hiring a few more servers so that they didn’t have to run so much and then turning the AC up a few degrees might be an alternative.

I know you're 60, but are you over 21? - I was grabbing a quick bite in Chipotle today. 3 guys riding bikes came in for lunch and ordered beers. One of the 3 didn’t have ID on him and the manager refused to sell them more than 2 beers without the guy being able to prove his age. None of these guys could have been under 50 and I’d guess they were all over 60. I think even a 6-year-old wouldn’t confuse them with someone under 21. The manager said this was a corporate rule and there was nothing he could do about it. Besides the general stupidity of this there’s the added humor that Chipotle sponsors a pro bike racing team in Europe. One of these 3 guys was even wearing a Chipotle bike jersey. A 16-year-old working for Chipotle’s bike team in Europe can buy a beer anywhere the team travels in Europe. A 14-year-old watching the team can probably do the same (ID’s are rarely checked). And Europe (except perhaps the UK) has far fewer drinking problems than we do*. Go figure.

* UNICEF’s Report Card Number 7 on Child Well-Being in OECD countries did note that only about 15% of 11, 13, and 15-year-old’s in the US report having been drunk two or more times. While higher than France, Italy, and a few others, it is also about average for all OECD countries. This is the good news. The bad news is that our problems begin at about 16 and it’s between about 16 and 30 that our problems dwarf Europe’s.