We have been so anxious for Rhubarb this year. It’s finally being cut and shipped this past week, from local New England farmers. We have a few sources for rhubarb. Four Town Farm in Seekonk, MA, Joe Czajkoski Farm in Hadley, MA and from Schartner Farms in Exeter, RI, all delivered by Farm Fresh Rhode Island’s Market Mobile program. I’m visiting Four Town Farm today with my boys, to see their rhubarb patch.
Interesting thing about rhubarb is Read the rest of this entry »
The other day I found this. Yeah, check that label. Not that there is anything wrong with MI or GA, but these carrots are definitely not from New England, and what’s worse, they’re definitely NOT organic.
Why is this a problem? Well, for one I found this days after I posted the recent post on organic stuff at Clover, the first time we’d officially talked about our extensive organic program since 2008. Worse, it means we’re not making you the best tasting carrots. Rolando and I learned really early that carrots were one of the vegetables most sensitive to the soil in which they are grown. A carrot grown in beautiful soil is sweet and full of flavor. But you can find plenty of examples out there of the opposite. Tony, of Russo’s, calls the carrots in this bag here Read the rest of this entry »
In this photo, you see some soup and salad kits side by side. We normally have either soups or salads available on our menu.
Currently, we are in a grey area at Clover, where we start a seasonal transition from soups to salads. As to not rock our operational systems too much, in the prep kitchen and at all our locations, we start making smaller batches of soup and add one salad to the production. After a week or so, we’ll pull the soup out for the season and add an additional salad to the menu.
That being said, hot soups only have about a week left. Get ‘em while they last.
Here’s the latest poster, for a Kids Worm Day we’re having Sunday.
We’ll have earthworm activities, stories, and more. Kids can plant a seed to take home. And the rumors are true. Antoria has secured a Worm Expert (Fern, a customer at HSQ who used to run earthworm classes).
So bring your kids by Worm University (Clover HSQ, 7 Holyoke) this Sunday, 5/20, at 3pm.
Elmer is packing up our 3pm special kits. These containers from bottom to top are, dry batter mix, Grillo’s hots, flour, and caper-mustard sauce.
Travis Grillo has our rotating tenant spot next door to the HUB. He’s doing a great job. We really appreciate what he does, selling a high quality, fresh, healthy and tasty product. We all need to consume more vegetables and he is increasing all of our opportunities.
We’re featuring these for the next few days. If you ask, we’ll even fry up a habanero for you to taste, if you’re brave enough.
Chris is so excited about his worm farm. He was so happy when it arrived that he wouldn’t let me joke about it or help him open it, instead like a kid at Christmas he opened the box and read all the directions in the corner of the office. I wish you could see the picture I took, but he wrestled my phone away from me and deleted it.
The worms go in that black box, we feed them food scraps and newspaper and they turn it into soil for the raised bed garden. Want to see how it works in person?
WORM KIDS DAY
this Sunday, 5/20, 3pm
Clover HSQ, 7 Holyoke St
Featuring worm activities, a Worm Expert, and more.
That’s George Howell in our Harvard Square store, teaching Rose how to pour coffee. This picture was taken over a year ago. So why are you just now seeing George Howell coffee at Clover?
Some of you know that George Howell is a big deal in the coffee world. He brought high quality coffee from the West Coast to Boston in the 70′s with
the Coffee Connection. He was one of the first to treat coffee like wine, paying attention to the place Read the rest of this entry »
Antoria (HSQ) here. My first post. Have you seen our garden upstairs? This is all unbelievable to me. I don’t consider myself a gardener. I used to feel as if I had a black thumb. I have been known to kill a plant or two. I was so bad my grandmother refused to let me water her plants when she was on vacation.
The raised bed at Clover helped me realize that a plant is only as healthy as its soil. After a failed first attempt with some store-bought soil, I went out and got my hands dirty. My journey started in Dorchester at my favorite cafe. The manager Lucian, told me about his garden and how great used coffee grounds were for it. That I needed better soil to start with. So Chris brought me out to Lincoln to go to Lindentree Farm, and they let us take their compost back to the restaurant. This picture was taken a few months ago when the first sprouts were coming in.
Want to see what it looks like now? Come by next Sunday (5/20), 3pm at 7 Holyoke. We’re having a kids day all about worms, gardening, and compost. There’ll be a Worm Expert. You and your kiddos can plant a seed and take it home.
We’ve wanted to serve George Howell’s coffee for a long time. It was actually the first coffee roaster that I visited, back in early 2009. George hosted Ayr and I at his roastery. I recall doing a formal cupping and discussing coffee varietals, light roast coffee, Dunkin’ Donuts, brew methods, among other things.
El Roble is an organic coffee from Colombia. It will be rolling to most Clover locations starting today. I think it’s smooth with a bit of a fruity tang to it. Really delicate. Definitely taste it black before adding milk and sugar. If you stop in to try it, be sure to let us know what you think.
This is a T-shirt I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. Mostly because I love rhubarb so so much. But I’m not very happy with how it turned out. Notice how large the food icon is on most of our shirts. On this one it’s pretty tiny. Which is really too bad. I’ve also heard some criticism about the art on this one. Some folks don’t think it looks like Rhubarb.
I make a new shirt every couple of months. The plan has always been to engage local artists to design different shirts, but I haven’t really pulled that off yet. Not enough time to go around and find the right artists/ etc. In the meantime I have a really simple formula that I can execute myself. A big line image of a fruit or vegetable that is in season, our logo, date, and a T-shirt with a color that is close if not a perfect match to the produce. I had this idea that over time employees would be able to wear the T-shirt they like best, being able to maintain some sort of uniformity while allowing employees a degree of personal expression (especially when the artist shirts kick in). And I thought the sea of colored shirts would be fun in the context of our otherwise color-less trucks/ restaurants.
Lucia (communications) and I have been talking about using the color of the T-shirt as a sort of color theme for the month. Don’t get too excited, but we’re introducing a little bit of color to the trucks/ restaurant. The colored logos and colored lights. And we’re going to have them shift seasonally. I’m sure there are some marketing folks out there cringing with the idea of changing colors. But we’ve always been a company with a lot of change and evolution and I think this might be fun for everybody.
Guess where this picture was taken? No, not at lab at MIT. This is straight from a brewery. A very unusual brewery.
Not since our first Pretty Things launch have we had a beer launch that’s been as long in the working. My first notes from talking to Bryan are from November 2010. Most of you probably haven’t heard of him, except maybe from us. But I think everybody who is into beer will know Mystic really well someday.
Bryan worked in the commercial fermentation industry for years, helping big companies make alternatives to artificial sweeteners by using yeast to create flavors. Crazy, huh? And when he got into beer he decided to start testing and screening strains of wild yeasts. Last time I talked to him about it he told me he’s screened something like 100 strains. Ask him tonight what he’s up to now.
I realize this intro may not have you all salivating, but I know I’m not the only geek who spends time on this site. And this is some really unusual and beautiful stuff that’s happening in our backyard.
Rolando, Chris and I visited the brewery. They’re doing a bunch of stuff that’s nothing like the other breweries Read the rest of this entry »
I had to re-wire MIT’s stereo last night. Like everything on the MIT truck it was the first stereo I installed and we’ve learned a lot since. I had to get under the truck 3 times, I wanted to share a picture of the underside of the truck with you all, but I couldn’t get a good photo with the iPhone. So instead you get my greasy hands.
Our stereo installation has been evolving. Besides just loving music myself, I think music is a really important part of creating community, a sense of place and connection. The sonic landscape of a place can be as important as the architectural or natural landscape. I’ve sort of messed this up over the past year by not rotating the music as often as I should on the trucks, but that’s another issue.
When I was trying to figure out how to do music on the MIT truck Darius of Q-Audio told me I should just use a car system. Makes sense, right? So I installed a amplifier, a head unit, and 6 speakers. The speakers are marine grade so that they can stand up to weather. They are low, near the customer, and many in number. Having many allows for a good sound field, and allows for music to be audible without being loud. Having them low means you get to hear the details of the music as a customer. I designed it so that as you walk near the truck the music becomes louder, and as you step away it trails off. We aren’t looking to blast music at anybody.
I bought the stuff online at Crutchfield, and have since. We use an iPod shuffle to run the music at MIT. That works OK. The latest unit I just bought for the LMA truck uses a USB stick, which is much cheaper. And the unit Ernie installed on the PRK truck uses a home-amplifier (Sony) combined with marine speakers. The advantage of that unit is that I didn’t have to install it myself!
One day this past Winter, we had been running a 3pm special which worked out quite well, beer-battered apples. I had just made myself a peanut butter, honey and banana sandwich, when I laid eyes on the beer-batter on the counter. Then the thought arose, to dip bananas in the batter in the same manner as the apples.
First, coat the bananas in cinnamon sugar. Then into the beer batter. Next immediately into the fryer for a few minutes. Really, really yummy. Careful, they’re super hot, right out of the fryer.
Jake, from Counter Culture Coffee, happened to walk-in for a cup of coffee, just as I was testing out the first batch. He gave me the thumbs up. Running at all locations through Tuesday of next week.
Van just pulled up with 16 sixth barrels and one 1 half-barrel of Mystic’s Descendant. First time we’re featuring this brewer and its the first time these kegs will have been used. Look how shiny they are! The tap goes in tomorow, 5/10 at 8pm.
Bryan, the brewer, tweeted yesterday that this was the largest shipment they’ve had of draft to date. We can’t wait to share them with you.
It really sucks when you realize after the fact you’re in need of something vital to your operation. This is James Bolding, he made a 10 minute round trip from MIT to HUB to get sandwich wrapping paper, just in time for the MIT lunch rush.
Come by the Harvard restaurant Thursday at 8pm for the launch of Mystic beer at Clover.
I think this will be a really special launch for a lot of you. Bryan, the brewer, got his PhD in how plants make fragrance in nature. He used to be a scientist for the commercial yeast industry, his job was to figure out how to make things taste like other things.
Now he makes beer using wild yeast. From what Ayr tells me, he literally goes out and harvests wild strains of yeast and turns them into beer. This is totally unlike most beer that’s being made right now in the U.S. So start thinking of your questions for Bryan, and get ready to taste. Tap for their Descendant beer goes in 8pm Thursday.
For longtime customers this list may be sort of surprising. We don’t talk too much about this sort of thing. I’m putting together training materials and was going through old posts and found this one about organic ingredients. I’ve been really unsure about how we should integrate this type of communication. So much BS in the industry. Maybe we just post on our website once in a while?
Why organic? Let’s make that a trivia question. I’ll buy lunch for the first person to comment/ twitter the answer.
Hint #1: answer may surprise you.
Hint #2: our eggs are not organic.
Mary (DWY) here. Before I worked at Clover, I worked at one of the oldest family owned/operated burger joints in the city. It’s funny how different jobs you have affect your diet. That job turned me into a vegetarian. I’m not a vegetarian anymore, but it took me a long time before I could eat a burger again.
The worst thing was when I started finding Read the rest of this entry »
I got this email the other day turning me onto one of our customer’s photo streams. He’s been taking photos of his food for the past 2 years, every single thing he eats. (Yeah, it’s an MIT customer.) And he figures something like 100 of those photos are Clover food. So he forwarded us this amazing link.
Have fun: http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=39768211@N07&q=clover
You might remember last summer our iced coffee was written up by the Boston Globe alongside Dunkin and Starbucks in a must-have-iced-coffee-in-Boston article. You might not know that I’ve never really been happy with our iced coffee method. It’s been nagging at me.
Our last big iced coffee change came when we moved from cold brew to our single-cup brewed iced coffee. The thinking at the time was that cold brew has WAY too much caffeine. The current method has undergone some tweaks, but basically we pour a cup onto ice when you order, not too different from our hot coffee. This method, pouring hot onto ice, may be the best thing in the world for iced coffee.
But I’ve been bothered by a few things. Read the rest of this entry »
Rolando and Ayr left in search of the world’s best frozen custard, new coffee roasters, and the newest Clover food truck.
UPDATE
Back sleeping in our own beds. We’ll be rolling out stories over the next 2 weeks:
All Clover Food Trip 2012 stories.
Previous trips:
2011: Chicory and BBQ
2010: West Coast Trucks and coffee
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