Fark you. Fark the horse you rode in on. Fark everyone who looks like you. And fark every horse that looks like the one you rode in on.

Posted on July 4, 2024 by dwightbrown

Popular fast-casual pizza chain Mod Pizza could soon be filing for bankruptcy — following in the footsteps of several other well-known US restaurants, according to a new report.
The company, which has locations in 28 states, is preparing a potential bankruptcy filing and could enter court protection as soon as next week, sources told Bloomberg Wednesday.

Good.

Previously on why I hate Mod Pizza. I know it’s going to be popular to blame Bidenomics for this, and there may be some element of that involved. But when I first started going there, it seemed like they had a better selection of higher-quality toppings. Since COVID, it seems like both the number of available toppings and the quality of toppings have declined. Add to that the service issues and we’re all just better off supporting our local pizza places.

Decent concept, poor execution.

Posted in DIAF, Gripes, Pizza | Leave a comment

Milano Ristorante in Round Rock To Close June 29

Posted on June 27, 2024 by lawrenceperson

Milano Ristorante in Round Rock sent out an email that they were going to be closing on June 29. We had an SDC there on March 23rd, and thought they were pretty good. However, they were also way the hell out Palm Valley, and were not overly crowded when we went at 6 PM on a Saturday.

The Biden Recession is going to take down a whole lot of restaurants before its over…

Posted in Closed, Italian | Leave a comment

The Logbook of the Saturday Dining Conspiracy is on fire!

Posted on October 19, 2023 by dwightbrown

Two posts in two days! Will wonders never cease?

But seriously, folks. I don’t want to say I have a high bar for linking to “Eater”. I think I link to them pretty often, sometimes criticizing something stupid they wrote, sometimes using them as a source for a story.

This time, I have what I think is an actual worthwhile article that I had to link to, for reasons that should become apparent in a moment.

“Confessions of a Tableside Flambéur”.

There are several common pitfalls that lead to flambé failures. If the pan isn’t sufficiently hot or the sauce isn’t reduced enough before the alcohol is added, it retards the flame. Shockingly, staff rarely go through any formal training to learn how to flambé. Most servers are, quite literally, thrown into the fire. As a novice, I definitely had to step away from the table and start over after a few flambé bloopers. I’m not gonna lie: It’s embarrassing when your flambé doesn’t flambé, like striking a book of matches in the rain.

I had not heard the story about the two people being killed in a flambé accident before now. And I hate to make light of their deaths, but…

Police have launched an investigation into the causes of the fire.

Really.

At Papi Steak, a steakhouse on steroids in Miami, a $1,000 wagyu rib eye is shepherded to the table raw, nestled inside a diamond-studded, golden briefcase and accompanied by a platoon of boisterous staff. One of the servers unlatches the case, which glows from the inside like the opening scene in Pulp Fiction, revealing a bloody steak concealed underneath a cloud of smoke. With the crowd goading them on and everyone’s smartphones held high, a manager comes over with something resembling a cattle prod and brands the words “Papi Steak” into the marbled hunk of beef. The steak even has its own designated entrance music that blares in the dining room to announce its arrival.

As I’ve said before, I am a libertarian. But I think I could get behind imposing the same confiscatory tax rates on people who order the wagyu rib eye at Papi Steak as I would on people who buy $5,000 turntables for their 78 RPM records.

And as a reminder of why I had to link this, for those who may have forgotten and those who may be unfamiliar with it: the SDC review of The Veranda, with Lawrence’s meditations on the subject of flambé.

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Obit watch: October 18, 2023.

Posted on October 18, 2023 by dwightbrown

Dr. James Irving Wimsatt, professor emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin, passed away Sunday morning, He was 96.

Dr. Wimsatt was a personal friend of mine, and of many other readers of this blog. I met him through his son, Andrew.

He was a great guy. I always felt intimidated by him: I described him to someone (no disrespect intended, Andrew) as “scary smart and tough as a bus station steak”. He was walking several miles a day on a regular basis well into his 90s. And he remained in full possession of his facilities pretty much right up until his death (though he’d been in and out of hospitals and rehab).

I thought this was kind of a neat entry from encyclopedia.com:

In Chaucer and His French Contemporaries: Natural Music in the Fourteenth Century, Wimsatt provides a wide range of information and analysis that treats comprehensively Chaucer’s reciprocal relationships with fourteenth-century French poetry and poetic theory. In addition to considering the works of Chaucer, Wimsatt addresses the efforts of such poets as Guillaume de Machaut, Jean de le Mote, Froissart, Oton de Granson, and Eustache Deschamps, writers who have previously been dismissed as mundane or not worth literary examination. However, Wimsatt considers them all viable poets and pays close attention to their lyric styles in particular. He also looks at the climate of the culture at the time and how this affected the themes of these writers’ works and any overlap in ideas. Jane H.M. Taylor, writing for the Review of English Studies, remarked that “Wimsatt’s breadth of knowledge is remarkable; his contribution to Chaucer studies is valuable, and indeed, on the rather neglected Oton de Granson and Eustache Deschamps, he offers insights which French scholars too might well find worthwhile.” Ardis Butterfield, in a review for Medium Aevum, dubbed the book “a substantial and reliable guide to Chaucer’s connections with fourteenth-century France.”

He wasn’t just a Chaucerian, though my understanding is he was a damn good one. He also wrote a lot about other poets. Dr. Wimsatt was kind enough, at one point, to give me a copy of his Hopkins’s Poetics of Speech Sound. I haven’t read it yet, being backlogged, but I wish I had before he passed.

He also served honorably in the US Navy. And he was a pretty regular member of the Saturday Dining Conspiracy.

“He that loveth God will do diligence to please God by his works, and abandon himself, with all his might, well for to do.”
–Geoffrey “Big Geoff” Chaucer

I believe that Dr. Wimsatt did indeed please God by his works, and he’s up there laughing with all those other English professors of that generation.

(Crossposed to Whipped Cream Difficulties.)

[What Dwight said. Jim was a prince among men and raised two fine sons. — Lawrence Person]

Posted in obituary | Leave a comment

We have a new winner!

Posted on October 3, 2023 by dwightbrown

That is, a new winner of the highly un-coveted Saturday Dining Conspiracy “Die In a Fire” award.

Yes, I am pretty peeved right now. Yes, I am using the power of my blogs to work on a grudge: but if you can’t do that on your blog, what’s the point of having one?

I used to (sort of) like Mod Pizza. We have better local pizza places, but sometimes it was just nice to be able to get a small personal pizza with exactly the kind and variety of toppings I wanted.

There’s one within easy driving distance from the house out here in the hinterlands. Mom was craving pizza, and I thought a small pizza sounded good myself. So I placed an online order.

Below is the feedback I left Mod Pizza corporate on their website. I’ve left out the original order number (referenced in the email) because it wouldn’t mean anything to anyone except corporate.

——————

I placed this order at 3:30 PM for pickup at 4:15 PM. When I got to the store (around 4:10 PM) I gave the employee my name. He wasn’t clear about what was going on. I waited about 30 minutes for my food.

Finally, one of the other employees informed me that the store had CANCELLED MY ORDER (my because “they didn’t have enough people to make it”. I counted four employees in the store at the time.

I was further told that if I wanted my food I would have to place my order all over again, while I was in the store waiting, because they had enough people (in the store with no other customers) to make it now. No offer to place the order themselves based on my original receipt, just “you have to do it all over again”. That’s ridiculous.

I left and went to another local pizza place. I will NEVER EVER order from ANY Mod Pizza ever again. Especially this one, as this is the second time in a row they have messed up a pickup order.

Y’all need to shut this location down, as it is doing real harm to your brand.

——————–

I should add to this: the Mod Pizza claims to have refunded my card for the order I placed, but I see no evidence of that in my account yet.

Edited to add 10/4: I did get a refund credited to my card this morning, just for the record.

(Crossposted to WCD.)

Posted in DIAF, Pizza, Rant | 1 Comment

I haz a sad.

Posted on July 21, 2023 by dwightbrown

The Little Gretel Restaurant in Boerne is closed.

This is a damn shame. I have been lucky enough to eat there twice: Mike took me there once for my birthday, and I took my mother there once for some significant holiday. It was an excellent restaurant, and I wish I had gone there more often.

I don’t know how hard they were hit by the late unpleasantness or if that had anything to do with it: the statement on their website says the chef is retiring after 15 years. Which I can understand…

Credit on this to Austin Eater, who for once actually covered a restaurant closing that wasn’t in downtown or central Austin. They claim that something called The Rill (“a family-friendly restaurant serving bar fare”) is taking over the space. I’m skeptical: The Rill seems to only have a Facebook page which I can’t view, and the descriptions does not excite me.

On the other hand, Little Gretel’s space was nice: you could walk across the street and watch the ducks, which was always fun after a meal. I may give them one shot and see how it goes.

Posted in Closed, German | Leave a comment

Burnt Toast.

Posted on July 20, 2023 by dwightbrown

Toast can still die in a fire.

However, Lawrence sent over a follow-up from Zero Hedge: they’ve removed the .99 cent order fee.

Did that help? Not really.

Shares of Toast are crashing this morning, down nearly 10%, as further proof that the American consumer is in the process of being kneecapped by Fed policy. The company had just risen almost 5% yesterday amidst a “Downtown” Josh Brown CNBC tout – and those buyers now find themselves toast by nearly 5% in just a matter of hours.

This is datelined July 19th. Looking at the stock right now (about noon CDT on July 20th) it is down even more, currently trading at $22.0425 a share. The one year high looks to have been just under $27 a share, while the one year low seems to have been $13.655.

And Schwab gives them an “Equity Rating” of “F”, “Strongly Underperform”.

All is proceeding as planned.

Posted in DIAF, Meta, News, Rant | Leave a comment

Fark Toast!

Posted on July 11, 2023 by dwightbrown

The “Toast” in this case is Toast Inc., the people responsible for the flaming dumpster fire that is ToastTab.

What prompts this latest outpouring of vitriol?

Toast Inc., a powerful cloud-based third-party point-of-sale vendor used by more than 85,000 restaurants, is unilaterally adding a 99-cent “processing fee” to online orders of $10 or more.

Yes, I realize this is the NYPost and rage bait, but the story is documented.

The fee is being charged to consumers — not to the restaurants that are paying Toast for its services.
Toast is then lifting the fee for itself, its clients say — paid for by consumers who, in most cases, never heard of Toast, let alone agreed to do business with them.

That’s right. The 99 cents is coming out of your pocket, not the restaurant’s.

Toast is also paid a percentage fee on every credit card sale.

So they’re gouging customers, while getting paid by the restaurants.

The charge from Toast appears as a line item on receipts under the term “order processing fee.”
The receipt includes a note at the end, added without input from the shop owner: “The Order Processing Fee is set by Toast to help provide affordable digital ordering services for local restaurants.”
In states with a meals tax, the Toast fee is included in the taxable bill.
Restaurants will be forced to show the fee as income, even though the money is lifted out of their bank accounts by Toast.

Why would they do something like this? Well, obviously, money. But I didn’t realize their business was floundering:

The publicly traded company suffered a net loss of $275 million in 2022, according to its SEC filings, and is on pace to fare worse in 2023, with an $81-million loss in the first quarter.

Ain’t that a shame?

I’m starting to feel a new cause coming on for the Saturday Dining Conspiracy: drive Toast Inc. out of business. I realize that their employees will lose their jobs, but perhaps they can find more honest work as thugs, pimps, or record company executives.

Posted in DIAF, Media, Meta, News | 1 Comment

Hold that Easy Tiger!

Posted on May 31, 2023 by dwightbrown

Hey, remember when we had a SDC at Easy Tiger a few years back, and the Toast Tab system drove Lawrence to apoplectic rage?

Remember Lawrence’s recent rant: “Dear Restaurants: Shove Your Damn QR Codes“.

Got this in my email a little while ago from Easy Tiger:

Ya think somebody’s been listening to their customers?

Posted in DIAF, Rant | 1 Comment

Dear Restaurants: Shove Your Damn QR Codes

Posted on January 3, 2023 by lawrenceperson

Here’s a Louis Rossmann rant that hits home for me: How online menu apps for restaurants suck compared to ordinary paper menus.

I hate having to scan QR codes on my phone just to get a menu so badly that I will avoid eating at any restaurant that wants to make me do that. ToastTab is especially infuriating.

And while I’m ranting about things that infuriate me, having you rate your transaction when ordering at the counter, before you’ve even received your food, is so unacceptable that I always give them the lowest rating possible when they make me do that.

Ahem. Back to the topic at hand.

Everyone but a small minority of perpetual covid paranoids have gotten over the stupidities of 2020. It’s time for every restaurant to go back to printed menus as the default.

(Cross-posted to BattleSwarm.)

Posted in Rant, Video | Leave a comment