nkedel

Yeah, but at least for heavily Americanized Chinese food, it's mostly different dishes that could be one mix-and-match dish:
- pick one or more of a handful of meats
- pick one or more of a handful or nuts and vegetables
- pick a sauce out of a handful
- stirfry together in a wok

Same is true for a lot of Americanized Italian food:
- handful of pasta types
- handful of meat add-ins
- handful of veggie add-ins
- handful of sauces
Mix and match makes a "big" menu

CRAZ8

One of the fine restaurants just outside Seattle does a 100 mile 9 course dinner every year - it just started its run last week.

Here's where it gets hard. Every single ingredient must be from 100 miles or less. Thank goodness I live in a wine region!

For Salt - they get their own seawater and make salt
Pepper - not available. The local indigenous tribes used to use certain plants that are similar
Baking Powder (you do want breads and cakes?) - Before baking powder was a technique to use certain wood ash, so now they do that.
Coffee - There's a local tree bark that, after enough wine, kind of tastes like coffee! Although Seattle is known for coffee, no-one grows the stuff here!
Wheat for flour and beer - they found a small local grower otherwise they'd have to grow their own on their own farm.

It's really cool to see how hard it is to get even some of the basics from close by. http://www.theherbfarm.com/ronsweekl...f&XCharsX=1545

I do love they do this, but the point is that we are so used to having ingredients from all over the world, that it's difficult to think about how we'd do without certain things available.

stimpy

I don't see a point in stressing about salt and pepper, etc. Salt is sodium chloride for goodness sake. Sodium chloride is sodium chloride no matter where you are in the world. Sure there can be trace amounts of other stuff in common table salt, but nothing to get too worried about. The things you should be concerned about are beef, chicken, tomatoes, etc. And wine of course!

And it's not just that it's produced locally, but how it is produced that counts. If there are local controls, then at least you are close by enough to be aware of them and your community can police the growers, etc. When food is imported from elsewhere, the community has less or no visibility of how it is produced. And in the case of California, the large food industry lobbied against a recent vote to label food and won. Why did they fight so hard against food labeling? I think we all know the answer and we should all be very careful of what we eat when in California.

bocastephen

CKF is notorious for not preparing much of anything in house...it's all prepared at a central location, portion packaged, frozen and transferred to the site for final prep. I think the only items they actually cook onsite are pasta (boiled them combined with prepacked sauce), steaks, hamburgers, etc. Everything else is re-heated, so you're basically paying $20 for a frozen dinner, heated for you and served in a chaotic, annoying environment.

I think many restaurants "SYSCO" their menus to some extent, but not nearly to the extent taken by CKF and other big brand chains.

obscure2k

+1. I have had this discussion with someone who knows the restaurant business very well. This information about the Cheesecake Factory is definitely correct.

CRAZ8

I agree. These guys know all their suppliers, as in general the food is all Pacific Northwest based. They have their own farm for things that aren't economical for other farmers to grow. They are now distributing heirloom seeds for some produce if they have any left over.

The 100 mile thing is the one time they go nuts to push themselves, even discovering old techniques that almost no-one has heard of to make the local ingredients work.

It's like a work of performance art.

China Clipper

Crazy! I mean, I love the idea and your description but I agree with the remark above that they're just taking it too far to make a point. Salt and pepper, please!

At first I actually thought the pro-CKF remarks upthread were tongue-in-cheek. I nearly stopped reading the thread when I found out otherwise!

Cloudship

That's all chain restaurants, though. I have gotten over that. So long as the food is good, I am happy. My issue with Cheesecake is that it is all pretty much the same blasted thing with just differences in sauces and garnishes. I have also noticed a bad case of inconsistency. We went there once, my brother and my father both ordered strawberry cheesecake. They were completely different! one was nice and thick and firm, the other one was like whipped cream.

SeriouslyLost

[emp added]




As already mentioned, a surprising number of places will do large parts of meals (esp a main meat & sauce) from water heated sealed bags. Good quality ones are chilled. Mass market are frozen. Pasta & rice can be had in precise quantity frozen blocks that you re-heat via steam 'cookers' - these are more common in Asia at 'european' restaurants there, but I've seen them all over the world. Soups are almost invariably from tetrapak sealed containers.

CRAZ8

They only do this for 3 weeks a year - and sell out every year. The cool part is that the kitchen team learn a bunch of stuff about how to make food work without some of the basic ingredients that everyone has to hand.

Of course, this is exactly the opposite to what this thread is about, but is a fun diversion.

Before I knew how the restaurant industry actually worked, in the early 2000s I visited the UK several times. One of the notable things was that, no matter where we ate - good or bad - every single restaurant had Sticky Toffee Pudding on the menu.

In many places this was the best thing on the menu!

This made it very, very clear that this fine dessert was sourced from a central location - I think there's Sticky Toffee Pudding mines in Yorkshire. It didn't take too much thinking to work out that many places were just heating up stuff, and the quality reflected that.

stimpy

I have no idea what goes on in the kitchen, but I do know that I've never had a frozen dinner that tasted as good as what I've eaten at the CKF. Note that the only CKF I go to is the one in Beverly Hills in case that one is run differently. And it's not a chaotic annoying environment, especially if you sit outdoors.

bocastephen

The funny thing about this is the Nexxt Cafe on Lincoln Rd in Miami Beach. The staff worked at CKF previously and basically walked out of there with the entire food prep bible and duplicated the CKF menu at Nexxt down to the identical menu format and design. They somehow survived the CKF lawsuit intact, but the more interesting part is being able to offer essentially the same menu, but without access to the central food prep facility or help from SYSCO copying the CKF recipes.

So if Nexxt can do it, why not CKF?

VivoPerLei

I'm not a big fan of chain restaurants (in fact usually I have to be dragged kicking and screaming), but I have to admit I went to the Cheesecake Factory in Sacramento and thought it was not near as bad as I had feared. Whatever formula they're using seems to work

Green Dragon

My husband's a chef. Normally, if we see a large menu, we walk back out.... but some local places we've given a chance. There is one place near us (Kountry Kettle in New Hope, PA) that is family run, has about 50 items on their menu, but is fantastic. Their broasted chicken must have Crack in it. Best. Fried. Chicken. Ever. They said they only make about 10 dishes each day on a regular basis. The others are there in case it's ordered, but they rarely are.