My neighborhood is being taken over by a hipster bistro chainby Questionable Culinary 12/18/2017, 11:57am PST
FUCK! My urban college area is slowly having this hipster bistro place monopolize all breakfast and lunch choices. They seem to take over every closed eatery business. It's been like fucking clockwork for 2 years: an eatery goes out of business, and within 3 months there's a new branch of this hipster brand taking over the spot.
I'm swearing at this point that they have some sort of deal with the local university, which has been steadily buying out more and more commercial and residential buildings. They'll buy out an area, shutting down a cluster of lunch places so make room for more facility expansion, with the ONE exception of this goddamn hipster chain who will open up a new spot right there. I do occasional work at one of their departments, and they used to have this expansive cafeteria in the building that was pretty much the main non-dining hall for the campus that served all sorts of shit at over half a dozen stations, with shelves full of made to go choices.
Not anymore! I come in today and the entire cafeteria has been replaced by the hipster chain!!! No more wide variety of choices! No more quick grab n go!
Look at this fucking shit. The entire site is nothing but "our story" articles! They call their a business a food lab for fuck's sake! FOOD LAB!
Imagine if Whole Foods decided to open luncheon outlets with 0.5% the selection and 1000% the smug.
How they piss me of:
-No meat. None. The closest you get is a single egg in the "breakfast sandwich".
- 2 to 4 menu choices at any given time. Your breakfast choices are the "breakfast sandwich", oatmeal, or a shitty popover. For a full lunch you're limited to some disgusting vegan sandwich like a chickpea squash wrap (no meat!) or other inedible garbage.
- Their prices are ridiculous. $3.50 for a 6 ounce coffee. $4 for a breakfast sandwich (half a pocket with one hardboiled egg, slice of cheese, and slice of tomato. That's IT! $4 for a hardboiled egg!). $4 for the kids lunch option: half a pocket with a spread of peanut butter, honey, and 2 banana slices.
- They take FOREVER. Not just with the food prep, with the PRESENTATION! You're not going to just walk in and order, you're going to sit through an orientation, mister! They have one hipster with a wool panda head hat (even in summer) taking all orders on an iPhone, and they are going to walk you through the origin stories of every single menu item in addition to the LINE PROCESS. Even at peak lunch hour when there's over a dozen people in line, the person at the front will be getting a full seminar on the particular sustainable Ecuadorian farm plot today's coffee is coming from. You'll then be given a briefing on the individual stations, exactly where to stand, the line on the floor you must not cross until your name is called, and pointed to the butcher paper on the tables you can color on with the provided crayons! It's shit straight out of a Portlandia skit
It was my only choice to "quickly" grab coffee before I had to be in this morning. It took TEN MINUTES for me to get a coffee! 10 minutes! With only one other customer in the entire place! They can't just have that shit in a pot, or machine, or even pre-ground beans from that morning. I got to watch the "food tech" grind the beans himself, put it through a "sifting process" twice before putting it in the filter and the filter in an open air funnel. You thought a soulless machine was going to make this shit? Now he can finally pour hot water out of a kettle into the funnel. Not the whole amount at once, jesus fuck no are we savages? 3oz of water get poured in, followed by waiting until the whole thing has filtered through and dribbled into the cup below, then a 2nd pouring is applied and you get to wait for that again. It's been finished for a minute, but the coffee guy had to go start prepping the locally sourced bushel of kale that had just come in. Please wait behind the line while he finishes that AM I THE ONLY ONE AROUND HERE WHO STILL GIVES A SHIT ABOUT THE RULES??!!!
This is now the only food choice outside of dining halls on campus, and damn near the only choice immediately outside of campus. I have no fucking earthly clue how it keeps expanding other than university collusion. Every working adult I've talked to despises the place.