As if you needed to be reminded, given that this is probably one of the biggest elections in decades - today, November 4th, is voting day! Do your part as a patriotic hot dog waving and apple pie eating foodie and get out there and vote.
For our blog readers and RSS guys, I wanted to make a quick post to let you know that we have two recent articles posted on the website. The first is titled 7 Quick Tips to Become a Sushi Snob and the second is an interview with Laughing Buddha beer, a local asian inspired microbrew.
The beer article was inspired from our summer trip to the beer festival at St. Edwards State Park, across from Bastyr University in Juanita. We were lucky enough to grab a few quick tastes before their line stretched nearly 50 people long past the other local brewers. They had some flavors that complimented well for a hot sunny day, with mango and ginger flavors. There were a lot of fruit styled beers that day, such as blueberry and peach, but I actually found the taste rather off-putting. There was an Aprihops beer from Dogfish Head that I was smiling over as well.
More interesting, the sushi write-up was more of an ad-hoc diversion, due in part to a review that I read of Mashiko’s on Citysearch. The gist was that Mashiko’s was given a one-star review from a reviewer who complained that the sushi was worse than Sushiland, the spicy tuna rolls were lacking and that the service was slow. Reading over the review, it occurred to me that lots of self-proclaimed sushi snobs aren’t exactly well versed on their, well, snobbery. So, I felt I had to address something and write a better guide on how to act like the know-it all sushi snob instead. Of course, the previous statement is a bit tongue in cheek, but there are good points in the article that any sushi lover can benefit from - so check it out.
A tasty looking burger from Orange King
It’s been pretty slow on the site these days, but we’re still alive and slowly making our rounds in “West” Seattle. And by West, I mean everything not on the Eastside.
There are going to be lots of changes coming to the site real soon. Our focus has been a little scattered, so we’re going to adjust our lens and focus on one thing - Seattle restaurants. We’re going to combine some of our topics together but also bring in more content about what we all love - food!
After lots of internal discussion with ourselves, consultants, restaurant owners and staff - we’ve finally come to a conclusion on how we’re going to do user reviews as well. Yelp and Citysearch already have the mass food review market taken over, so we’re going to have limited user reviews from a select handful of experts. How are we going to pick experts, you ask? Well, we’re in the process of making contacts with well known local foodies and trying to enlist their help for our project. In addition, we’re opening up a forum on the site so that everyone can contribute their thoughts, reviews and opinions as well. From that pool, the passionate and the proficient will be tapped as a guest reviewer.
We apologize for all the delays, but hope you’ll stick with us just a bit longer as the new look and feel all make their way in.
Your fellow foodies,
- Grant and Steve
Steve and I are off to get our King County Food Handler’s Permit today in order to do serve up a surprise coffee taste testing at tomorrow’s Harvest Fair being put on by Seattle Tilth. It’s running 10am to 5pm and located at Meridian Park, behind the Good Shepherd Center (4649 Sunnyside Ave N) in Wallingford.
In the meantime, I’ve been calling restaurants non-stop to try and build a flyer of restaurants that support organic, locally grown, sustainable and/or seasonal produce/proteins. I have to say once more that calling restaurants is not fun. Anything other than the words, “I’d like to make a reservation…” will immediately cause the wagons to circle about 50% of the time and shut you out. The other 30% of the time I am getting through, I get to play phone tag or leave voice mails.
The one interesting thing I have learned however, is that the head/Executive Chefs apparently do take near complete control of sourcing, as I am almost always told to talk to the chef to get my questions on sourcing answered. Not having worked in an actual restaurant, it’s nice to know that the chef does get the biggest say on what they get to use. That said, I have been mainly calling contemporary style restaurants thus far, given that the chances of Red Robin using organic lettuce or your local teriyaki joint using free range chicken is slim to none.
Anyhow, enough of a break. Back to work, work, work.
Woo-hoo, Coffee.net is going to have our 15 minutes of international, federally funded fame!
Just this morning, Steve and I were over at the Redmond Town Center by two reporters from Voice of America. The show we were being interviewed for is a weekly half-hour show called “Cultural Odyssey”, which provides glimpses into American life and culture. On this particular show being filmed, the topic is Seattle’s coffee culture, so they decided to contact us as we had a pretty big web visibility.
I agreed to the interview because I am all for publicity for Coffee.net, but also because it was pretty cool to be asked by the VOA. There’s certainly dozens (hundreds, even) of people above us in the coffee pecking order in this city, so it was a surprise to say the least. In fact, Steve and I both took a few hours to brush up on our coffee just to be ready for the interview. I even took to memorizing the odd statistics like the total exports from Brazil and Vietnam from 2000 to 2007 via the ICO (International Coffee Organization) incase we were going to have talks about the coffee crisis, robusta or other industry issues.
In any case, I thought the interview went quite well and we had a good rapport with the VOA reporters. They asked us various questions: the rise of Starbucks, the specialty coffee market, Seattle coffee consumers, the history of coffee in Seattle, how to rate coffee and various items along that line. Steve, being the “coffee as a drink” expert, handled a lot of the culture and connoisseur type questions while I answered the “coffee as an industry” queries.
Having been in front of a camera before, I was pretty at ease blabbering away to our reporters’ questions. Steve was a bit nervous at times and caught himself looking straight at the camera a few times. The only major hiccup we encountered was that right as they setup the filming equipment, the Redmond Town Center manager swooped down impressively fast to tell us that this was private property and filming was not allowed unless paperwork was filled out. To his credit, after talking to the VOA guys, everything got worked out. Joe, one of the reports, said this was fairly routine and joked that they generally don’t have problems after mentioning they’re reporters from the government. I had a good laugh at that, as it could certainly be a tongue-in-cheek reference.
For those who don’t know, VOA is a federally run news organization that has been in operation since the start of WWII. They evolved over the years from the Office of War Information to being under the US Information Agency and now run by a Board of Broadcasting Governors. As a government run news source, you may not be familiar with them, because they tend to serve audiences outside of the US, as their mission is to represent America to the rest of the world. As such, they broadcast in 45 languages over the TV, radio and internet, with a worldwide audience of 134 million people according to their website.
We were told that we would get a DVD of the show when it aired, so we’ll definitely post it up on the blog or the main site when we get it. Supposedly, the team is doing a whole slew of shows on coffee and one of them is also about what is locally known as “Sexpresso”, so perhaps we’ll add in a few clips from that section as well, for your titillating pleasures (bad puns and all).
I suppose most people would be really happy to have a lot of visitors to their website, but we were all pretty surprised when I pulled our website statistics and saw this!
It looks like our site is getting pretty popular now, with close to 15,000 unique visitors a month right now (July shows less traffic than June since the month isn’t over yet). We checked deeper into our stats and it looked like a full 1,000 people wanted to sign up for our site too! As the business guy for Coffee.net, I’m thrilled that we have so many people interested in signing up. As the web developer for the site, I am petrified at what this means for our user sign-ups and server load.
The graph is pretty clear that we’ve grown quite fast in the time we’ve been online. Currently, we’re in the middle of our second marketing phase, so the expectation is that even MORE traffic is going to come our way in the next 2-3 months. In the meantime, it’s obvious that we need to open up the user logins (damn the QA and testing period) or provide some sort of alternative like a forum for people to start sharing their inner foodie.
If you have comments or suggestions, we are more than happy to listen to them!
While I generally am not a fan of internet quizzes, I thought this Pew news quiz was worthy of a blog post. The idea is to test your general knowledge about current political IQ, though I would say that the facts being tested are more “nouns” than ideas (e.g., When did the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor vs Why did the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor?). I had issues with the question of which talk show host is supporting Barack Obama, as that’s ranks on the political pole of importance next to who wears lapel pins. Oh please.
Of course, the real news isn’t about my score, but the score of the average test taker coming in at a dismal 50%. My optimistic theory is that Americans are so busy working and taking care of daily business that most of them simply don’t have time to pay attention to the finer details of the political arena. This is why we’re able to get at least half of the questions right, but may not know exactly who the Senate majority leader is, simply because that position is so removed from our own daily lives. Of course, the flip side of that coin is that we’re busy, but only because we’re watching American Idol and watching YouTube instead of the reading the New York Times or the Economist.
Breaking down quiz results by age, the results show that there is a strong correlation between poor performance by younger test takers (30%) and better results by older test takers (60%). Given that the older generation are the ones still reading newspapers and the younger generation is online, there may be some truth to the idea that we will simply consume our information from the medium that is most familiar.
That or we can blame rock and roll, video games and pretend it’s not our problem.
Wow, we’ve just uploaded our next batch of updates! There are now over 100 new restaurants listed on Coffee.net, bringing the total to over 200 Seattle restaurants now. A few restaurants are lacking images and we’re working hard on fixing those issues, but we will have those fixes up pretty soon.
Another milestone that we’re happy to report is that Coffee.net now has a readership of over 10,000 visitors a month! It’s been a little over half a year since we officially opened our doors, so we’re happy to be receiving this amount of traffic already. Please let your friends know about the site and keep those comments and suggestions coming!
Ok, the title of this blog post is a little misleading because I actually *do* like Yelp (mostly). It’s a cool idea with awesome site design and tools (unlike the unslightly Citysearch), but has some sketchy ability to reign in its own users.
We’ll go straight to Exhibit A. This is from an Elite (cream of the crop) Yelp member from the Seattle area, who has created a list of top restaurants in the Woodinville area (close to our neck of the woods). The top 10 restaurants this person lists are:
1. Denice’s Place
2. Mongolian Grill
3. Garlic Jim’s
4. Samurai Sam’s Teriyaki Grill
5. Ezell’s Famous Chicken
6. McDonald’s
7. Maltby Espresso
8. Subway
9. Theno’s Dairy
10. Crystal Creek Cafe
If you’ve been in Woodinville, you know there’s also Purple Cafe and Wine Bar (our full review is coming in with our next update), yet it’s mysteriously gone from the top 10 list. However, if you scroll all the way to the bottom, you’ll see it listed at #25, one spot below Old Country Buffet and one spot above KFC. That is pure absurdity. Here’s what the review actually said:
“We tried to eat at this cafe and we were told that there was a 45-60 minute wait. So…. if you ever manage to get there when the wait’s not too long, maybe the food will be good.”
The reviewer left a one star (the lowest rating), based solely on the fact they had to wait an hour to find a seat at a fine dining restaurant. This raises the hair on my neck, let alone the manager of the restaurant who is likely fuming at the mouth at the absurdity of this review.
As food critics, we understand quite well that different people have varied taste in foods (apples to oranges, what makes you happy makes you happy, etc). That said, to be a discerning diner of fine gourmet, it’s mind blowing to possibly list McDonald’s as anywhere above Purple (or for that matter, half the list, even though it’s filled with fast food already). Even when comparing similarly styled cuisine, such as McDonalds vs Red Robin, the contest is a scathing no-brainer.
This is the problem with sites like Yelp, because they provide the sandbox for which to play, but they have no way of realistically monitoring the quality of the users. Sure, they can throw out the trouble makers and spammers, but otherwise are handcuffed against taking action against users who obviously have no business reviewing food. Yelp is close to a purist’s democracy of food, which means anybody and everybody can have their time in the sun. To this extent, we have seen a small but vocal contingent of reviewers that use sites like Yelp for their own personal soapbox and often, raging bullhorn. Yelp will tell you that bad apples come with the territory, but tell that to the restaurant owners who get slammed by these self-absorbed crusaders. (In case you are curious, Coffee.net has our own system of checks and balances for these type of things currently in testing.)
Again, this isn’t meant to hark on Yelp (that was a bad pun), but to point that it’s broken in a way that is fixable. Both Yelp and Citysearch fail to understand the foodie by having no way to separate the various restaurant factors like service and food apart. Not all diners believe that eating out is a form of mind and body experience to satiate the soul. In fact, I would say true foodies will gladly make a matyr out of their ego in the quest for good eats. This is why we’ve implemented restaurants ratings based on your priorities: high service and ambiance for a good date; high food and value for down and dirty grubbing. If Yelp used this system, it would break their huge “star” brand, but it would also separate the service nit-picks from the would-be food connoisseurs.
Of course, it’s in our own interest as a competitor to Yelp, to see them go burning down in flames, but we’re not like that and know it’s not going to happen. Competition makes products better and as long as Yelp is around, we’ll have motivation to improve Coffee.net for all our wonderful Seattlelites.
Hey all, I apologize for the long time between the last site update, but we’ve been quite busy over the last few months ramping up the content for Coffee.net. We decided to update the site in one very large batch, so that the changes can be seen immediately. So to answer your questions - no, we’re not dead and no, we haven’t stopped reviews. There’s over 100 new and fully written reviews waiting to go up, along with scores of pictures. We’ve been eagerly awaiting the push, but the finish line is finally in view.
Of course: User logins! When are they going to be up? Well, we’ve got them in beta testing and we’re happy to report they’re working fairly well. Probably one more month of testing and getting out the last of the features and they will (FINALLY) be good to go. We’re sorry about the delay, but we like it done right and late, rather than the opposite.
Last but not least, some changing of the guard at Coffee.net. Bryan will be leaving us soon to make the world a more energy efficient place, so we will be missing him and his quirky sense of humor. Robin is headed off to grad school for urban planning in Virginia, so we wish her the best of luck designing our new city infrastructure in the years to come.
What this also means is that there will be a job opening at Coffee.net sometime in the future! If you might be interested, ask yourself this:
If so, you might be just the person we’re looking for. Interested parties can send a resume/CV and writing samples to grant (at) coffee (dot) net.
