Tag Archives: business

Brandywine Kitchen: Locavores Rejoice!

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I LOVE discovering a new restaurant with certain characteristics that keep me coming back on a regular basis. Those characteristics typically include: a nice, friendly ambiance; unique, well-prepared food; healthy options alongside more indulgent choices; some measure of organic and local ingredients; and, particularly in these tight economic times, reasonable prices.

Bellingham, Washington’s own Brandywine Kitchen simply nails it on all accounts! And while this post may seem to only be relevant for folks here in Bellingham, I actually think it speaks to a fairly universal business principle.

Now, I’m a total proponent of paying extra for organic, locally produced food. Consider it a tax I gladly pay to support a more sustainable future.

That said, it seems to me that most of the locavore restaurants that I have been to — eateries that feature locally-grown and organic food — have been of the high-end, fine dining variety. And while I like that experience from time to time, on special occasions, for instance, I simply can’t afford to eat like that regularly, and neither can most people.

Enter, Brandywine Kitchen! Their tagline: From Seed to Plate

Founded originally as a small, organic heirloom tomato farm, owners Azizi Tookas and Chris Sunde then started selling prepared foods at the Bellingham Farmers Market, and eventually opened up the restaurant last year.

The space is elegant without being stuffy, and the first economizing element you notice upon entering is that there’s no wait service. Customers simply walk up to the counter, order their food, receive a number, visit a smaller counter for napkins, water, or fountain drinks, and then select their own table. On the tail end of the dining experience, customers are asked to do their own busing.

The most expensive entrée on the menu is $10.95, and several entrées and most of their sandwiches are $8.95 to $9.95. And while this could make for a pricey lunch, it’s hard to find a good restaurant that serves dinner for less than $12.00, and locavore restaurants more typically run as high as $15.00 to $25.00, not including starters, beverages, and desserts.

So, this business principle that I was speaking of is the recognition that 99% is much, MUCH bigger than 1%, and therefore it makes more sense to cater to the 99%, with affordable prices and a relaxed, casual atmosphere.

The other notable thing about the Brandywine Kitchen menu is that it is supremely accessible. Instead of fancy, nouvelle cuisine, with tiny but gorgeous fusion concoctions, the Brandywine serves recognizable favorites, such as Mac & Cheese, Fish & Chips, and Chicken Pot Pie, all made with the best, healthiest ingredients available, mostly coming from a list of local farmers and other vendors, whose names are listed proudly on a chalkboard near the front counter.

I had the special, a bison meatball sub, and unlike most restaurants, the special was the same price as most of the other entrées. The sub was absolutely delicious!

Again, this is the kind of food that most people eat on a regular basis. It’s a brilliant, sustainable business formula, the place is packed with people raving about it, and I wish the owners continued success, for very selfish reasons, of course.

Local Living Economies & Co-ops

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A little over a year ago, I wrote about a conference taking place here in Bellingham, Washington, an annual event put on by the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE).

I wrote in that post how, in the face of federal, state, and local government failure to adequately address economic and environmental crises, the best solution is for local communities to take charge and make change happen on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood, town-by-town basis, and that’s what BALLE is all about.

It’s a nice coincidence that today is the first day of the 2012 BALLE conference, and I just happened to come across an inspiring article at Fast Company that totally fits this subject.

Hippie Capitalism: How An Impoverished U.S. City Is Building An Economy On Co-ops

With sky-high unemployment, Richmond, California, is not a place where traditional business models alone can dent poverty. The city has turned to co-ops in hopes that people who might be unemployable in the traditional economy gain access to both jobs and control over their own labor.

What’s really remarkable in this story is that the local government, led by an ambitious mayor, is spearheading this movement.

“There’s not a lot of help coming from the federal government, or the state government,” says the city’s Green Party mayor, Gayle McLaughlin. “So we’re kind of on our own.” Two years ago, she went all the way to Spain in search of another economic model that might reinvigorate her city…

The Basque Country in Spain is home to the world’s most famous worker-owned co-op, the Mondragon Corporation, based in the town of Mondragon. The 55-year-old corporation includes some 250 smaller co-ops, with more than 80,000 employees, the vast majority of them members and owners themselves…

And so she brought the idea back to California and hired what is probably the only official municipal worker co-op consultant in the country. As of January, the first co-op born from this campaign, the aptly named Liberty Ship Café, is up and running, with plans for new bike shop, bakery, urban agriculture, and solar installation co-ops on the way.

Mayor McLaughlin’s program is in its infancy, but you have to admire the bigness of her vision, and hope, for the sake of struggling Richmond, that she can succeed.

Tweet of the Day: Of Flowers and Donuts

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When I saw this tweet, I felt my heart sink.

After all, until November of last year, the Fairhaven Historic District here in Bellingham was my neighborhood, and A Lot Of Flowers an iconic presence in the heart of this beloved village only a few blocks walk from my old house. (Photo source: Flickr user brewbooks)

It is hard to imagine that street corner without the charming, mostly open-air, flower shop, and impossible to imagine what’s going to be there in its place: a donut shop.

Mind you, I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE Rocket Donuts, our locally-owned donut masters, it’s important to keep in mind that they will be providing a space in the new building for A Lot Of Flowers, and this, especially, is a relief:

[A Lot Of Flowers Owner] Ferguson said she’s excited to work with the new owners. She said weather presents a lot of challenges to her nursery and retail business in its current open-air operation, which has a small building on the property. She plans to talk to the new owners about what she would like for the new space, as well as discuss ways to incorporate some of the outdoor aspects to her business that have made it popular over the years.

Ferguson also is happy to potentially have some stability with her tenant lease. In recent years other property owners have proposed ideas to build structures that could force A Lot of Flowers to leave.

“This is good news for us,” Ferguson said.

But change, even needed and well-planned change, can be challenging, painful even, and it is certainly true that the northwest corner of Harris Avenue and 11th Street will never be the same again.

Welcome, Kulshan Brewing Company!

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It’s starting to be the case that I can measure how long I’ve lived here in Bellingham, Washington by how many breweries have started up, and, in one case, have shut down.

Back in November 2009, I wrote about the two breweries we had at the time — Boundary Bay Brewery & Chuckanut Brewery — both are still going strong, winning numerous awards for their craft beers and ales, and, according to Wikipedia, Boundary Bay has become the largest brewpub in the country based on the number of barrels sold per year.

And when I mentioned in that 2009 post that Boundary Bay better watch their backs, because Chuckanut had significantly stepped up their game, having won the 2009 Best Small Brewpub award at the Great American Beer Festival (they won the Best Small Brewing Company award in 2011), I deemed this welcome and healthy local competition.

But when I heard rumblings some months ago that another new brewery was opening up in Bellingham, I really had doubts that our small city could support three breweries, especially considering that there were also several bar/restaurants in town that served good selections of craft beer.

Enter Kulshan Brewing Company, which just opened a few weeks ago, and already all doubts have been put to rest.

I went there last night for the first time, the place was packed, everyone was raving about how good the beer is, myself included, and so it seems they will really have to screw up big time in order to fail.

The ambiance is casual and comfortable, the crowd was a nice Bellingham cross-section, and they have a novel approach to food that I was initially skeptical about: food trucks.

They currently have three different trucks that rotate throughout the week, offering sandwiches, BBQ, and pizza depending on the day, and they plan to eventually widen the selection. Early criticism of the idea suggested that people won’t want to eat out of to-go boxes when they are out drinking $4+/pint beer, but the folks I talked to LOVED the idea, reported that the food was great, and, best of all, considering how pricey the beer is, the food was cheap! (My friends had the Cuban Dog from StrEAT Food last night, which was huge, delicious, and only $4.50!)

Finally, the beer.

I sampled all of the brews that they had flowing and was VERY impressed with how consistently good they were. Not all of them were unique or stood out, but they seemed solid, delicious examples of the styles they represented.

American Wheat Ale: Let’s just get this out of the way: I don’t like wheat beers. I tasted it, didn’t care for it, but folks who I talked to who were drinking it said that they liked it.

Bastard Kat IPA: I was doubtful when it was poured, because it was so light in color. Other light-colored IPAs I’ve had were WAY out of balance, insane hops and not enough malt, resulting in a beer that is too bitter for me. Bastard Kat, on the other hand, was a good example of a standard Pacific Northwest IPA, with great, citrusy hops and plenty of them, but balanced nicely with just enough malty goodness to make it HIGHLY drinkable. Yum!

Midnight CDA (Cascadian Dark Ale): Basically a dark IPA, this was my favorite of the bunch. Pours almost black, and has a really nice, full viscosity without being syrupy. The hops weren’t as dominant as the IPA, but nor were the malts overbearing. It was surprising how drinkable it was. I’m not sure what the ABV is, but the alcohol was not overpowering (nor was it for any of the beers, for that matter).

Porter: Probably the most unremarkable of the bunch, but not in a bad way. It’s simply a good example of a Porter, with very tasty roasted malts, a light, drinkable body, and a dark, rich color. Porters aren’t my favorites, but I think that a Porter fan would enjoy it very much.

Russian Imperial Stout: This, to me, was nearly an exact copy of my favorite imperial stout, Lost Coast Brewing’s Old Rasputin, but that’s not a bad thing at all. Kulshan’s is undeniably delicious, with a high alcohol content nestled in heavily roasted malts. Not a beer for sunny weather, in my opinion, so I’d be surprised if they kept it on tap for much longer.

Sadly, they had just run out of their other beer — Good Ol’ Boy Pale Ale — so I wasn’t able to try it, but people were talking about it and saying it was a great session beer.

I’ll be returning to Kulshan for sure, and I recommend it heartily!

Tweet of the Day: @TreeHugger

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While I can handle the idea of generating energy from human waste, and I understand that the following idea could save a LOT of trees…

…eeeeewwwww!!!

To ad or not to ad

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Well, that’s some interesting timing.

Just a few days ago, in my post about Fish & Bicycles nearing its 1,000th comment, I mentioned that I don’t make a penny from this blog as an excuse for not being able to offer a prize for the 1,000th commenter.

For those who don’t know how this blogging thing works, here’s some info that will make the rest of this post make more sense.

I use a service called WordPress.com, which offers free blogs, hosted on their servers, with 3GB of storage space for images uploaded and embedded in posts. Like most “free” services on the web — Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. — while users don’t have to dish out any money to use them, we do volunteer to help those companies make money via advertising. At WordPress.com, the free service requires that the URL for your blog has the name WordPress in it (e.g. blogname.wordpress.com), and WordPress.com places ads on “free” blogs from which they, not the bloggers, make money.

Now, unlike Facebook and Google, where ads appear in the sidebar and there’s no way to remove them, WordPress.com offers a $30/year upgrade that will remove all ads, and you can also pay $17/year for a “custom domain”, which removes “wordpress” from your URL.

I’ve been dishing out the the $17/year for the fishandbicycles.com URL since I started my blog in October 2009, and I recently signed up for the No-Ads upgrade, because I didn’t like the fact that I wasn’t earning anything from the ads that appeared, and WordPress does not allow users to run their own ads in order to earn money, using services like Google’s AdSense.

Enter WordAds.

Back in November 2011, WordPress.com announced that they will start to offer a program that would place ads on approved blogs and that the bloggers will earn money from the advertisers.

The criteria for an approved blog?

Selection will be based on level of traffic and engagement, type of content, and language used on a blog. Some blogs may not be accepted.

So, like I started off saying, interesting timing. Tuesday I mentioned that I don’t earn money from Fish & Bicycles, and the very next day I received an email from WordPress.com, informing me that Fish & Bicycles has been approved for the WordAds beta.

I suppose I should be flattered, but I’m way too conflicted over whether or not to participate.

Taking a look at the Pros and Cons, you’ll see it’s a bit lopsided.

Pros

  • Money: It would be nice to at least make the nearly $50/year to break even

Cons

  • No information whatsoever is provided as to how much money will be earned
  • Ads are ugly
  • Limited control over actual ad content
  • Terms of Service include this unappealing item:
    • You hereby consent to the use of your name, likeness, blog name, and any associated content or logos by Automattic in connection with advertisements, articles, and other similar communications conducted by Automattic relating to WordAds.

As of right now, I’m leaning towards resisting the carrot and stick. $50/year seems quite a reasonable expense for a good, ad-free product that provides me with a vehicle for my creative expression and a social media connection to readers all over the world.

I know I won’t be able to quit my day job on the WordAds earnings, I’m not hard up for cash, so there really isn’t much point to it.