DailyGenesis.com

I’m not a big T.G.I. Friday’s fan, but I was intrigued when I saw their new campaign for the “Right Portion, Right Price” menu. Those of you who know how I feel about portion sizes will find it no surprise that I love this campaign. I love the name, in fact. I think it’s great branding.

The tagline is: “Save that stuffed feeling for your wallet.” Nice. They are not only promoting the idea of smaller portions, but also charging less money for the right amount of food.

I’ve written before about what happened to Ruby Tuesday’s when they tried to reduce portion sizes. I think the difference there was that they didn’t change the price, at least not enough. I think this T.G.I. Friday’s campaign will be a good test of whether the public will accept a mainline chain restaurant trying to serve them a correct portion size, or if they will demand to stuff themselves beyond what is reasonable.

I am very interested to see the results of this campaign.

Over the past four months, I’ve been scrounging whatever free time I could muster up to work on a new design for EatAroundOKC.com, my Oklahoma City Restaurants blog. I finally got it launched last Sunday and that is a big relief. Please check it out.

My main objective in the new design was to enlarge it to fit a 1024 width screen. The previous design was locked for 800 width and, of course, in the past two years the move toward larger monitors has been great. My stats show that now over 90% of visitors to the site are using 1024 or above. I figured it was time to move on up.

The wider width accommodates a three column layout, allowing me to put the category navigation on the left and freeing up space in the right-hand sidebar for some more interesting features including a list of the highest rated and most popular posts on the site.

My favorite feature of the new design is the font style. The body font is 15px Georgia, a bit larger-than-life but I love it. The headlines are even more oversized. I think this gives the site a very readable and even newspaper-like quality.

Though the new design is really nothing amazing to look at (my design skills are mediocre at best), I am proud of the code behind the design. The CSS was rewritten in its entirety, starting with a blank page, and every line of the markup was scoured to remove anything unnecessary. The original design was the first CSS design I’d ever written, so there was a lot of waste. The new design makes better use of the cascade and the code is a lot leaner. It’s truly a pleasure to look at so please, go ahead and enjoy a peak at the code.

Anyway, I am glad to finally get the new design launched. Aside from some server issues, everything has gone very smoothly. Please take a look and let me know what you think. And please read along and comment on EatAroundOKC as well.

So, I have always had a problem with restaurants that serve enormous portions. I have always believed it was simply a way to increase revenue by providing too much food to justify charging more for each meal. Since all of the other costs to the restaurant are consistent (personnel, facilities … etc.) adding a little extra food and jacking up the price can bring in more revenue per person.

Yesterday, I was listening to NPR while driving and caught the tail-end of an interview with some guy who is writing a book about obesity in America. I didn’t hear much, but I heard him talk about this restaurant problem, and he mentioned that Ruby Tuesdays had recently tried to reduce their portion sizes in response to the health concerns and obesity concerns in America. However, the backlash from their customers was so overwhelming that they had to return to the larger portions after just a short time.

This interested me, so I did a little search and found this article on Time Magazine from last year which talks about the issue as well. Interesting read.

Anyway, this just made me realize — the problem isn’t completely the fault of the restaurants. I mean, these chains are big businesses and they have to make money. They are just giving people what they want. So, the responsibility is on us. It’s not so bad bad to take advantage of big portions if we were all somehow disciplined enough to take half of it home for later or split with someone else at the table. Or, we can choose to frequent the local places, who generally serve more appropriate portion sizes. We just all have to get over our “price per pound” mentality and think about what is actually a reasonable amount of food to eat at one sitting.

I built EatAroundOKC.com about a year ago as a place to post my very own reviews about Oklahoma City Restaurants. It was sort of a learning lab for me as it was the first website I ever designed and cutup with XHTML/CSS. Also, it was the first site I ever integrated onto Wordpress. Well, in fact, it was the first time I ever used Wordpress, or any blogging software for that matter.

Anyway, I had high hopes of writing lots of restaurant reviews about Oklahoma City restaurants. I got a few up there, and then a whole lot of months passed by without a single post.

But recently, my friend Andrew starting writing about Oklahoma City restaurants on a blogger blog he set up. I found his articles to be quite entertaining, and I asked him if he would like to post them on EatAroundOKC instead because, after all, he could be hugely famous this way since my site is so well known. Anyway, he agreed and so with renewed enthusiasm we bring you the all new and improved EatAroundOKC.com, your guide to restaurants in Oklahoma City, at least the ones where we’ve eaten.

What is new and improved you might ask? Well, primarily the fact that there will (hopefully) be regular posts now. We’ve even started a new monthly series — the “Shady restaurant of the month.” I’ll be refraining from posting any restaurant reviews here on DailyGenesis in lieu of putting them up over at the new site. In fact, you’ll probably notice a few from the DG archives being ported over to EatAroundOKC. Please subscribe to EatAroundOKC so you can keep up with everything.

We’re also opening it up to outside reviewers. We’d love to find some other Oklahoma City people who like to eat and like to write and would submit articles to help build up our restaurant portfolio. They, too, can be made famous if we choose to publish them on EatAroundOKC.

So help us spread the word. It’s not like we’re going to make any money off of this, but it is a fun little project and I think it could be a handy resource for Oklahoma City. My goal is simply that one day, some restaurant somewhere will comp us a meal in order to get us to write about them. Then, it will all be worth it.

Ok, my last post pointed out that the first Chipotle in Oklahoma will be opening soon in Tulsa. But Ben pointed out in the comments that he had already seen a Chipotle sign along Broadway in Edmond. When I heard that, I had to check it out immediately.

He’s right! There is a small Chipotle sign on a lot at the SW corner of 15th and Broadway in Edmond, just south of the Starbucks. It’s a little strip mall that looks to me to be about 75% complete, not counting time for internal buildout. Looks like Chipotle will be sharing the building with an AT&T store and a few other, smaller, retailers. I didn’t have my camera with me or I would have shared a picture (darn!).

So, Chipotle’s logo is alive and well in the metro area. I must admit, I’m a bit disappointed that Edmond gets the first one. Well, let’s step back — I’m disappointed that Tulsa gets the first one in Oklahoma and also that Edmond gets the first one in the metro area. But you know what, I’ll take it. The Edmond location is a mere 20 minutes from my house. When I lived in Houston, the closest Chipotle was 25 minutes away if traffic was good, and we made the drive quite frequently.

Of course, there’s no word on when this Edmond location will be opening, but my best guess is early 2008. Hopefully very early indeed!

Ok, if you don’t already know how much I love Chipotle, please read this to get the full understanding.

So, currently the closest Chipotle restaurants to Oklahoma City are in Witchita, KS.  There are three of them there, at around 154 miles away. 

Just slightly farther out are the multitude of them lining the North side of Dallas, even one in Denton proper.  These ring in at about 160-170 miles out.  Of course, I frequent these most often as I rarely have any reason to go to Witchita.

But, if you had been paying close attention to the Chipotle website over the past year, you would have noticed that both Tulsa and Oklahoma City had pins in them on the “future development” map they used to have up (the map has now been removed).  No further info was given.  Just a couple of pins showing that they did indeed have the intent to build here.

And if you’ve paid even closer attention over the past couple of months, you may have taken a look at the Chipotle job boards where you would have seen jobs advertised in Tulsa, indicating that a restaurant opening is just right around the bend.

Well, now we’ve a location.  It’s not open yet, but 10902 E.71st St. in Tulsa is about to become the closest Chipotle to OKC at a mere 100 miles away, cutting almost an hour off of the gulf separating Oklahoma City from all kinds of tasty.

Not quite close enough to accommodate lunch hours though, so we can only hope that an OKC location will be coming quite soon. 

Please note: this article has been republished on EatAroundOKC.com. Please follow this link to see the article:

“Oklahoma City goes ultra-hip with Red Prime Steak“

Please note: this article has been republished on EatAroundOKC.com. Please use the following link to see the article:

“OKC’s asian district featured in the New York Times“

I think the title says it all. I know it’s a bold and absolute statement, but I’ll stand behind it. At least until I eat somewhere I like better.

Cheever’s just nails it for me. The new American cuisine is a fantastic combination of tradition and innovation. Everything I’ve ever eaten there was unbelievably good. And the things I’ve seen other people eat there looked really good too.

The location is perfect, especially since its just a few blocks from my house. The vintage old building has been nicely upgraded, but it still holds on to its creaks and crevices to keep that unpolished edge.

The atmosphere is sophisticated, but lively. Local artwork adorns the walls. The service is impeccable. The prices are substantial, but fair. I could just go on and on. But the bottom line is simple:

Cheever’s Cafe is the best restaurant in Oklahoma City.

Try it. Love it. Comment about it.

And you might also want to try the Iron Starr Urban BBQ, another fantastic restaurant from the same group. Plus, a new treat is on its way as they plan to open the Red Prime Steakhouse in a fantastic location downtown. Way to go, guys.

While in Los Angeles I got eat at Beacon, an experience which definitely warrants a post here on the blog. I found Beacon just by chance. It is across the street from the Jazz Bakery where I was to hear Matt Wilson perform later in the evening. The Jazz Bakery folks recommended Beacon and another restaurant nearby. I am glad we chose Beacon.

Beacon serves Asian food with a creative twist. Their two executive chefs have been written up in some publications and I found out that LA Magazine rated Beacon as one of the top 25 restaurants in LA. It certainly deserves it as far as I’m concerned.

First of all, we got to sit outside on their lovely patio in the cool LA evening weather, under space heaters. Just about the perfect environment. Then came the food. I was there with my sister and we decided to split everything so we could make a two course meal into four courses.

We started with the chef’s soup of the day. An amazing combination of carrots and ginger and probably a lot of other stuff all pureed down into an amazing experience. Then there was the sauteed mushroom salad, also fantastic. Then, there was pad thai. I got the pad thai because I pretty much always get it any time I’m anywhere that serves it. It’s one of my favorite dishes and I just have to see what it’s like. It was great. Maybe not the best I’ve ever had, but definitely unique and right up there on my list.

But the first three courses were nothing compared to the grand finale, the hanger steak. This dish was highly recommended by the waiter and he was right on. An amazingly tender steak marinated and served in a sauce that I can’t even begin to describe other than to just say “wow,” and topped off with a lovely tab of wasabi relish. Unbelievable.

As you can tell, I am 100% in favor of Beacon. The service, the food and the environment are all well worth the trip. So, if you’re ever in LA and in the mood for a great dinner and some jazz, it just doesn’t get much better than Beacon and the Jazz Bakery.