Well, the Groupon “thing” is firmly in place, like it or not. If you’re a small business, you might like it quite a bit – getting butts in seats and all that. How does it work? Who makes money? TechCrunch did a fantastic analysis a few months ago.

But if you are a small business and/or restaurant with an upscale target market and a really polished image, it might not be the best thing for you, especially if you’ve opened recently. Google for “groupon sucks” and the #1 hit you will see is a blog post from a spa marketing company talking about how discounting is not always the best way to attract new customers. It is certainly food for thought and a great post, but targeted at “luxury” goods like hundred-dollar treatments and the like.

What if your per-check average is well under $20? Is it such a bad idea to discount, then?

A friend just told me that they were hesitant to try a local restaurant because it always looks empty. I know for a fact that the restaurant’s food is quite good and told him so. They have a dining room too big for their needs and that hurts them with walk-by traffic, as my friend’s perception shows. This place might benefit from a quick-and-dirty campaign to get more people in the door. Or perhaps you can skip giving half the money to Groupon and just go to the restaurant. Do we have a deal? Good. Also try out another local place experimenting with Groupon – but just go instead of buying the coupon. Their sandwiches are amazing.

I responded to another blogger’s comments about being ruined for veggies for many years as a kid eating salads with bad iceberg lettuce, and went off on a rant and just had to share.

Iceberg is but the tip of this iceberg. . .  there are lots of early-exposure problems that cascade into picky/limited eaters later.  Even one typical meal holds numerous traps:
1. stale lettuce with
2. pale flavorless tomatoes flanking
3. anemic carrots underneath
4. fatty yet boring dressing as a precursor to
5. overcooked underseasoned meat alongside
6. baked potato in a coffin of bacon bits and cheese next to
7. brown, mushy green beans or
8. greying soggy broccoli not to mention
9. horridly pale and bland peas & carrots drizzled with rancid butter meant to be the homework before the recess of
10. chocolate cake dark with color yet light on cocoa with its layers of
11. hydrogenated frosting so sweet it makes the scoop of airy vanilla ice cream nearly savory

This is long before you get into the esoterica like liver, lima beans, beets, fish (!!!), eggplant….

Saving the native varieties of chiles is part of the mission of the Chile Pepper Institute in Las Cruces, but particularly I love Chimayo chiles, maybe even more than Hatch.

They are delicious and worth keeping around – even if consumers will need to pay higher prices because they are more difficult to farm and manage.

Saving The Chiles – article posted a few days ago online.  Decent reading if you’re new to the chile preservation subject.

Because you know I loves me some birria.

All the “cool kids” were saying that bacon jumped the shark nearly 2 years ago – the whole “let’s put bacon in everything!!!” is done/over/tired.

Sure, bacon is tasty.  But as a fad it definitely hit hard (even the post-fad engendered some anger) and maybe, just maybe, the shark-jumpage will be accelerated with the whole nasty flu business going on.

Yes, yes, I know you can’t get it by EATING pork.  But who isn’t going to come away from the whole situation without at least associating something big, threatening, and potentially pretty disruptive to those pink carriers of delicious meaty treats?  See what I mean?

. . . and that’s why the phrase “Get your goat” indicates frustration or irritation with a situation.  It comes from either a French or British history and basically means someone took away your only means to get daily milk.

Because “goat is the most widely consumed meat in the world“, it would be an annoyance for much of the planet – not necessarily Americans who are often squeamish about things that don’t taste like burger or chicken.

Luckily I live in a city with barely enough people of Mexican origin to give me a couple of local restaurant options for goat (birria, if you’re reading that menu).

If you do, too, seek it out – you might be suprised that it is delicious and mild.  It does not, however, taste like beef, so don’t expect to not notice any difference.