An interesting urban drama has been playing out in the Wedge neighborhood of Minneapolis, home to The Wedge co-op, arguably the Midwest’s best food co-operative, and Hum’s Liquors, for whom similar plaudits are not warranted. 

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I just got back from a week out of the country. Somewhere far, far away from a Starbucks. And boy, did I miss those venti iced teas in a place where the temperature and humidity were sweltering. When I landed at LAX and saw a Starbucks in the terminal, I knew I was home again. And boy, were the lines long.

But Starbucks is apparently not what it seems. If you follow the business press, you would conclude that Starbucks is one of the more troubled companies in America. About a year ago, it stopped showing growth in same-store sales and profits after years of breakneck growth. Wall Street turned on Starbucks, and its visionary but impetuous founder Howard Schultz took back the reins. Stores were shuttered in places such as Albert Lea. Hot sandwiches were taken off menus because Schultz said you couldn’t smell the coffee; oatmeal is now a morning staple. But the numbers have not rebounded.

Remember Krispy Kreme, the cult donut that went national, started offering its product everywhere from gas stations to Target stores, and flamed out? Is that where Starbucks is headed?

Or consider an alternate analysis: What’s wrong with Starbucks is Wall Street. Walk into any Starbucks and what do you see? People who love the brand, its products, and vibe. Starbucks reinvented coffee and leisure breaks for a whole generation of Americans. Not everything it serves is great, but the ratio is pretty impressive. Where Starbucks went wrong was it believed that its product was for everyone and belonged everywhere.

And who drove it to that conclusion, like Krispy Kreme? That was Wall Street. It’s not enough to run a profitable but mature, slow-growth business anymore. If you want to trade on the Street, you need to be growing the top and bottom lines or your stock tumbles.

It’s a sick system that’s evolved because it pushes companies to grow beyond their natural constituencies and clientele, and over-leverage so to take short-term risk without regard to long-term stability. Product and customer-experience innovation takes a back seat to expansion. That’s why there was a Starbucks in Albert Lea and that’s why there were analysts suggesting the company needed to serve dinner at those underutilized stores.

So now Starbucks is retrenching. Trying to figure out what went wrong. Krispy Kreme commoditized its product, sapping it of consistency and excellence. Starbucks hasn’t gone there yet, but probably only because its founder remains in office, refusing to destroy its essence.

There’s little wrong with Starbucks to its customers and thousands of employees. That there is so much wrong with it in the eyes of Wall Street is just another piece of evidence of how screwed up America’s business culture is. When the only universally accepted measure of a company’s success is growth, inevitably recklessness and short-term thinking ensues. Let’s hope it doesn’t destroy one of the great retail success stories of our era.

A little while back, I blogged about the sad state of affairs for burger eaters in the Twin Cities and took a shot at all these locals who order their meat cooked to blackness. Following that, we asked readers of our twice-monthly Foodie e-newsletter (subscribe here) to chime in on how they like their meat cooked.

The results restored my faith in humanity but only for a few minutes. Keep in mind our Foodie subscribers are the crème de la crème of the foodie world. They live to eat. And even 20 percent of them order burgers well-done or medium well (a nice idea, but show me the restaurant that doesn’t cook a medium-well burger well-done).

Here are the raw vote totals—heh, heh—from nearly 300 responses, which tracked quite accurately with our exit polling data from seventeen leading burger restaurants.

Rare
4.1 percent

Medium rare
48.6 percent

Medium
27.7 percent

Medium well
13.6 percent

Well-done
5.9 percent

Next up: Why must they put the cheese on after the burger’s been cooked? It won’t melt!

Hell’s Kitchen chef/owner, Mitch Omer, unleashed a wild, ad hominem broadside against our own Andrew Zimmern this week on The Rake magazine’s website. I hesitate to feed it, in that it’s unreasonable and often incoherent, but I thought better of that because I do think it opens a window into the minds of independent chefs and restaurateurs.

Omer seems to be calling Zimmern out for failing to properly respect local chefs and restaurants, for poking fun at their press releases, for being impressed by powerful outsiders who bring their act to our towns, and having acknowledged some vicarious glee in watching other critics disembowel particularly horrible restaurants deserving of nothing better.

As editor of our restaurant coverage, I’ve never really thought of Zimmern as an enemy, gratuitous or otherwise, of the local chef/restaurateur. AZ tends to support and adore the same cadre of local innovators and stalwarts as Dara, Iggers, Nelson, and Lilienthal.

So why the hit piece? Is it jealousy? Is it xenophobia? Is it sheer irrationality? I think the attitude reflects something in the nature of chef-restaurateurs. Restaurants are extraordinarily challenging businesses to own, grow, and see thrive. There are many moving parts, and the human factor has more influence than most consumer products. They seem to engender paranoia and resentment.

I’ve eaten a lot of meals out over the last week: Cheesecake Factory, Tria, Morton’s bar, Chambers Kitchen, Yum! Three of the five meals were deeply flawed, two of those intolerably bad, and only one was not resolutely disappointing in some way. If your clock radio or car only worked right 20 percent of the time, 60 percent of the time only partially worked, and the final 20 percent not at all, people would be up in arms. But that’s the success ratio at many restaurants.

Yet I have not given up eating out. Nor have you. Which I think leads many chefs and managers to believe it’s enough for the restaurant to mean well, for the recipes to be interesting, for the ambition to be manifest. They not only don’t understand their customers, I think many are contemptuous of them.

We just won’t see their side of it. We won’t pay for top-quality ingredients, we want familiar wines, we expect consistency, and to get in and out on our schedule. WCCO-TV’s Jason DeRusha, in a comment to Omer’s rant, says, “I get bored with everyone who spends time talking down to the restaurant eaters. We pay to eat. We are customers. Why are we stupid and pedestrian if we don't want to eat certain foods?”

As I’ve covered the local restaurant scene here on and off for seventeen years, I’ve concluded that most chefs and independent restaurateurs are auteurs. They want to make an artistic and/or personal statement with food and/or hospitality. They don’t really want to be in business to serve people. Ask an independent chef or restaurateur what he thinks of Parasole (Figlio, Chino Latino, Pittsburgh Blue), which exists to give people what they want, not advance the dining culture. You’ll hear a lot of contempt and a bit of envy. It’s telling.

Now Mitch Omer deserves some kudos. His restaurant is successful and more importantly, has been so for years. That’s not easy. Success is to be respected in this business. He has found a way to express his art around a customer base that appreciates it enough to come back. His customers are the critics that matter, and they vote yes.

I admire all the restaurateurs who try to push the envelope and drag our food culture along with it. And I have nothing but respect for the food knowledge of Iggers, Grumdahl, Nelson, et al. But as critics, the question is whether our mission is to be an advocate for the diner or for the art they survey. The interests often don’t dovetail, and I think too many of us get so close to the restaurant community that we see the world through the prism of the valiant chefs, the martyred farmer, the struggling food artisan. It’s so prevalent an attitude nowadays that the Mitch Omers of the world demand it.

Zimmern doesn’t always play the game and has become wildly successful to boot, and that chaps some folks’ hides, but he is not the problem, Mitch. The problem is the restaurant business is groaning under the weight of chefs and restaurateurs (and genuinely sycophant critics) too busy serving themselves to realize they’re in a service business.

We’re told that the restaurant business is the toughest on earth, and that the vast majority of them fail. Over the years, I’ve become less convinced that is a phenomenon of the universe and more convinced it's because a lot of restaurateurs are marginal businesspeople.

Cafe Maude is the hot restaurant in Minneapolis’s far southwest Armatage neighborhood. (The neighborhood’s only restaurant, to be accurate.) It’s been open a few months and has garnered favorable press, including from our critic Peter Lilienthal. Owner Kevin Sheehy described his restaurant to me several weeks ago as family-friendly. So when I dined there with friends last Sunday, we brought our kids.

As we were seated for brunch at 11 a.m., the busser placed a tall glass filled to the brim with ice and water in front of my three-year-old. Moments later our server told me there was no kids menu or special portions offered at any of the restaurant’s mealtimes. The kitchen did agree to make a half-size burger for my nine-year-old, after I asked.

The food took about forty-five minutes to arrive. The restaurant was half full. At about the forty-minute mark we asked for some bread for our three-year-old. It came slathered in “cheese and rosemary,” as the server described it. When my son’s burger arrived it had been slimmed down, but the kitchen’s seasoning was so intense he would not eat it. (It was also cooked past well-done, and the heavy char made the taste more intense.) Though it was a half-portion, we were charged the full $11 on our bill. I’d like to believe even a non-parent can find at least half a dozen aspects of the experience above that are the opposite of family-friendly.

You may find it surprising then, that I like Cafe Maude. It’s charming, exceedingly comfortable, and has an interesting, reasonably priced menu. What it is not, though, is family-friendly.

That can’t be good news for Maude, because I will never return with my kids in tow. Which means I’m likely to go a lot less often than I might otherwise. I’m sure the same can be said for other southwest Minneapolis parents who’ve had experiences similar to ours at Maude and other area restaurants.

A day later, I heard from one of my colleagues about a nearly three-hour dinner (which didn’t even get them to the end of dessert) with his grandkids at Stewart and Heidi Woodman’s Heidi’s, a restaurant that offers a kids menu.

My conclusion is a lot of this “family-friendliness” is half-hearted.

Independent restaurateurs in the Twin Cities regularly feign incredulity to me over the popularity of chains. They talk as if their only choice is between selling their soul or losing customers. They want family patrons. They understand there are more family-dining dollars than date-night dollars in Highland Park, Lynnhurst, and Armatage. But they more strongly want to make an aesthetic statement, and crayons, plastic tumblers, and chicken strips with carrot nibs aren’t how they see themselves.

But they are also businesspeople—that could do an additional 5:30 p.m. seating of customers who don’t want to linger into the peak 7 p.m. meal hour. Of folks like me who love the idea of eating better food in a less-contrived setting than chains offer, and have the disposable income to do so. But who, six nights a week, have kids in tow, and need the restaurant to understand why these littlest guests are the lynchpin to the success or failure of the evening.

Is it really compromising your integrity to buy some classy-looking plastic glassware? To have paper and crayons on hand? To come up with a handful of simple, small-portion recipes kids will eat, and price them accordingly? To invite an area parent to speak to your staff on the dos and don’ts of making families welcome? I’d gladly create a checklist for independent restaurateurs.

Most restaurants that go under do so because of some major strategic or operational failing. When you pick a location, you are, in effect, picking your customers. The hordes of grazers and samplers eventually move on to what’s new and hot, and your neighbors become your regulars.

When a restaurant can’t deal with half the inhabitants of its neighborhood, it puts itself well behind the eight-ball.

One of the things that I know puzzles many of my peers is America’s taste for chains. And I agree that their sameness, contrived quality (Welcome to XXXX, how may I provide you with excellent service today?), and unrootedness to the community frustrate me as well. But nowhere is the service and friendliness ethos more deeply ingrained than in the USA. In the UK, they refer to overtly friendly and helpful service as “American-style,” and it’s not always meant as a compliment.

But I just spent a week in Florida and was reminded why Americans like chains. We were in a part of Florida where most of the merchants and restaurateurs were mom-and-pops. And frequently we were treated to sour, snippy, exasperated service. Yes, it was a holiday week in a holiday part of the country, but that’s not my problem. I’m paying your bills.

My daughter got sick and I had to get her a prescription. I had a choice of a large chain retailer or a local druggist. I know how beleaguered independent pharmacists are by chains, so I direct all my hometown business to our neighborhood pharmacy. I decided to do the same this time round. After waiting for over a half-hour for the meds, as the pharmacist shot the breeze with locals, I became pretty sure he didn’t value my business the way I valued his existence. I could have saved more of my vacation by going to the chain store.

The local market was selling turkeys and I went in to inquire about what was on offer. “We have twelve- and fourteen-pound turkeys. That’s all we have" . . . Sigh . . . "No, we’re not making crab cakes this week. Do you know how busy we are? No, we cannot"—Don’t you love it when an independent merchant states that he cannot do something? Who’s stopping him?—"take orders. We cannot pre-reserve. We cannot guarantee anything will be here at any given time.” That’d drive me to Whole Foods pretty quick.

At one beachside lunch spot, the menu board noted “no refills,” “no substitutions,” “no checks or credit cards,” and “food that is not picked up when your number is called will be discarded.” Translated, that’s: “we’re greedy, unaccommodating, penny-wise, and contemptuous of you.” I guarantee TGIFriday’s will not throw out your to-go order if you’re late picking it up.

Now, I did encounter friendly service as well, but the protocols, service standards, and enforced customer relations of the chains can be reassuring in the face of local businesspeople who know you’re not from “around here” and treat you accordingly.

I understand it’s a two-way street, and a lot of customers, especially tourists, act like cretins. But spend enough time around ungrateful merchants and you may find yourself grateful for the canned servility of chained-up America.

Last March, we devoted our annual and popular Best Restaurants issue to the local foods movement. I conceptualized the effort in fall 2006, which was reasonably early in the national awareness cycle of the topic. (In a nutshell, there is no downside to seeking out local foods—it reduces the carbon footprint of the food economy, the food is fresher, more flavorful, and you bring critical economic mass to a locally food economy that was moribund a decade ago.)

But I am sick of it. I can’t read the latest (there are, like, four) tome by an award-winning author regarding their year of “eating locally.” I ignore the obligatory “farmer profile” in the Times Wednesday food section. I don’t really even want to know which grower my food came from when I’m dining in a local restaurant.

Yet the local foods movement has lost none of its essential salience or goodness. But everyone that is going to get it, gets it. So it’s time to live the values but stop the yammering—it’s still food, and the basic issue is how it tastes.

I just finished the November Travel & Leisure mag. It was their all-green issue. Parts of it were OK, but most was hype and diffidence. Last week was NBC Universal’s “green” week, nicely skewered by the writers on 30 Rock. (I’d work for Jack Donaghy any day.)

I even endured an article about a NY couple who is using no fuel or petroleum-based products for an entire year. Their fanaticism trivializes the issue. I don’t want to eat with them, I don’t want to talk with them, I don’t want to smell them.

And we are still doing nothing but talking about climate change.

The problem, perhaps, is that when the nation’s media leaders get wind of an important topic they sincerely want to spread the word. Or want to wrap themselves in it as a fashion statement. Or a marketing exercise.

Cynicism good. Denial bad.

It’s all quite simple, actually. But we make it very complicated. Don’t purchase carbon offsets before you fly. Take the LRT to the airport and use the subway when you’re in NYC. Don’t cover your house in solar cells. Just turn the lights off and buy compact fluorescent bulbs. You don’t have to avoid tomatoes all winter (not that the ones we get are worth eating anyway), but order a couple fewer tomato salads and eat some more pumpkin soup.

When California went through its Enron-induced energy crisis a couple of summers ago, the state found it required almost no sacrifice of its citizens to get them to reduce their peak energy consumption by nearly a quarter. It just required brownouts and electric bill surcharges. Which suggests that most of us don’t act until we are told to.

Or we turn it into a religion or an obsession or a fad. Why so many of us want to is an ongoing puzzlement. But can we stop talking and start living it already?

If you’re not watching the American TV iteration of Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, you are missing the best TV of the season. Episode three airs Wednesday night on Fox and I have high expectations, since the first two episodes have been a running horror show/comedy panic. Even if you hate Hell’s Kitchen, and there is good reason to, this show will rock your Wednesday.

For the uninitiated, RKN is an American version of a show Ramsay does for the UK’s Channel 4 (which offers some of the old shows on-demand), and has aired in the U.S. on BBC America. In each episode, the über-chef spends a week at a small UK restaurant whose fortunes are flagging and attempts to fix its problems. The series showed the often-explosive Ramsay to be a passionate and savvy restaurateur who is able to translate his high standards to operations lacking the kinds of budgets and monied customers his restaurants cater to.

The British RKN was occasionally funny, but more often a fascinating look into the lives and eccentricities of small businesspeople. Fox’s version, so far, has focused on more dysfunctional people and operations: A Sopranos-wannabe Italian restaurant in Babylon, Long Island, and a filthy Indian joint in Midtown Manhattan. The sight of Ramsay losing it as the goombah fulminates and the roaches scurry, his incredulousness at the sheer depths of the incompetence at play make it hard to turn away from the screen.

The UK episodes, not so much the Fox freak shows, were an endless litany of evidence of the idiocy of so many chefs and the owners who enable them. Time after time RKN subjects were trying to pawn of third-tier haute cuisine in communities that could neither afford nor appreciate it, simply because it satisfied a chef’s ego. Ramsay’s response is always the same: know your customer, keep things fresh, simple, and of good value. It would seem so easy.

The British shows are now in hiatus, but another season is in the offing. The Fox show is earning mediocre ratings up against Bionic Woman and Private Practice. But it deserves to live to see a better time slot. Compared to the piffle of Hell’s Kitchen, either version of Kitchen Nightmares is well worth experiencing.

I feel a rant coming on:

+ Smokers are uniformly some of the most inconsiderate narcissists around. We’ve driven them all onto the streets with clean-air regs, which is good, but try walking down the street or waiting for a bus without inhaling somebody’s nicotine exhaust. And why do smokers believe the entire world is their ashtray? They flick ash without regard for where it goes or who’s downwind, and then they dump the butt on the sidewalk. Maybe when the Minneapolis City Council is done saving the elephants it can do something about the 500 cigarette butts on every block.

+ There is a special place in hell for people who board airplanes before their row is called and then use the tactic to put their humongous bag in an overhead bin above someone else’s seat before they head back to row 34. And no, you don’t need an ID when you board. You haven’t needed it in more than five years! Five years! Put it away!

+ Why do about 20 percent of all the restaurants in town not offer Splenda with beverages? Yes, that’s you Ike’s at the Airport, yes that’s you D’Amico & Sons, yes that’s you Punch Pizza. C’mon boys, this is the first artificial sweetener that doesn’t taste like chemicals and you’d think it was foie gras. I know it’s a little more expensive, but it’s the one you need to have.

+ Another baseball season has come and gone and they are still precooking hot dogs and brats at the Metrodome and storing them in warming ovens for hours. Even my hot dog–loving kids won’t touch the tepid things after the gummy, wet bun has been peeled off. Please, Twins (the concessions at the Dome are under the domain of the Sports Facilities Commission, not the teams): don’t let this horrible concessionaire get anywhere near the new ballpark. Twenty-eight years of wiener abuse will be quite enough.

+ The auto workers are on strike as of Monday against GM and the American carmakers are all teetering on insolvency. I always argued that the millions of Americans who bought Fords, Buicks, and Dodges solely because they were American were only hurting the car companies. Today, the U.S. manufacturers make much better cars, but after years of turning out the lowest common denominator, huge swaths of Americans won’t even consider an American vehicle. Truth be told, I’m one of them. A poor reputation will haunt you far longer than a bad product lasts.

+ Is it just me, or has Alice Waters gone from a national culinary hero to a sour polemicist for a cause that she’s basically won people over to anyway? If the mark of success of the California-grown local foods movement is when kids choose beet salad willingly and their parents spend two hours preparing dinner after working ten hours, then there will be no victory. There’s idealism, and then there’s fantasy. The latter is just not sustainable.

I usually find the rest of the country’s take on Minnesota, particularly when it airs on TV, clichéd and vapid. Food Network gives us a fair shake typically, and I didn’t even mind Rachel Ray’s recent foray in her Tasty Travels series. (Yum-O.) And I have great expectations of my colleague Andrew Zimmern’s season two Minnesota-based episode of Bizarre Foods on Travel Channel. (It will air in 2008.)

But possibly the best nationally produced Minnesota show I’ve seen is the current episode of Alton Brown’s Feasting on Asphalt series where he motorbikes across America in search of the regional food and food culture. Brown is one of the most knowledgeable TV foodies out there, he’s funny, and because he lives in Atlanta, he’s not NY/LA-centric.

But I did not expect the episode “Lutefisk Express”—the final episode of season two, in which Brown biked up the Mississippi—to be quite as entertaining as it was. He starts in Alma, Wisconsin, at a fishing pontoon/greasy spoon, hits the Whistle Stop Café in Frontenac (gotta get there for pie, lard crust you know), restored my faith in Mickey’s Diner, did a turn at Olsen Fish on the lutefisk line, stopped at Bob’s Java Hut on Lyndale and got a tattoo upstairs at Uptown Tattoo, watched Soile Anderson make a smorgasbord, encountered some Viking-wannabes in Crosby, and ended up at Itasca State Park.

The fish platform in Alma and the Whistle Stop in Frontenac are real finds. I was shocked to learn how committed Mickey’s owners are to real food (and butter), laughed myself sick over Anderson’s Finnish accent (so thick the show used subtitles). Brown is not a camera hog and is content to let his crew share the stage, he really knows food and food science, and I find his personality to be mighty good viewing. Feasting was not a show I had on my DVR list this summer (or last) and now I regret it. Since it’s cable, I’m sure it will return many, many times.

If you’re interested in checking out “Lutefisk Express,” it airs Saturday at 3 p.m. and Sunday at 6 p.m. on Food Network.