Places to Eat

Reviews of places to eat.

Whopper TV.

I am a Direct TV customer, but I haven’t seen this yet. I think I am going to have to tune in to channel 111 tonight though. CP+B has purchased dedicated time on Direct TV and set up a specific channel to air an endless loop of a Burger King Whopper.

The entire week long spot is the latest Burger King challenge, that works like this. Tune to channel 111 and you’ll see a 5 minute countdown.  Watch the perfectly flame grilled burger spin for 5 minutes and you get a free burger, watch it for 10 minutes and you get two, 20 minutes and you get four… The loop is endless. The catch is that you really do have to pay attention. At given points in the loop, the channel prompts you to hit certain buttons on your remote, if you miss one the clock resets and you start over. Complete the challenge and you can claim the free burger right there on the TV.

This is a simple yet very effective way to create an interactive TV experience. So effective, that Burger King has already given away more than 50,000 burgers this week, and is expected to give away more than 800,000 by the end of the contest on Sunday night. That means more than 13 thousand hours of Whopper TV will get watched and interacted with. Pretty impressive don’t you think?

4Food, The Social Networking Burger Joint.

About 3 weeks ago I killed my Foursquare account and app on my phone. The application was having about a fifty percent fail rate on being able to locate where I actually was and I got tired of being told “Your phone thinks you are a little far away from that location” when I was standing right in the middle of it.

I had other issues with Foursquare as well. Like Gowalla I didn’t see much to the point of using the app when the pay off was pretty much not there. This might be a reflection of the city that I live in, but when you are the “Mayor” of 35 venues, and you receive only 1 perk in 6 months that is kind of lame. Seriously, 1 in 6, and it was for 50 cents off a cup of coffee at Starbucks, a place I never go to. Anyway today I was going through some web sites that focus on Social Media trends and I came across a rather interesting restaurant concept opening in New York.

4Food is an upcoming restaurant opening on July 6th at the corner of Madison and 40th. This is an organinc fast-food burger joint. The burgers have a hole punched in the center of them that allows a customer to choose a scoop from 40 different items to fill them up. You can fill your burger with things like edamame, salsa, hummus, chili, etc. This however is not what I wanted to post about though. I want to talk about the high-tech social networking hooks.

4Food is encouraging customers to create online accounts and then fill their orders via the web.

According to Rex Sorgatz of 4Food, “Customers who create accounts on the 4Food.com website will be given simple customization offers that can produce millions of outcomes. Once a food choice is created, the customer can schedule a pick-up time. If the customer chooses to name their creation (“The Yoko Ono Burger”), they can market it and receive $.25 in store credit for every customized burger they sell.”

If you want to order in person you can either use a kiosk, or work with one of the iPad toting wait staff to create your masterpiece. According to Sorgatz, it is like Apple meets Chipotle. The store offers free WiFi and will have a 240 square foot video display with feeds from Foursquare, Facebook, and Twitter, that shows checkins, tweets and wall posts. There is no word on what you get in the form of an incentive for checking in and posting but I am sure they will have a promotional driver for doing that.

Oh and no, this won’t make me sign up for Foursquare or Gowalla again. Now “Cause World” might stand a chance…

Check out more info on their website and Facebook Page.

A New Dining Experiment.
Salad-1

Lab Gai Thai Chicken Salad.

I am trying a new experiment when it comes to buying and cooking food. It goes like this. I source the recipe for the evening meal, then I go to the store and buy just what is needed to make dinner. This way, everything is fresh. I only buy what I need. I waste less. I spend less. Last night was the first evening meal of the experiment. For less than $5.00 I was able to create a large Thai chicken Salad. ( Lab Gai )

I bought just what I needed last evening and I had nothing left over at the end of the meal. More importantly, all the ingredients were fresher since they hadn’t sat in my refrigerator for any amount of time. The big test is going to be going to the local Farmers markets on Wednesday and Saturday, in order to get even fresher, locally grown food for at least two meals a week. I need to start sourcing venues that allow me to purchase farm fresh food every day. Enough for breakfast and for dinner.

Hmmm what should I make for dinner tonight?