With minimal fanfare, Draeger's San Mateo is closing for good.

 

Now I don't live in San Mateo any longer, but I'm not at all surprised to see this happening: SFGate: Gourmet Bay Area grocery store closing after nearly three decades
 There were rumors during the plague that the plot of land had been sold -the buyer varied depending on who you talked to-, but the flux of the pandemic let a lot of useful intel slip by unnoticed.

Let me add that I no longer have skin in the game as far as Draeger's goes. I was one of their cooking school's lead instructors for most of the 2010s, and enjoyed myself thoroughly there. An almost-independent department, we were a solid moneymaker, and what we brought in from private events and classes subsidized the in-house restaurant 'Viognier' quite well. The pandemic closed the cooking school for what we all thought was for good, (Worth mentioning that the restaurant permanently closed at the same time. The story in SFGate talks about a decline in fine dining... but that dining room was empty more often than not.) and so the Scions of the Draeger's Cooking School scattered. 

I'll miss that place. We had a lot of good times there, as a department. Abby ran a delightfully tight ship, and had the most incredible Customer Service mien I've ever seen in action. Oliver and the wine crew were extraordinary, and the housewares department was something out of legend. Jorge was a wizard with that stuff- truly incredible sense of style and a knack for placement that managed to make egregious expense avoid looking tacky. No small feat.

Heading back to downtown San Mateo is going to be a very different thing as the next few years go on. I wonder how this supposed mixed-use space is going to look... "Developer Lane Partners is planning to erect around 100,000 square feet of office space and 10 below-market-rate units, with around 17,000 square feet dedicated to an unnamed grocery store, according to the San Mateo Daily Journal"

That's corporate construction speak for "We want to pretend we're making this a more livable space while gouging the city and the locals". It's also interesting that the grocery store is unnamed, because one of the rumored buyers of this location was Target. Their grocery would do some most unpleasantly tacky things to the look of downtown, and I do hope that's not what ends up in the location. Blech.

I have contacts down there still, so hopefully there will be more information as things develop. Assuming they do, of course. We'll see.

Crumbl- where Less is Less

I’m a dessert person, but I’m poor and frugal. So when it comes to desserts, the notion of Value For Money gets a lot of attention. Pricy components and proper attention to detail can, with care, make what looks thoroughly mundane both justifiably expensive and extraordinary. That was the sort of thing I focused on when reviewing the local cookie shop Butter Pecan. Partially because I enjoy portable desserts like cookies, and partially because you can buy just one cookie without blowing your budget. …Most of the time.

A friend made a mention of getting cookies from a place called Crumbl “Just to see what all the fuss is about”. His resultant glowing review led me to look them up, discover their home storefront was in the next town over, tell myself ‘what the hell, it’s for science’ and get in the car.

Over the course of getting there, getting cookies, and getting home my “Sure, what the hell” had turned into “…wait, what the hell?”.

The shop itself is pastel pink, white, and sterile looking. It’s not remotely friendly aside from the smell of buttery fresh-baked sweets- which is cheating anyway. There are people behind the counters, but none of them are looking at you or even anywhere close. Everything from order to payment is done via kiosks, which led to a Big Problem for me. I got bait-and-switched.

The order kiosk has icons for both Large Desserts and Mini Desserts. The image on the Mini Desserts is of a hand holding what is apparently a Large one. I didn’t find that out till later because there was no actual product visible from the customer accessible area. What sort of bakery does *that*? One that’s not expecting professionals with standards, I suppose. I ordered my cookies- a mini cookie 6-pack because that gave me the maximum opportunity to test the flavors. Three bucks apiece, rounded up, before tax and… tip?. The ‘tip’ calculator was, of course, gibberish math. Plus, who tips big at a place that’s 100% takeout and has no counter service? It’s designed to get people to pay extra for nothing, and I don’t approve. Rather like most modern restaurant websites where you can’t even look at the menu until you start an online order- that’s poisonous as hell.

Anyway, they called my name a minute or so after the order went in, and I was handed a box that was approximately half the size I was expecting. I opened it and looked. Then I closed it and left to go home. 

Upon my return I got out my scale and set to work.

The subconscious value calculations a lot of us do come down to size and weight if we can’t precisely gauge quality. In this case I can do both, but I wanted to start with the easily quantifiable.

Six cookies, five different varieties, just under 250 grams. What the hell? That’s tiny!

The diversity of the cookie styles left me with a wide range of weights, which was even more of a surprise. The Confetti was smallest, weighing in at 29g. Most others were in the 30-35 range, but the Chocolate Mint Mallow swung up to 60g.

Disparity aside, we take the average, and we’re talking about something in the neighborhood of $35-40/lb for these. In the past I reviewed another cookie spot (review linked at the top) and did similar math. Those cookies were $3.75 each, and averaged out at 100g. Quick math, rounds up to $17.00/lb. Crumbl charges literally double what Butter Pecan does based on weight of ingredients.

So yeah- what the hell?! These had better be some absolutely incredible cookies!

They weren’t.

The universals are mostly good overall:

-Deliberately underbaked to extend the shelf life. Totally normal, and I like a soft cookie anyway.
-Doughs are salted for balance to the point where you can taste it. Just a whisper shy of too much.
-All the cookies are S W E E T. Tons of sugar, hence the aggressive saltiness. (Sugar’s cheap.)
-Lots of butter flavor. It comes through very strongly, adding richness to help balance the sweet.

The individual cookies, however, all had their own problems:
“Churro”: way too heavy on the cinnamon, and topped with a swirl of what could almost be buttercream- plenty of powdered sugar in it for that. Sans the cream it’d have been a fine snickerdoodle. I'd rather have had that.
“Milk Chocolate Chip”: The chips were large, bulking the cookie out some but not enough. They were more milk than chocolate, with a rapid-melting texture and a flavor reminiscent of astronaut ice cream. The cookie component was a fairly basic dough, probably also used in some of the others.
“Confetti”: Bog-standard. I’ve eaten many like it. It was a high-quality incarnation of what I expected.
“Peanut Butter”: Despite the massive fat content it still had that sandiness that peanut butter cookies are reliably known for. That said, there were no whole nuts or pieces (in a cookie that small, who’d dare?) so the texture was pleasant.
“Chocolate Mint Mallow”: A very odd sandwich of chocolate cookies with what they claim is a mint marshmallow filling between. The filling tasted more like buttercream, but the mint flavor was milder and more subtle than I expected. Since most mint products go waaay overboard, this left a good impression. The cookies were very dark chocolate and very soft, almost tacky to the touch, which had me considering other preparations. I’d happily have rolled portions of that dough in spiced sugar before baking and sold them accordingly. Perhaps a chipotle sugar? Beautiful with dark chocolate. Less worry for cross contamination too.

Speaking of that, it was the final worry I had. Mint and peanut are both somewhere in that facility and I didn’t see any way to avoid allergen or flavor contamination. The chocolate chip cookie had a faint whisper of peanut come through on my palate, and that’s Not Good.

Overall, I’m not sure how Crumbl got past its first store, much less expanded across the country. It has all the trappings of a vanity project sponsored by someone with deep pockets- niche product, high prices, minimalist décor, tech-heavy processes, minimal human interaction. I don’t like it one bit, but it’s on the main drag in a college town so it probably makes bank. 

I’ll leave Crumbl to the UCB kids who don't know any better and get better product for a better price at Butter Pecan.

Cookbook Review: "Mooncakes and Milk Bread", by Kristina Cho

The cover is gorgeous, and the images inside are every bit as beautiful

It's always interesting to see publishings from people I've worked alongside in the past. The better I know them, the more I'm sometimes torn about how critical I ought to be. This time I don't have to worry about it though, because I don't have anything bad to say. For those who know me well, you know that's... not common.

Kristina Cho of Eat Cho Food is a Bay Area local, and on several past occasions joined me and my comrades at our cooking school to host a variety of classes. As such, my fellow chef-instructors and I had the opportunity to test some of her recipes at scale, and I remember them fondly as I revisit them in her 2021 book Mooncakes and Milk Bread. 

This is more than just a cookbook, though it certainly does a stellar job as one. Each section speaks at length on a different facet of Chinatowns, celebrations, family businesses, and the carefully nurtured world of Asian restaurants, bakeries and cafes, doing so from the equally rare perspective of someone near enough to gather and share the in-depth knowledge and understanding without necessarily being buried by it. While not necessarily a 'coffee table book', it's definitely one worth reading through on a leisurely afternoon.

The introduction includes some of the important contextual parts of the book- many cookbooks with similar notions tend to put them at the end. I'm talking about, of course, ingredients and equipment. In addition to the building block ingredients, this section also offers a few pages on navigating Asian grocery stores- something quite useful for the uninitiated.
Rather than add an equipment list to every recipe (as I am prone to doing here on this blog), this section offers a list of likelies, and if anything obvious might be missing from your pantry or cabinets, it makes it easier to check whatever recipe you wanted to make. 

Fair warning, the one thing you really ought to have to get the most out of this book is a stand mixer- but that's to be expected for any baking-focused book. There are also A Lot Of Gadgets that see occasional use, so if your home kitchen is cramped, you may have to get creative. Though that's something gently encouraged in the text itself too, so don't fret if you don't have, for example, a Taiwanese Pineapple Cake mold. I don't, and I do Asian cuisine for a living!

Chapter 1 starts with the titular "Mother Of All Milk Bread". The how, the why, and the emphasis on its versatility are right there at the start, giving you a clear heads-up on what's to come. From there, we're treated to some great baseline recipes like Fluffy Steamed Bun Dough(p.17), the (Scallion) Pancake(p.23), and the Mo(p.35), along with things to serve in, on, or alongside them. If you were waffling on a purchase, this section alone more than justifies it, and there's so much more to come.

Chapters 2 and 3 are largely recipes that start with "Mother of All Milk Bread dough to step X", so getting that down perfectly is a must- but if you bought this book you were probably planning on doing that anyway. It also demonstrates in a more practical sense the abstract concept of baking and pastry bulding blocks- '5 ingredients, 500 combinations, 50,000 results'. The biggest winner here is pages 48-49 though, where you're given the trick to shaping most of the fancy looking buns you see in Asian bakeries!

This is going to make a world of difference in your baking presentation

Chapter 4 is titled 'Cakes and Tarts', but it also gives a look at the Chinese celebratory calendar and the treats one's likely to see around those times so it can be quite helpful if you're looking for something specific. The recipes in this section's first half vary widely, with another major building block (Chinese Puff Pastry, p.157) and delicious treats for the oven, stovetop, and steamer alike. The second half is Mooncakes in all their (Lala) glory. This bit is where most of the specialty gadgets come into play, so read carefully and twice before attempting things in this part of the book.

Chapter 5 is 'Cookies', and shorter than the others so far. But in brevity it offers decisiveness. The recipes in this chapter aren't terribly complex (with two notable exceptions on pp.199 and 207) and have great versatility. Mostly this is due to the recipes being centered around some sort of nut or seed, and those are largely interchangeable with no more than an easy tweak or two.

Chapter 6 is 'Chinese Breakfast'. Oh, man. This is the good stuff. It's dim sum classics and traditional tasties with some clever new fillings and flavors. I won't spoil anything here but reading this chapter made me go out for dim sum. (I'd have made them myself but dim sum for two is A Lot Of Work and I was very, very hungry.)

Chapter 7, 'Sips', is brief but thorough, giving a number of basic recipes and clever drink concepts that can also function as templates for a myriad of other flavor combinations. Having worked in a boba shop before, I got a good chuckle out of some of it and wholeheartedly approve.

This is a fantastic book, full of history, humor, family, friends, and food. I'm delighted it exists, because it has so much to offer so many. Well done indeed, Kristina. You've done this very proud.