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Yalie Cuisine. “We don’t want students to feel that eating well is suffering,” says Josh Viertel, explaining the philosophy behind the “sustainable” menu at Yale’s Berkeley College dining hall, as reported by Alison Leigh Cowan in The New York Times. Twist is, it’s the Yale students who can’t have Berkeley’s experimental organic meals who are suffering. They’ll do just about anything to have at the burgers of “grass-fed lamb and freshly picked mint … chicken brodo with pasta and greens and pork loin with fennel … They try to slip fake identification cards past the Yale employees stationed at the entrance. They don sweatshirts with the Berkeley insignia to make it look as if they belong …”

“Whatever they can get away with,” says Catherine Jones, Berkeley’s executive chef. It sure beats “picking from the same old nonorganic salad bars, scooping out the sugary cereals and chewing on chuck-patty hamburgers slipped into white bread rolls” like they do at Yale’s 11 other dining halls. The idea for this “sustainable” dining hall, yale.edu/sustainablefood, was hatched four years by Alice Waters, a chef, “when her daughter Fanny became a freshman.” The project started by turning “a vacant lot into a lush vegetable garden that doubles as a laboratory … The three-meal-a-day rollout came in September 2003.” The thinking is “that people and communities thrive when meals consist of locally produced, seasonal ingredients, rather than food that is shipped long distance or processed so it keeps.”

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Much of PF Chang’s success comes from its operations practices, analysts say. Restaurant managers are partial owners in the eateries they run. This helps reduce turnover — the bane of the industry — allowing the company to deliver the key factor in a restaurant’s success: a consistent customer experience in food and service, says Sharon Zackfia, an analyst with William Blair & Co. in Chicago, who rates PF Chang’s stock outperform.

What also helps, says PF Chang Chief Executive Richard Federico, is that his places offer extras not found at many mom-and-pop Chinese restaurants: upscale decor, dessert menus, cappuccino, and a 50-bottle wine list. “PF Chang’s has offered an alternative without compromising product quality,” he says.

Business Week

Starbucks Speed. How to serve drinks — and food — faster without making customers feel like “they’re in an Indy-500 pit stop,” is a key challenge facing Starbucks, reports Steven Gray in The Wall Street Journal. “This is a game of seconds,” says Silvia Peterson, Starbucks’s director of store operations, whose job it is to find ways to play that game better. It’s easy to understand why Starbucks hired her: According to Mintel International Group, mintel.com, “64 percent of Americans said they pick a restaurant based on how much time they have.” That’s why Silvia and “her team of 10 engineers” came up with bigger ice scoops, for example. That way, baristas only had to dip once for ice, helping to “cut 14 seconds off the average preparation time for blended beverages of about one minute.”

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