We got our first negative review today, on Yelp. It was tough to read, mostly because you put your heart and soul into your establishment, you tweak and finetune and sweat and get it just so and you hope that hoardes of people will flock to tell the world how awesome it all is.
And, realistically, that’s what’s been happening at Fray thus far. We’ve had scores of people enthusiastically tell us how great they found the food and the beer options and the wine list and the staff. That’s been terrific.
But there’ll always be one person who just doesn’t dig it. Sometimes more than one.
And so it went that a reviewer named Katy took to Yelp to complain about our small portions, high prices, mediocre soup and, oddly, that the bowl of potato chips her friend ordered came to the table as actual potato chips and not fries.
We’ll scrub the potato chip thing as an issue because, seriously, have you tried the things? They’re magnificent – house-made, rosemary-infused, sea salt and pepper spiced fried potato chips that disappear as soon as they hit the table.
And we’ll also ignore the dig at the pumpkin creme fraiche soup, being as we sell a ton of it and have comment cards left and right telling us how great it is.
But the price and portion size thing… is that a fair point?
Kinda.
Look, we know that there are places on Main Street where you can get a barrel of spag-bols for $2.50. We’ve all enjoyed visits to restaurants where the portions are so big you can’t figure out where the place could make a profit. And we’ve also all been to places where the huge portions and low prices give away the fact that you’re eating non-fresh, frozen, processed, possibly cooked the day before ingredients that were perhaps shipped in from Chile.
But our ingredients are not. They’re from Cambie Street and Granville Island and farms in Abbotsford and vegetable farms in Richmond and breweries in Surrey and meat producers in Pemberton. Our vegetables come to us with soil still on them. Our meat comes so fresh we don’t have to cook it to a medium well done state to ensure nobody gets sick, unlike most restaurants in town. Our chicken is valley chicken, our pork is Abbotsford-bred, our beef is from interior B.C., our cheese is from Benton Brothers, and our purple yam bread, ketchup, BBQ sauce and mayo – that’s made in-house. No bottles, no jars.
That takes time and labour. It also takes commitment, and sometimes it costs money to get food delivered three or four times a week (to maintain freshness) instead of once (where a truck is backed up to the door and boxes of frozen food are unloaded into a coolroom).
Yes, it’s true, our mac and cheese costs more than $5. But it’s also true that its made with fresh radiatore that comes from a pasta artisan in Port Moody, and has three cheeses that are aged and of premium quality, and the dish is made that day, not reheated from earlier in the week.
Our food is good. It’s the way food should be – fresher, healthier and of a higher quality than most are used to.
So we’ll probably get another few low rating reviews on Yelp, Urbanspoon, OpenTable and DineHere before all is said and done. But, at the same time, we’ll hope that people who enjoy fresh ingredients and attention to detail will feel that what we’re producing is worth a positive review, and repeat custom, and the sharing of our existence with friends.
After all, the more people who come eat at Fray, the better deal we can get from bulk buying, and the lower prices will go.
It all starts with you. Click the table reservation link on the right hand side of the page, and come see what you think.
Archive for Rants
The price of freshness
Why you won’t find Budweiser at Fray
Take it away, The Pour Fool:
Budweiser has always been far more about marketing than beer. The founder of Anheuser Busch, Adolphus Busch, refused to drink his own brew, calling it “that slop” (he was German, of course, so it came out “dot schlop”) and stuck to wine. AB first made its massive incursion into every American beer market not because Americans were clamoring for the fantastic beer but because the uber-financed new St. Louis brewery actually paid the rent for tavern owners who agreed to sell Bud and kick out all their competitors.
And, oh yeah, it tastes like sockwater.
Fray has three over-arching rules. Here’s the flow chart:
Budweiser doesn’t make it past the first step on our food flow chart. It tastes horrible. But it also fails on steps two and three.
That’s why our draft beers, all six of them, are B.C.-based, it’s why they’re all microbrews, and it’s why you won’t find Canadian, Kokanee or Coors in the fridge.
Sure, we’ll stock a nice German brew or a hefty Belgian ale. We’ll even go to the US for a well crafted beer, but our heart is where we hang our hat.
Out of the taps, we’re stocking Okanagan 1516 Lager (let’s call that our nod to the mainstream), R&B Raven Cream Ale, Driftwood White Bark Ale, Phillips Blue Buck Ale, Russell Blood Alley Bitter, and Red Racer India Pale Ale.
And our thinking is, if you can’t find a beer to love in that batch, you’re in need of some tastebud education.
But just in case, in the fridge we’re stocking local favourites Granville Island Honey Lager and Steam Whistle Pilsner, along with some non-local brews that we feel still make the first step on the flow chart: Red Stripe, Hoegarden, Brooklyn Lager, Pacifico, Peroni, Guiness, Leffe and (to keep the hipsters happy) Pabst Blue Ribbon.
Our wines are all from B.C. with one exception: There’s not a lot of B.C. based shiraz, so we’re hosting an Ontario option for those that like that kind of claret.
But no Budweiser. No Millers. No Coors. No Michelob. No Molson. Get used to it. Embrace it. Retrain yourself to be cool with it.
Nail. Fill. Sand. Blow. Times 1000.
There’s nothing quite like the feeling of doing renovations with your own two hands. Mind you, that ‘feeling’ is essentially early onset arthritis, especially when you’ve decided to cover every surface with wainscotting, thereby ensuring you’ll need to nail in every single surface, fill each nail hole, sand each nail hole, and then paint the whole thing.
With gnarled hands after the first four of the above, and having sanded every wall into the wee hours of Saturday and Sunday morning, the painting will be done by someone else.
My hands are so clawed up, I’m having to type this with a pencil in my teeth.
Around the same time as this was going on, we had to knock out a wall to move a fridge, replace a toilet that had decided to turn itself into a beaver dam, and send four tons worth of trash (literally) from the Trong Dong days to the tip.
All this so we can cook you a nice grilled cheese once in a while and maybe pour you a beer.
Still. Wouldn’t change a thing. Well, except the awning.
Anthony Bourdain, you are always welcome at Fray
Legendary TV chef and no-BS talker Anthony Bourdain is welcome at our place any time, especially after putting the verbal slipper in to a host of TV chefs that spend more time on their rep than their food.
Bourdain called Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives host Guy Fieri to task, saying “I’m glad that’s not me,” and saying of Rachael Ray, “I don’t know why she bothers. To her credit, she never said she was good at it.”
Take it way, Vancouver Sun:
His harshest comments, however, were saved for Paula Deen, the cooking show host and restauranteur known for her high fat Southern cooking. Bourdain called Deen “the worst, most dangerous person to America”, that “her food sucks” and, apparently alluding to her affiliation with Smithfield Foods, Inc., accused her of “unholy connections with evil corporations and she’s proud of the fact that her food is f***ing bad for you [...].”
Damn right. It’s easy to make something taste good if you drown it in butter, deep fry it and slather it in MSG, ice cream or sugar.
Food professionals have a responsibility, like automobile manufacturers, to ensure their product is used safely and doesn’t end up killing the consumer.
At Fray, we’re giving it our best shot to combine great flavours with health, freshness and sustainability, while helping the local food producer economy thrive.
Maybe Paula Deen could do a little more for fan base by teaching them how to grow their own food, or track down local suppliers, rather than buy it processed from the back of a Smithfield truck.
