Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog
Cartago Delenda Est

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Tuesday, September 13, 2005
17:06 - Hearing myself think is overrated anyway	(top)
One of my favorite restaurants is Chipotle, the burrito place that moved into what was once a Boston Market a few blocks from work. I just love their food. The burritos are big and tasty, the salsa is fresh, the cheese�oh, the cheese�is just to die for, and when you're done eating a steak or barbacoa burrito you've got a serious burn of spice-related well-being going on. They use lime and cilantro in their rice. They make great chips with large-grain salt and a drizzle of lime juice. Their soft-drink cups are covered with soul-baring, self-effacing essays musing on the zen of Chipotle, on all the aspects of the dining experience from the role of cumin and cilantro to the eclectic music selection to the cruciality of having the kitchen open for all to see to even a pronunciation guide for the restaurant's name. Their menu is small�just a few major choices with a few posted variations�but there's a purity to it, like at In-N-Out, that makes you feel like you're part of some kind of cultural phenomenon: Children of the Chipotle. I swear, if I had to pick a single place to eat every day for the rest of my life, this would be it. There's only one thing I don't understand about the place, though: the acoustics. It's a chain, so maybe it varies from location to location in this regard, but I don't think so: they chose to do the interior d�cor in some kind of strange Industrial Midwestern/Corrugated Metal and Exposed Bolts/Hardwood Chairs and Dangling Ductwork motif that has an effect on sound that can best be described as apocalyptic. The metal wall coverings and clanking chairs hammer on casual sound waves in such a way that Chipotle is where conversations go to die. You have to shout to be heard across your own table. Yet you can hear everybody else's conversation all the way down to the cash register. The whole room is a giant echo chamber, without any soft surfaces anywhere to be seen to deaden the reverberations. The restaurant makes a big deal of all the cool music they play over their speaker system, but I can never make any of it out�everything but the bass line is drowned out by the metallic cacophony. The food is great there, indeed yes, but... man oh man, the noise. One of the cups, though, solicits customers to visit the restaurant's feedback page (click "Speak" on the site's Flash menu) and feel free to send comments to Joe Stupp, the guy in charge of making sure the Chipotle user experience is every bit as impeccable as that of taking an iPod out of its box. They seem to place a great deal of stock in this ideal, and it's always seemed incomprehensible to me that nobody's noticed this glaring problem yet in what is otherwise an outstanding lunch experience. I'd used the form once before to rave about the cheese, and Joe wrote back within 24 hours to thank me and talk about the fresh-grating process and so on. But this time I wanted to air an actual complaint. Here's what I got back: Brian, Thank you for writing us, and that does happen sometimes with the various locations we build that we can't seem to figure out the acoustics. We will look into this for sure at our Cupertino restaurant (are there other locations you visit?). In the meantime, if it is just too obnoxious for you to tolerate, then please just ask us to turn the tunes down for you, and we would be happy to do that. Sincerely, Joe Stupp Manager, Duct Tape and Plungers Chipotle So I guess I can expect to see a sound crew in the Cupertino Chipotle sometime in the near future, swinging boom mikes around and tapping on corrugated metal wall panels, fine-tuning the acoustics. I'm not sure what they can do to soak up the sound, frankly, without completely changing the look of the place; maybe they can stand some coat racks in strategic places in the room and drape carpets over them, or maybe put up some mannequins with frightwigs. But whatever happens, I remain convinced that there are few chain restaurants like this, where they give you this much interactive customer communication right up to the level of people who can make things happen. Small wonder the food's so good, dood.