10.09.07

The Root Beer is For Sale!

Posted in The Story at 10:13 am by Chef Matt

After almost two months of testing and refining and subjecting my fellow chefs to varying degrees of palatable bottle-fermented concoctions, my root beer has made it to the production block! Seven bottles of Rustico’s finest homemade root beer (I need a name for it, don’t I? I’m thinking “Fin Root Beer” - “Furb” for short…) were officially deemed worthy of serving to our customers (by Chef and myself) and so we put together the dessert for our servers to sell.

Root beer and vanilla ice cream. The best dessert flavor combination since… well… ever.

We decided the root beer would go out as a dessert item with a scoop of high quality vanilla gelato for a “build your own root beer float”. Homemade root beer, awesome ice cream - what’s not to love about this?

Well apparently in the first night, there was a lot that was not to love, as exactly zero were sold. But on the second night, I was still hanging around (watching my beloved Philadelphia Eagles get their asses handed to them by the Giants) when Andrew came out and told me that one root beer had been sold.

I was ecstatic. Here was all my months of effort finally culminating in a single sale. The first review is always the most important I feel with a new dish. For me anyway, it sets the tone of how everyone else will perceive the dish from then on. I wanted this one to be perfect. I pulled out a scoop of ice cream, opened the bottle of root beer, let the fizz overflow die down, rinsed off the bottle and placed them together on a cedar plank (for the “rustic” look we go for at Rustico) and sent it out.
I pulled aside our floor manager, Jon, and told him that he had to “touch” the table that ordered the root beer float to see what they thought. I just had to know.

The next few minutes were arduous, both because I was dying to know how they liked my root beer, and also because the Eagles continued to suck.

Jon came back into the kitchen and gave me the news:

“Matt, they LOVED your root beer. One of the people at the table was a self-proclaimed ‘root beer aficionado’ and he said the root beer was ’simply outstanding’!”

GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLLLL! Yeah, it kinda felt like that…

Vindication.

Chef had given me an awesome project, one I really put my all into, and now, two months later, the result has turned into something our customers think is great. It’s hard for me to put into words exactly how that feels. It’s like seeing your own kid hit a homerun or come home with straight A’s. This root beer was my baby - and on it’s first time at bat, it knocked the ball clear out of the park.

I won’t say “scored a touchdown” because even the Eagles couldn’t manage that…

So come one, come all - please come visit me and try out our root beer float! I don’t have a huge amount of them - I make batches of about eight at a time, but I am trying to make sure we always have enough on hand for the next visit by an “aficionado”. If you are that special root beer lover - I think I have something here that will not disappoint you! And I’d love to hear what you think!

Chef Matt

P.S. I know that the next question y’all are going to ask is, “What about the recipe?”  I’m not ready to post that yet for two reasons:

1. I only just came out with this root beer, and I want people to come by and try it first.
2. I’m actually still working on the recipe. It needs more little tweaks here and there - very minor ones, but tweaks all the same - and I don’t want to give you all the recipe until I have it perfected.

Stumble it!

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