The Tastemakers (43 page)

Three times a year—spring, summer, and fall—Schaibly got to flex his culinary muscles with seasonal menus known in the business as limited time offers (LTOs). “This is my outlet as a chef to do new cool stuff,” he said with a huge grin. “The guest likes what they like. It makes it challenging for me to update things. There's a certain amount of a fondue cage that I live in. Believe me, I'm pushing on the edge of the cage. For me, bringing fresh ideas is bringing in certified Angus sirloin for the bourguignon fondue. You'd have thought that I was trying to close the place down and turn it into a burger joint when I did that.” The LTOs were Schaibly's opportunity to melt current dining trends, seasonal ingredients, and his own creativity into the fondue pot. He kept an eye out at farmer's markets and in restaurants, read culinary blogs and magazines, and experimented with ideas at home. Schaibly was fondue's creative edge, its future tastemaker, and he greatly enjoyed the challenge of keeping fondue relevant. “Yes, I live in a fondue cage,” he said, “but once you embrace what's going on, you can do whatever you want, man. That's what's cool about my job. I love it.” Each LTO involved a unique cheese fondue, a seasonal salad, and a fresh spin on dessert fondue. (Oil and broth fondues remained the same.) LTOs were devised a full year ahead of their chain-wide debut so the company could test them in select markets, tweak the recipes if necessary, and secure a consistent supply of ingredients. In the past Schaibly had made a fondue inspired by gyros (spiced lamb with a tzatziki-style dip) and an all-bacon fondue menu, a trend near and dear to his heart. Currently the chain was serving a goat cheese fondue because
Schaibly preferred lighter cheeses in the spring and summer months (imagine eating a bowl of hot gruyere in Florida in August), though it took ages to achieve the right consistency. The goat cheese turned grainy when melted, so it only really worked when it was folded in at the end with other melted cheese. He had also recently tried mixing red wine and cheese for a fondue, and although it tasted good, the purple color would never fly with guests.

That day in Tampa Schaibly was putting the finishing touches on several LTOs. The Spring 2014 menu was designed around the salad, which would be a classic caprese with Roma tomatoes and a fresh Wisconsin mozzarella he had encountered on one of his trips there. The cheese fondue was going to feature a sharp butterkäse and fontina cheese blend, white wine, tomato pesto, and diced fresh tomatoes. The idea had come from a recent trip Schaibly and the Melting Pot's executives took to Switzerland, where they reacquainted themselves with fondue's roots, eating fondue for a week straight. In one epic session they ate twenty-five fondues in a single sitting, a feat Schaibly described as “gross” and Bob Johnston called “torture,” but it gave them a wealth of new ideas, including the tomato fondue. There were two items that Schaibly was still trying to perfect, and this is why the executive team was coming in for lunch today. One was a dessert for the Spring 2014 LTO that was a white chocolate peaches-and-cream fondue, and the other was a Fall 2014 LTO contender that Schaibly was particularly excited about: a lobster bisque fondue that he had been testing at home.

Because the Melting Pot is only open for dinner, the executive team sat around one of the tables in the empty restaurant. There was Bob Margait (director of operations), Mike Lester (Melting Pot president), Scott Pierce (Front Burner's CFO), and Kristy Galke (R&D coordinator). All were veterans of the multi-unit casual American restaurant business, whether they had been with Outback steakhouses in their grand expansion or had worked their way up from a Melting Pot server position. These weren't gourmet foodies and culinary tastemakers chasing the latest trend with bold experimentation but rather calculating restaurant business executives attuned to the market realities of the mainstream customer they were
serving, someone who was typically a middle-class woman between nineteen and thirty-five years old. The Melting Pot targeted your average American fondue eater, so to speak. They weren't looking for culinary fireworks as much as a subtle shift that could bring in new customers and keep the old ones coming back. A nudge of the needle. Schaibly and a waiter put two empty fondue pots on the table's induction burners (which heat metal but are cool to the touch) and began explaining the lobster bisque fondue as he assembled it. He poured in just over a cup of lobster bisque he had sourced from a local supplier, then began folding in the cheese for the classic Swiss fondue, all the while whisking with a fork.

“It's gonna be heavy,” said Lester, “but it's gonna be delicious.”

“We might need that lemon juice,” said Galke, watching the concoction rapidly thicken.

“Yeah,” said Schaibly, “it's super thick. That might have been wishful thinking to think it's only a bisque base.” He squeezed in another lemon. “I'm hoping this acidity will cut it more.” He sprinkled in chopped cooked lobster tail and shallots to the fondue and kept whisking. “Careful,” he said, finishing up, “it's gonna be stringy.”

The fondue had the taste of a lobster grilled cheese mixed with a bisque, a hint of seafood but not overly cheesy, with a nice tang. “I love it!” Pierce declared. “I'd eat it all day.” Margait dove in next with his fork, speaking as he swirled the lobster fondue with a twirl to coat his bread. “We'd have to lock in the bisque and fancier lobster meat now, while the price is low,” he said, popping it into his mouth. Schaibly promised he could secure a good price and would fix the viscosity, but there was concern around the table that if it didn't fly, they'd be left with oceans of lobster bisque on their hands. “Remember when he had to give away a hundred thousand pounds of chicken pomegranate sausage?” said Margait, recalling a previously unsuccessful attempt to capitalize on a food trend.

The lobster fondue was taken away, and Schaibly returned with the ingredients for the white chocolate peaches-and-cream fondue. At the previous tasting a few weeks back, the peaches-and-cream fondue had been a big hit, but everyone agreed it was too thin and not peachy enough. Schaibly worked with a supplier to create
a concentrated natural peach puree that, along with fresh diced peaches, could hopefully amplify the flavor of the fondue.

“I like the flavor of peach fondue,” said Lester, “but compared to others it doesn't compel me to order it over other chocolate fondues.”

“What about using fresh peaches to dip with?” asked Margait.

“On the plate?” asked Schaibly. “The problem is that when a peach is good, it's too soft to hold onto with a fondue fork.” Instead, they used the classic Melting Pot dessert dipper plate, which included cubes of crumb cake, marshmallows, and sturdier fruits like strawberries. The peaches-and-cream fondue was powerfully sweet, almost overwhelmingly so, and the peach only really worked well with certain dippers, like the sponge cake, but when it did, it was fantastic, like some great chocolate bar that had yet to be invented or a Starbucks frozen drink developed in Mattson's lab. Schaibly was pleased.

After lunch I spoke with Lester about the company's new international efforts, which had begun picking up steam over the past few years as domestic growth slowed because the Melting Pot already had such a large market presence. There was now a location in Edmonton, Alberta, which had become one of the busiest in the chain, as well as several in Mexico, which were exceeding all expectations. “When you really look at it most cultures have some sort of communal-pot cooking,” Lester said, though cultural differences required some adjustments. Whereas the chain's biggest challenge in North America was the long time required to eat there, in Mexico that was the Melting Pot's biggest strength. “Americans want to refuel and get out,” Lester said, “and in Mexico they love how they can eat and don't get pushed out.” In American Melting Pots the lowest-selling fondue was the traditional Neuchâteloise, but in Mexico it outsold all other fondues ten to one. Mexican customers were split evenly between men and women (in the United States women dominated the business), and lunch was a bigger meal than dinner. The latest frontier for fondue was in the Middle East, where the Melting Pot had signed agreements to open seventeen restaurants in several Arab countries, largely in wealthy Gulf states like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait as well as Lebanon. There were requests from
Brazil, China, and Indonesia for franchises, as the world's growing middle class looked to the Melting Pot to deliver its own spin on a food that had originated in Switzerland, crossed the ocean to America, and evolved into a trend that was now ready for a global resurrection.

F
ondue had seen a second life once before. During the 1990s and into the early 2000s fondue enjoyed a brief return to favor, as the children conceived during those wild midcentury fondue nights discovered its charms for themselves. The
New York Times
reported in 1990 that sales of new home fondue kits were double what their manufactures expected and were now littering the shelves of house-wares stores nationwide. Magali Pelletier, the product development manager with the Quebec kitchenware company Trudeau credits the boom to the recession of the 1980s and, once again, Faith Popcorn's behavioral cocooning trend. Trudeau had distributed other fondue sets for years, but in the mid-1990s they manufactured their own in a rainbow of bright colors and made three-in-one fondue sets, with interchangeable compartments so you could use just one boiler to make cheese, oil, and chocolate fondues, all with little mess. Between 1996 and 2001 the company's fondue business grew tenfold, selling one million sets in Canada and the United States at chains like Target, Crate & Barrel, and Bed Bath and Beyond. Restaurants also got back into the fondue revival. A 2003 story in
Time
magazine (“It's Now Hip to Dip”) chronicled the inventive gourmet fondues popping up at restaurants such as Luna Park in San Francisco, Vine in Los Angeles, and New York's cheese-focused Artisanal. This continues today with places like the Bourgeois Pig, a restaurant in New York that is staking a claim to hipster fondue, with savory blue cheese and honey entrées as well as a dark chocolate, bacon (of course), and beer fondue for dessert.

During this period, for the first time in years, new fondue cookbooks began appearing on bookstore shelves. The most popular was
Fondue
by Lenny Rice and Brigid Callinan, a book that was entirely
cheese focused and began after the two friends, who were working in the food business in San Francisco, threw a fondue party in 2002 to use up various odds and ends from a cheese course they'd taken. “People were taking different things off the dessert tray and using it in the cheese,” said Callinan, who now teaches culinary arts in Idaho. “They were dipping Fig Newtons in cheese. It was super fun. Everyone said, ‘You've got to do that again.' ”
Fondue
was even published as a special custom edition for Williams and Sonoma stores, which paired it for sale with their newly popular fondue sets. This fondue revival died down by the mid-2000s, pushed back to nostalgic territory for one reason or another (e.g., trends toward small individual tapas plates), but it wasn't hard to see how the fondue trend could reinvent itself every decade or so, melting and reforming with the flavors, ingredients, and influences of other trends in order to stay relevant. You could sprinkle chia seeds in a cheese fondue to make it ostensibly healthier, use Red Prince apples or purple sweet potatoes for dipping, and do a tikka masala curry fondue, with chunks of paneer cheese and naan bread for dipping. Perhaps the future of fondue was found in businesses like the DipStick, a Denver food truck that had taken fondue to the streets in 2012.

Everyone involved with fondue, past and present, readily acknowledges that the food would likely never return to the popularity it enjoyed as a trend in the 1960s. Nonetheless, the inherent qualities of eating fondue ensured that it would always occupy a place in food culture. Schaibly and Bob Johnston told me several times how first-time guests at the Melting Pot regularly marveled at what happened when they dined there. Their children's faces, normally glued to screens at the dinner table, were completely entranced by the experience, and their phones remained in pockets throughout the meal. Conversation between strangers eased into friendships, and dates blossomed into romance as cubes of bread kissed melted cheese. “It's not what's going on in the pot as much as what's going on outside the pot,” Johnston said, repeating a company saying. Fondue was as much a social trend as an edible one.

I experienced this firsthand when Schaibly and I returned to the Melting Pot for dinner that night. It was a Thursday, and the
restaurant was now alive. Every table was full: couples on dates, large families with kids and grandparents, a dozen well-dressed young women on a girl's night out, and a private room holding a church fund-raiser. We took a seat in “Lover's Lane,” a row of highwalled booths that were the focal point of every Melting Pot. Our friendly waiter, John Martin, came over and explained every aspect of the meal, from the order of courses to the way the fondues are prepared, while asking about ourselves, my visit to Tampa so far, and whether we had any special requests. Schaibly ordered the seasonal goat cheese fondue with a side of premium dipper plates that included Nueske's summer sausage and sliced Granny Smith apples. Martin came back out a while later with a double-chambered fondue pot that he placed onto the table's cooktop, and he began assembling the fondue from the tray of ingredients. Creamy garlic and herb cheese, butterkäse, and fontina went into the pot with chopped garlic and white wine, and we watched it slowly liquefy, releasing a steam that smelled like a drive-through farmland. Right before the last solid bit melted, Martin tipped in the crumbled goat cheese and began folding it into the fondue with a fork, slowly and carefully.