Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

The votes are in – Modmarket has won American Institute of Architectures Restaurant Design award.  Thanks to everyone who voted in the People’s Choice Awards – we won that prize along with the jury award, being the only winner in a category to win both!  And thanks to the Boulder Daily Camera for this great picture and blurb in yesterday’s paper!

People always ask us why our basil chicken salad tastes so good.  The main reason?  It is made completely from scratch.  We cut everything fresh that goes into the salad AND we even oven roast our own tomatoes.  That last part made us understand why sun dried tomatoes are so darn expensive.  It takes  A LOT of tomatoes to make a small container of sundried tomatoes.  The second reason?  We use homemade aoili as the binder in our salad rather than store bought mayo.  What is aoili?  Ours is egg yolk, basil, olive oil, salt/pepper and garlic.  It is more sauce like than mayo like and tastes like heaven.  Third reason – we hand pull apart every chicken breast that we use in the salad.  This is a completely pain (literally – 170 degree chicken gets your fingertips uncomfortably hot almost instantly – the secret is tripling up on gloves and the burning in your fingertips becomes manageable) but pulled chicken just tastes better in our opinion than shredded or diced chicken.  It also tends to stay a bit juicier.  In the end it takes us about an hour to make 20lbs of chicken salad.  I think most restaurants would balk at taking this much time to do it, especially when we could buy pre-made stuff from our food vendors.  But if we bought it, we wouldn’t know exactly what was in it (all good stuff in our case) AND it wouldn’t taste nearly as good!

After months of prototyping, our gourmet sandwiches are finally for sale in our store.  The good folks at Crispin Porter + Bogusky and lots of peeps at the Boulder Farmer’s Market have helped been enjoying these tasty treats for a while now and now you can get in on the action next time you visit Modmarket.  As with all our food, these sandwiches are simple delights.  They are all built on an AMAZING ciabatta roll that is baked locally and toasted in our brick oven at 700 degrees.   The bread is made of 4 ingredients.  Flour, salt, yeast and water.  It is an artisan bread that is shaped by hand, so you will notice some variation in the size footprint of each sandwich, but trust us, they all weigh the same   We use aoili as a spread on our sandwiches.  What is aoili you ask?  Basically it is olive oil mixed with an emulsifier (egg whites or garlic in our case).  We make ours from scratch every day or so.  They BLOW AWAY any sandwich spread you are used to.  We have three different sandwiches on the menu right now – a basil chicken (featuring the best (and healthiest) chicken salad mix you have ever tasted, a chipotle steak (flavored with a chipotle aioli) and an arugula mozzarella one.  We only use whole, freshly grilled meats in our sandwiches.  No cold cuts or processed meats here!  When you try one, I think you will agree that we have just raised the bar for sandwiches in Boulder!

One of the reasons we started Modmarket is b/c I believe 100% in the healing power of foods.  Eating the right food is like putting high octane gas in your car, it just makes the system work better.  Everyday I read new books (like this one) or hear things like what is described in this AWESOME TED talk.  Do yourself a favor, take 5 minutes and watch it.  And if you don’t believe what he is saying, all you have to do is come eat salads at Modmarket everyday for a month and then examine how you feel (hint: you will feel A LOT better).

So yesterday I spent about 3 hours touring around Munson Farms in Boulder.  We are going to be buying a lot of produce from them throughout the summer and Bob Munson was nice enough to drive me around all the fields, show me where they were planting what, etc.  It was a lot of fun plus I got the added benefit of seeing the beginnings of their spring crop start to poke through the winter hardened soil.  Those little green shoots in the pic above will eventually turn into super tasty, locally grown lettuce.  How cool is that?  There is about a two month window when we will be able to get lettuces from Munson and during that time, we will have greens in our salads at the Farmers Market that were cut THAT DAY.  If you ordered a salad at 11am, the lettuce in it could be less than 3 hours from harvesting.  This is a new kind of ‘fast food’.  Our food is going as quickly as possible from the farm to your plate!  I only wish Colorado’s growing season was longer so we could do stuff like this all year around!

Both Rob and myself are fairly addicted to working out.  We were both pretty excited when the Colorado Athletic Club opened up a gym in the same center where Modmarket is located – working out is much easier when it is across the parking lot from your office.  I have been going there since they opened and can honestly say it is the nicest, best equipped gym I have ever been a member at.  The saline pool and hot tub alone are worth the price of admission.  The peeps that run the gym are pretty cool too – we convinced them to give us an offer to give to all our customers.  Next time you eat at Modmarket, flip over your receipt and you will see a free 5 day pass to the gym.  How cool is that?  Eat great food at the Mod, then go snag a yoga class and a hot tub across the street.  Sweet.

Interesting study recently came out showing that fatty foods can be as addictive as hard drugs. As someone who has watched numerous friends and family members struggle with changing eating habits over the years, this is not surprising at all.  One of the people involved in the study made a very interesting comparison between modern food and cocaine.

“We make our food very similar to cocaine now,” he says.

Coca leaves have been used since ancient times, he points out, but people learned to purify or alter cocaine to deliver it more efficiently to their brains (by injecting or smoking it, for instance). This made the drug more addictive.

According to Wang, food has evolved in a similar way. “We purify our food,” he says. “Our ancestors ate whole grains, but we’re eating white bread. American Indians ate corn; we eat corn syrup.”

Very interesting stuff.  Makes me happy that Modmarket is doing its part to be a solution in this whole food mess rather than part of the problem.