Paul Heinz

Original Fiction, Music and Essays

Filtering by Tag: food

My Experience with Blue Apron

While recognizing that my somewhat cushy existence as an at-home dad/musician/writer doesn’t give me much leeway for complaining, after being the primary meal planner and preparer of the house for the past twenty years, I decided that I needed a break.  It wasn’t so much the shopping and cooking that bothered me as it was the planning.  Deciding what to eat in order to satisfy everyone’s tastes and restrictions was getting to be a mental chore, so for my 50th birthday I requested a gift certificate to Blue Apron, a meal delivery service that supplies its customers with all the ingredients needed to cook recipes you choose on-line.  Easy peasy, and it seemed like a fine antidote to the meal planning virus I’d contracted. 

While I’ve enjoyed aspects of the service, after eight weeks of using Blue Apron, I’ve decided that the pros don’t outweigh the cons, and this morning I cancelled my service.  Let me preface this by saying that if both my wife and I were working full-time, I might not be so quick to abort the mission.  The fact that I have a lot of flexibility to shop and prepare meals changes the ledger considerably.

So why did I cancel?  There were three things that made me feel uneasy about the service, as good as it might be. 

First, it’s not cheap.  I of course knew that going in, but seeing the bill show up on the credit card each week started to wear on me, especially knowing full-well that I could easily drive to a grocery store to pick up whatever food I needed at a fraction of the cost.  I was paying $10 per person per meal, so $80 a week.  This is not unbelievably expensive, and I doubt a company could do it for much less, but nevertheless, price was one nagging concern.

Second, I found my shopping to be much less frequent, which on the surface is a good thing, but my trips became so infrequent and my habits so poor that our food inventory suffered as a result.  It was so easy to say “I’ve got dinner all set for tonight – we can hang in there one more day before I do another shopping run” that we’d be left to face a breakfast of toast and a lunch of peanut butter sandwiches (not that there's anything wrong with that).  We also kept running out of basic items like milk, yogurt and bananas.  In short, I grew terribly lazy and used Blue Apron as an excuse to avoid shopping at all costs.

But the biggest reason for cancelling the service is the staggering amount of waste created each week by the Blue Apron deliveries.  As a guy who started recycling two decades before curbside pickup was a thing, unnecessary waste is an important point for me.  Ellen Cushing wrote a nice summary of the waste incurred with a service like Blue Apron (competitors have similar issues) and the somewhat disingenuous claim that most of the materials can be recycled.  Blue Apron used to have a free recycling program that allowed customers to send all the contents back to the company, but this has been cancelled, no doubt due to the cost.

If Blue Apron or a service like it could be localized so that – like the Chicago-based Oberweis dairy deliver service – we could have a cooler with reusable ice packs, I would be on-board.  Eliminate the box and the ice packs, include a synthetic insulator to separate cold items from the rest, and this could be a service that yields nothing more than a few small plastic bags.  

There are also grocery delivery businesses like Instacart and Peapod that are good fits for some people, and I may one day yield to that temptation, but for now I’m going to go back to shopping more regularly and forcing my family to share the burden by choosing a few meals each week that they want me to shop and cook for.  At least that’s the plan.  How long before it goes awry?

Dining at Topolobampo

It was a mere five years ago or so when my son Sam and I flipped through the TV channels and wound up tuning into PBS, where we became entranced with an enthusiastic geeky guy singing the praises of Mexican cuisine. Rick Bayless’s One Plate at a Time had us at “cochinita pibil,” whatever the hell that was. It hardly mattered. It was his passion that roped us in, infectious and encouraging, and like foot soldiers of an oddly ebullient military commander, we were ready to go wherever he led us.

Except to his flagship restaurant, apparently. Yes, about four years ago my wife and I managed to make it down to Chicago for a brunch at Frontera Grill, and twice now in the last year we’ve purchased Cubano sandwiches at Bayless’s O’Hare location, Tortas Frontera. But we’d never been to the Granddaddy of the Bayless franchise, the upscale Topolobampo, so when my son had one request for this 16th birthday – dining at Topolobampo (the name of which I didn’t master until Saturday as we were driving into Chicago) – we decided to take the plunge. 

It helped that we were a group of four instead of our usual family of five, because I’m not used to spending bookoo bucks on dining experiences. I’m simply not wired that way. Hell, my personal wine chart with a y-axis representing the price of a bottle of wine and an x-axis representing my happiness results in a straight vertical line. I like it all. When I “splurge” on a Wednesday afternoon and decide to get a lunch at Chipotle for nine dollars, I’m happy as a clam downing my sofritas, black beans and brown rice. Lovely. Until Saturday night, I believe the most I ever spent on a dinner was somewhere around $120 per person, drinks included. On Saturday we exceeded that by a considerable margin.

Our jovial yet subtle John Goodman-like waiter made the pitch for the newly introduced “Winter Beach Vacation” dinner, and all four of us took the bait (see what I did there?), enjoying seven courses ranging from crab taco (like no other taco I’ve ever had) to seared scallops to octopus, all delectable, though my favorite was probably the lobster chilpachole. Our meal was orchestrated perfectly, neither rushed nor tedious, with just enough time to enjoy our dish, let it settle for a bit, and then move on to the next course. Plates were retrieved at the right time, drinks were replenished timely (the house margarita was superb), and all four of us enjoyed a delicious, leisurely dinner in about two and a half hours.

Originally my daughter was supposed to fly up and join us for the weekend, but when she had to back out due to a school requirement, we invited my son’s friend, whose palette has expanded considerably since our camping trip in 2012 when his diet was restricted to…I think bread and Chips Ahoy. His attendance on Saturday night worked out perfectly, because what ever else you can say about Topolobampo, it isn’t obviously friendly to vegetarians; my daughter would have had to have put in a special request, and I’m not sure what the results would have been. Probably wonderful. But something to think about if you’re a veggie looking for fine Mexican dining.

So was it worth it? I’ve written before about how haphazard we humans value things. We’ll drive three blocks further to save a few cents on gas or spend weeks pricing out the best deal on a grill or refrigerator, and then think nothing of shelling out $12 on a martini or $100 plus on a concert ticket. In short, we are inconsistent, and we’re all a bit different on where we’re willing to spend money. For me, the value I get out of watching a good movie for $10 exceeds that of seeing a musical for $125. For others, it’s just the reverse.

An experience at a place like Topolobampo is a once a year or every other year event for me. Mind you, I have three kids in college and a new sewer coming this spring. There may come a time when our disposable income is such that we can enjoy a high-end restaurant more regularly, but I think it has much more to do with my mindset and my upbringing. My German-Lutheran Midwestern roots taught me to watch my wallet and choose carefully, a practice that has served me well in life, but I still pick my spots and manage to spend money on life experiences where appropriate.

Last Saturday was one of them, one plate at a time. Seven of them. And three margaritas. Say it with me: muy beuno.

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