I have been swithering, to use a great Scots term, about Union being a pure soup cafe - soup, salad, gorgeous breads and nothing else. The menu streamlined; the cafe specialising in soups; the numbers of soups on offer increasing as time goes on. Rather like Ali Yeganeh's Soup Man in New York - we do soup. If you don't want soup, don't come in here. I like that attitude; that robust confidence to stand by your original idea.
However, the thought of turning away sandwich-seeking customers makes me twitch a bit. As I get more nervous about this, I start to widen the menu options to include sandwiches, even though I don't want Union to be yet another Edinburgh sandwich shop. Then I fret that I'm wandering away from the original idea, and then the frets grow.
The Geek knew of these switherings before I was properly aware of them, and now I realise that I swing from being totally confident in the soup-only business model to panicking about it. Thus my confidence (or lack of) can be plotted on the Panini Scale:
In other news, I may be embarking on a renaming exercise for some of my soups. The soup trialists got cream of courgette and spinach this week. Something about this made me ask them if they'd choose this soup from a cafe menu. Almost all of them said 'no' - but they all loved the taste. One of the triallists said I should call the soup 'The Big Green', as the spinach-and-courgette name sounded depressingly healthy. I like that. Not sure what made me ask them that question - must have been irking away in the back of my mind as well. It has, though, reinforced the idea of letting customers have a taste before they buy. That then led me to the 'semi Genius' and 'full Genius' - a lunch serving of multiple smaller portions of soup. 'Full Genius' is all six. Semi ... well, guess.
And I tried a new bakery this week; Bakery Andante in Morningside. Which has left me with a rather annoying earworm.
No comments:
Post a Comment