Fast and Limp

I’ve seen more than my share of restaurant trends come and go over the years. When crêperies were sizzling in the 1970s, I was hustling crêpes. When disco was the rage, I slithered through a combination nightclub-bistro as a waiter with a blow-dried coif and an unbuttoned satin shirt. That idiotic restaurant lasted ten months, but I still have the shirt.

The newest hot trend in modern dining, the “fast casual” concept, is less about novelty and more about saving cash. It’s a disturbing trend, because customer service is rendered irrelevant. These shiny new self-service restaurants are alluringly inexpensive, but patrons are treated more or less like cattle in the stockyard — move ’em on, head ’em up, move ’em out. That’s what dining in Chipotle or Moe’s Southwest Grill or the dreary Einstein Bros. Bagels feels like to me.

Cost-conscious dining always has a renaissance when the national economy goes wobbly. And given the state of the economy over the past few years, it’s no surprise that low-budget dining is big business. One of the fastest-growing culinary concepts is the Colorado-based Noodles & Company (which recently hired a Chipotle executive as its new CFO).

Local franchiser David Merola opened the metro area’s first Noodles & Company in May, but not in the location that would seem most ideal for a cheap, stylish noodle joint. Merola had initially planned to open his first restaurant in Westport, but instead he chose the southern suburb that’s become a potent magnet for corporate chains: Olathe.

I’ve been there twice now, and I question Merola’s sanity in choosing this oddball locale. It’s in the corner of a strip shopping center “pad site” that’s not particularly easy to find. And I’m not convinced that the natives really get the concept, which is vaguely similar to the ill-fated Semolina International Pasta Restaurant. Does anyone remember that Louisiana-based noodle joint? It was a full-service operation that served pasta dishes — supposedly “from around the world” — and didn’t last two years in Overland Park.

On one of my visits to Noodles & Company, I looked out the window and watched a well-dressed 30-ish couple climb out of their shiny SUV, walk in and stare up at the giant menu hanging above the front counter. They looked confused, which is completely understandable — the menu is difficult to read, and the counter looks like something from a small-town convenience store, jumbled up with a basket of plastic-wrapped cookies, a couple of wine bottles and a refrigerator loaded with bottled juices and water.

After pondering all of their options, the couple whispered to each other, then turned around and dashed back to their SUV. Could they have been culinary snobs? I suspect so, but the funny thing is that, in the fast-casual category, Noodles & Company is practically hoity-toity. The napkins might be paper, but the food is served on heavy white china, and the flatware is metal. There’s even a modest selection of wine, served in little jelly jars. (A glass is more expensive than most of the dinners.)

Some of my friends, perhaps nostalgic for their college days, adore Noodles & Company. “It was cheap. It was fresh,” says Jennifer, who frequently ate at the venue near her campus in Colorado. “I wish they would open one downtown.”

That would make sense. Noodles & Company may feel wildly out of place in Olathe, but it’s an obvious match for an urban demographic. In fact, there’s a lot to like about this ten-year-old restaurant chain. The food is prepared quickly, the prices are incredibly inexpensive, and the menu is imaginative but hardly as complicated as its “international” posturing would suggest. Many of the dishes share a lot of basic ingredients — carrots, red peppers, onions, chopped cabbage and mushrooms — and the truly exotic entrées, such as “Bangkok curry” or pad Thai, are pale facsimiles of the same dishes served at local Thai restaurants.

[page]

But the whole experience is prefab. Bob pegged the place “a Boston Market with delusions.” On our first visit, Martha and Greg thought the food was mediocre but found the ambience light and fun, even if the counter cutie turned blank when Greg wanted to order a glass of wine.

“They spent money on décor and not on training,” Bob sniffed as he dug into a small bowl of buttered noodles that we all decided didn’t taste bad. Martha thought it would be fun to share dinners (I tried not to cringe at the suggestion), so we ordered several of the smaller versions to pass around, as well as a couple of full-size meals.

The pad Thai was predictably sweet and gummy, the pot stickers strangely chewy. And the grilled chicken breast that tried to pass itself off as sweet-chili chicken looked like one of those preformed patties from my high school cafeteria. But the “Wisconsin mac & cheese” proved to be rich and creamy — one of the few stellar choices on the menu.

We all agreed that in terms of variety, Noodles & Company lived up to its United Nation pretensions. On the menu are Japanese pan noodles, Chinese chop salad, Tuscan fettuccine, Indonesian peanut sauté and penne rosa, most of which can be prepared in a fashion suitable for vegetarians as well as meat eaters or made extra spicy for patrons with a yen for more heat than what comes from the bottle of chili sauce on the table. And if some offerings are more bland than their counterparts at actual ethnic restaurants, the place still wins points for being the antithesis of a greasy burger chain.

Still, when it came time for a second visit, I had trouble coercing dinner companions all the way out to Olathe just for fast-food noodles. But I finally caught Bob and Patrick in a hungry moment, so they tagged along.

Once again, the fresh-faced postadolescents at the cash register were strictly tabula rasa. Like, clueless.

And it’s not as if that big menu doesn’t inspire questions. What’s the difference between a small order of mushroom stroganoff and an entrée version? A couple of bucks and a bigger bowl. And if you want to customize the dish with beef or chicken or tofu, you’d better speak up fast, because the counter kid never asked us. Why should she? Move ’em on, head ’em up, move ’em out.

“This place is so weird,” said Patrick, who found the place endlessly amusing. But he liked only one dish, the noodle-free Mediterranean grill, which mixed thin slices of grilled beef and chicken with fresh spinach, tomato slices, kalamata olives, cucumber, red onion and feta with a “savory tzatziki” sauce that looked and tasted a lot more like French dressing.

I liked the mushroom stroganoff — it tasted like my mom’s, the kind made with Campbell’s soup — but I should have requested meat in it. I was still hungry after finishing a full-size portion, so I ordered a little bowl of macaroni and cheese as dessert. It sounded tastier than the Saran-wrapped cookies at the counter.

That night, we learned a few more disconcerting truths about Noodles & Company. The one-napkin rule, for example. (We had to plead for extras.) The incredible immaturity of the kids who deliver the dishes to the table — including the chicklet who glared at Bob for complaining that his chicken-noodle soup was cold. (She begrudgingly had it reheated.)

[page]

Then there was the realization that no one picks up a dirty dish unless the entire group leaves the table. When we got tired of watching plates stack up, we asked the chicklet to take some away. She went to the kitchen, sullenly returned with a bus tub, set it on the floor and put the plates in it. We were aghast.

Will I ever go back? Hell, no. Do I think the future Noodles & Company restaurants in Kansas City will be successful? Absolutely yes.