Did you know Modmarket caters hors d’oeuvres in Denver and Boulder? Well, you do now.

Since the day we opened Modmarket, I have been on a quest to find the perfect container to hold our salads.  It had to not only be aesthetically pleasing,but it had to meet our environmental standards, not be too expensive AND work well within the operational constraints of our kitchens.  We started off using containers that were made of corn and could be composted, but they were hideous looking, extremely expensive and, based on our observation, rarely composted.  They look just like ‘normal’ plastics so lots of people we talked to were just tossing them in the regular recycling, which was not a good thing.  We eventually switched to a PET plastic container which was made of recycled material which worked great in our kitchens, was easily recyclable and was not too expensive.  The only problem was that it was opaque and quite ugly.  Last summer, on a trip to California, we came across the container pictured above.  It is a similar shape to our old container, however, it is water clear AND is made from recycled PET plastic bottles.  It has very clean lines with no silly ridges or features to distort the view of what is inside it.  It took us 4 months to get a supply chain setup so we could get this container in our stores, but the wait was worth it.  Our to go salads now look as good as they taste  The picture above was taken as we loaded up the car with a big catering order.  Imagine walking into your offices conference room and seeing that beautiful stack of containers.  Just makes you want to eat a healthy salad, doesn’t it??

• Patsy Kingsley to modmarket

  show details 10:29 AM (23 hours ago)

  Dear Anthony & Rob,
  
  Not sure I’m allowed to reply to your email but here goes!  THANK YOU!!  Have been a huge fan of Modmarket since the day you opened on Colorado Blvd.  You’ve helped me to lose weight and also get to enjoy a dinner out every once awhile.  I’ve always loved the approach of fresh food, rather than frozen or processed and its the way I cook at home and live.  Again, thank you for giving back to someone who is a big fan and frequents your place and good luck to all of your future endeavors.  You have a great product and a great concept.  Only one word of advice from a 52 year old lady.  Keep your eye on the ball at all times and as my mother used to tell me “don’t get above your pickle”   Have a great day.
  
  Patsy Gallery

Before owning a restaurant, I don’t think I had ever been in a walk in cooler.  They are, as the name implies, gigantic refrigerators that you can ‘walk in’.  They work perfectly about 95% of the time, keeping all of our fresh produce at a constant 36 or so degrees.  The other 5% of the time, however, they freeze over.  Basically the humidity inside the box starts to freeze on the cooling elements of the walk in and once this process starts, you are about 12 hours away from a total walk in failure.  The annoying part is that our top of the line model is supposed to have a feature that prevents it from ever freezing over.  This feature does not work.  Once the cooler freezes over, it will not hold temperature any longer and you are forced to defrost it.  This involves standing on top of the cooler (10 feet off the ground) and pouring hot water through the top of the cooling unit over the cooling elements.  Obviously before this occurs all the food in the walk in needs to be moved to a temporary and safe location because the water you are pouring in dumps into the walk in and makes a huge mess.  The best part of all of this is that the walk in ONLY freezes over at inopportune times, usually when we are short staffed and really busy.  This happened last week and Rob and I were in the store so we said we would chip in and defrost the thing.  Somehow, in the process, I spilled about 10 gallons of water onto the top of the walk in.  So I had to spend 45 minutes mopping up water 10 feet off the ground and trying not to short out our store stereo which was, of course, sitting a few inches away from where all the water was.  Good times.

I have been a fan of the TED conference ever since my IDEO days when some colleagues told me of the awesome content presented there.  As such, when we heard about TEDx Mile High, which is a local version of the conference, we jumped at the chance to help sponsor it.  We ended up becoming the primary food sponsor for the event and we are providing treats for all 1700 attendees.  Our catering team made a special menu for the event that features a lot of Colorado sourced foods and will hopefully show attendees that quick food can be local, healthy and affordable.  There are some other companies helping us with this goal, including Noosa yogurt, whose amazing Colorado Aussie style yogurt will garish some of our dishes, and Mile High Organics, who is providing what seems like a literal ton of organic fruits and veggies to use in our culinary creations.  Our most interesting partner is Grant Family Farms, a local CSA, who provided us with 40 ducks to use in our menu.  Check out coolers in the picture above.  When the ducks arrived, they filled something like 12 of those coolers.  Took us a while to figure out how actually get them to fit in our walk in (health code prevents us from leaving them on the floor), but we eventually managed.  Will post some pictures later this week of the build for all this food, our catering team is going to be pulling an all nighter so they can use our entire kitchen.  I am sure food for 1700 is going to take up quite a bit of space!

One of the biggest mistakes we made at last years Farmer’s Market was not having a dedicated staff for it.  Rob and I plus our friend Pete figured we could handle it.  Oh, how wrong we were.   Setting up a restaurant in a tent every Saturday morning is hard.  Doing it with a complex menu made from farm fresh ingredients is WAY harder.  There is a reason most of the vendors at the Farmer’s Markets and other carnie events serve unhealthy food – it is soooo much easier to setup and serve.  In any event, we learned our lesson last year and this year we are hiring a dedicated crew for the Farmer’s Market so we will be properly staffed from Day 1.  Our catering manager, Jess, had the brilliant idea to have people come in and give them a little job test, putting them on the spot to cook up some eggs (crucial skill in our booth, the Rocket egg sandwiches depend on this).  The picture above is her administering the test.   She is the reason why the Modmarket booth will run like a greased wheel this season.  Come check out her skills this weekend when the Market fires up for the 2011 season.