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A Look at Silicon Valley Cafeterias
boycottthecaf writes "The San Jose Mercury News has a story on the cafeterias of Silicon Valley companies, and how they are used to keep workers on site during lunch. Google, of course, has the cafeteria everyone envies."
By Nicole C. Wong
Mercury News
For many Silicon Valley employees, there's a pecking order to valley companies. And it has nothing to do with sales or size.
It's all about the food.
For years, Silicon Valley companies have invested in their cafeterias to cut the time workers spend foraging off-campus for food, boost camaraderie and keep the troops happy, or at least well-fueled. Now some cafes are such hot spots that discerning diners from other companies are clamoring to eat there.
``Apple's the best,'' said Joseph Ruff, a programmer at Mountain View start-up TellMe Networks. ``The egg burritos, they make them nice and spicy. Network Appliance -- that had a pretty good salad bar, but it was smaller than Apple's.''
Want navrattan korma with raita, chutney and naan? $5.29 at Cisco Systems. Need something to drink? Sun Microsystems stocks 20 flavors of Odwalla juices alone. Feeling guilty? Yahoo boasts sustainably harvested seafood and antibiotic-free chicken.
Marc Marelich, eBay's general manager of food services, often sees outsiders slipping in to eat at the new cafe. And no wonder -- they can get ahi tuna salad tossed on the spot, spicy Tunisian chili with lamb and beef, or Yucatan fish tacos with pico de gallo.
At San Jose semiconductor maker Atmel, which a few years ago decided not to construct its own cafe, employees have found a prized alternative to brown-bagging it. Sales reps, engineers and even the chief financial officer cross the street to eat at BEA Systems' Tuxedo Junction Cafe. One Atmel engineer dines there so often -- three or four times a week -- that a cashier mistakenly gives him the 10 percent discount for BEA employees.
John Lawn, editor in chief of Food Management magazine, said Silicon Valley's corporate cafe scene serves some of the best food in the country. ``You'll find a cafe that's as nice as any commercial restaurant in Chicago or San Francisco, maybe better,'' he said.
Of course, you'll also find some that are worse.
Amy Flores, spokeswoman for Agilent Technologies, offered this opinion of Agilent's cafe: ``All I know is it's sometimes good, and it's sometimes bad.''
And last year, Intel decided that too many employees were avoiding lunch at the company's dining hall, which facilities planning manager Mike Dowd described as ``battleship gray'' with menu offerings ``maybe a notch above hospital and school cafeterias.''
So the cafe splashed its ceiling with paint the color of nacho cheese and revamped the menu to include inari and ebi sushi. It also lowered prices.
Now, Dowd said, ``We have more employees who are willing to have their friends come over to our house to eat, rather than go to theirs.''
Google, by far, has become Silicon Valley's most sizzling lunch site -- as elusive as French Laundry, the Wine Country restaurant where would-be patrons must call two months in advance to get a seat. Ruff, the 39-year-old TellMe programmer, has been begging a college buddy who works at Google to bring him as a lunch guest for the past year.
Google employees must make online reservations 24 hours in advance to bring visitors to the cafe. And they are limited to two guests each month, since all the lunches and dinners are free.
Google's executive chef, Charlie Ayers, cooked for members of the Grateful Dead in the early '90s. He orchestrates a 100-plus staff and announces the day's eating options only an hour before lunch. ``That's how we keep them on campus -- have that element of surprise,'' he said.
It seems to work. On an average day, 85 percent of Googlers eat at the cafe, compared with 50 percent at other valley companies.
Eric Case, a 25-year-old blogger product specialist at Google, finds that all of a sudden, his friends want to dine with him. ``They'll e-mail, `Hey, do you want to have lunch sometime next week?' What that means is, `Can I eat at Google?' ''
Broadcom counts on a
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Story: http://www.networkmirror.com/f48ThG_X4VrVJ79J/www. mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/11531501.htm
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And whatever happened to the good ol' days of bringing in your own lunch? I do that at the small place I'm at, and my time and money spent is minimal.
Gleepy the Hen. More intelligent than the average hen.
Here you can find a sample of the google menu: http://googlemenus.blogspot.com/
What is interesting about cafeterias is how much they vary from site to site. The selection is much better in the bay area than the same company's cafeterias in other techie locations (e.g. RTP, Richardson, Boston, DC, Ottawa, etc).
Prices are generally better in the Bay Area locations too.
Anyone who has spent much time in and around San Jose understands why so much attention is paid to the cafeterias, there just aren't that many places to go out, those places are generally mobbed at lunch and getting there and back in a reasonable amount of time is tough. Either companies invest in cafeterias or they risk loosing a sizeable portion of their workforce for a couple hours a day.
For example, the Cisco campus stretches for miles down Tasman Drive yet only a couple of very small places and a lone Carls Jr. can be found there. There is a concentration of quick casual and fast food restaurants at McCarthy Ranch but they are filled. The InNOut Burger's drive through often snakes through the parking lot.
Are you aware that Bugmenot has a firefox plugin?
I just right click in the login field, choose BugMeNot, wait 3 seconds for a login to be retreived from their servers, proceed to read story..
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> There were even free tampons in the ladies bathroom.
I read a book (can't remember which one, sorry), in which it was claimed that some female exec used this as a way to decide which companies to buy from -- if they didn't have sanitary supplies, they were probably going to go down the tubes fast and leave her company in the lurch.
I can see her point on this one. Having, at least, emergency supplies of sanitary suppies isn't that expensive (especially as techie companies lean heavily towards men, and most women will prefer to use their own brand). If there isn't an emergency supply, every once in a while you will lose someone for at least half a day, as she'll have to go home and change. It seems a bad tradeoff, something that would be made by a desperate company.
Lea
Dude, starving yourself will just push your metabolism down and encourage you to continue being sedentary and overweight. I bet you have cold hands and feel dizzy for most of the day. Get an iPod with star trek audiobooks and walk or jog for half an hour in the morning fast enough to breeze rapidly but not so quickly to get wasted and discouraged. Now reward yourself by eating a nice breakfast with eggs and sausage. Exercise and energy boost will make you feel warm for the rest of the day, burning lots of thermal energy. On the other hand, you probably won't be very hungry for lunch, so you get eat something light and with lots of vitamins. Do they have a Fresh Choice in your area?
Stay away from fat-free foods. They have lots of sugar that your liver will quickly convert into cholesterol and you will feel hungry again. The best bet is eating some fish in a Japanese or Chinese restaurant - a) it has unsaturated fat which cleans your blood vessels, b) fish doesn't have fattening growth hormones like non-organic beef or chicken and c) you will not get hungry soon and eat unhealthy "fat-free" snacks.
Cooking dinner at home would really do wonders. Restaurants tend to use the cheapest components and cook food for best taste and fastest cooking speed, not the most healthy dish. But I guess your milage may vary and it's possible to find relatively healthy restaurants.
I know there are ways to bypass registration, or one could just register, but that is a lot more painful than this post. Grandparent deserves the karma.
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