September 2006 Punta Gorda Herald
Pies & Plates is on the Move two times Over
There aren’t many merchants in town better than Pies & Plates owner Cindee Murphy at spotting a trend and capitalizing on it. She seems able to anticipate what her customers want before they even know it themselves.
She has transformed a one storefront shop in Punta Gorda Crossing that sold gourmet kitchenware, coffee, tea and a smattering of food into a large retail kitchenware store and popular eating place that has now outgrown an additional storefront next door to the original one. Plans for a 20,000-square-foot building on a recently purchased triangular parcel northeast of the intersection of Taylor and U.S. 41 north are in the works.
Meanwhile, she recently signed a two-year lease to move her just-introduced Prepped & Ready business into the old Artistic Gourmet space on West Marion Avenue.
“This has been such a wild ride,” she said of her recent adventure into prepped and ready meals. “We had planned on doing it in the Pies & Plates dining area until the new building is ready, but it was so overwhelming, really a pain. Set it up, take it down. So we (husband and partner Dennis) thought, let’s get it started and put it under one roof.”
The Prepped & Ready concept is simple. You register a week in advance and show up at one of Pies & Plates’ weekly sessions at 6:30 p.m. Wednesdays. She and her staff will have 12 meals planned, shopped, chopped and prepped.
Customers cook one of the meals at a station (a sandwich cart with refrigeration), usually in less than 10 minutes, and then move on to the next station for another meal. In less than two hours and for $195, you walk out with 12 meals, 48 servings, all packed tidily in right-sized, vacuum-sealed containers that will take up minimal space in your refrigerator. You can even warm the meals up in the packages.
If you don’t want to prepare them yourself, staff will prepare them for pick up the next day for an additional $35. The menu changes every month.
Murphy said her customers are loving the concept. “It saves them time shopping, planning, cooking and cleaning up,” she said. “There’s not a lot of waste. The best part is at the end of every session when they say, ‘I can’t wait to come back next month.’ And I’m thinking, ‘Wait until you taste the food.’”
Murphy said many customers come with a friend, splitting the meals and turning the session into a social occasion.
The prepped meals concept has been sweeping the nation, but Murphy is aiming her sights a little higher than most. You won’t have to worry about carting home macaroni and cheese or tuna casseroles. "Pies & Plates tries for the cutting edge,” she laughed. “We’re always trying to bring the best to Punta Gorda.”
“We’re upping the quality of the food, making it more gourmet,” she continued. “The difference is our staff, particularly Jana Metzlar (Prepped & Ready manager). They can come up with original gourmet recipes, more like a gourmet cookbook.”
After a look at the meals for September, I had to agree. This month, you can prepare such dishes as pecan-crusted pork medallions with red onion marmalade, garlic and herb ham-wrapped chicken breasts, tilapia parmagiana, steak Diane and Mexican chicken. Not a pedestrian dish among the 14 choices (you get to choose your favorite 12); I’d describe it as upscale international cuisine.
Cindee and Dennis and staff are working nonstop to get the West Marion location prepared to house Prepped & Ready. They’ve taken out a wall in the back and are awaiting the arrival of plumbing, electrical and refrigeration contractors.
“We’re trying for a real clean look, yellow walls with a lot of stainless steel,” she said. The sandwich cart cooking stations will occupy the center of the store, with a small retail section up front.
She also wants to retain the “artistic” concept of the previous tenant.
“I’d like to show some local artists’ works that are kitchen or food related,” she said, pointing to the long walls just begging for something to be hung on them.
Murphy hopes to open in Prepped & Ready’s newly rented space in time for October’s Third Thursday Gallery Walk but realizes that the inevitable construction delays everyone experiences around here probably make November a more likely time frame.
If expanding into the West Marion location isn’t enough work, Murphy is also busy planning the new building at U.S. 41 and Taylor Street, which is turning into a bit of a challenge.
“It’s an unusual-shaped triangular parcel, and the building has to meet all the downtown land development regulations,” she said. “It’s still in civil engineering, and it’s taking a little longer to do the research.”
She couldn’t say what the façade will look like until the shape of the building is decided, but did say she and Dennis are determined to construct a building residents will be proud of. “We’re calling the project Gateway,” she said. “We understand its importance to downtown, and we’re going to make it look right.”
How does she keep a business running, undertake an expansion at another location and build a new facility at yet another all at the same time? “I’m a project person,” she said. “If I get comfortable at the store, I just kick it up a notch.”
I wasn’t able to come up with a simple term to describe Murphy’s business while writing this column, and by the time I think of one it will have morphed into something else anyway. Though I don’t know exactly what to call it, I do know the whole operation centers around food. And any business that provides good food is good for Punta Gorda, no matter how it’s described.
She thinks so, too.
“I think it will be a plus for downtown, a destination,” she said. “I know people who drive here (to Pies & Plates) from Fort Myers, North Fort Myers and Cape Coral. It’s an activity for downtown. We’re
hoping to create a little hustle and bustle.”
E-mail Gordon Bower at pgherald@sun-herald.com.
July 25, 2006Publication: Charlotte Sun
You can be a Gourmet Chef Punta Gorda restaurant lets you do it yourself By BOB FLISS CHARLOTTE SUN HERALD BUSINESS EDITOR
You don’t have to be Rachael Ray to show incredible panache in the kitchen.
Pies & Plates, the popular restaurant and gourmet shop at 2310 Tamiami Trail, is jumping on a national food trend — “prepped and ready meals.”
Owner Cindee Murphy explained that prepped and ready is a sort of compromise between restaurant takeout and cooking from scratch.
Rather than providing a finished dish, the restaurant furnishes all the ingredients, plus mixing and cooking instructions. The customer follows simple directions and carries home a tidy little package of uncooked food, ready to be frozen for later use.
Or if you’re really hungry, you can just cook it as soon as you hit the door.
That might be the best option, considering that when Pies & Plates kicks off its Prepped & Ready program during the evening, beginning Aug. 2, dishes will include:
• Basil pesto three-cheese puff pastry Florentine.
• Asian sesame grilled chicken skewers with pineapple habanero sauce
• Prosciutto and goat cheese stuffed chicken breast with alfredo sauce.
Definitely a lot more interesting than a TV dinner. The cost is $195, which provides 12 entrees, each enough to feed four adults.
“I think this is going to appeal to people who work hard, or play hard, or both,” said Murphy. She noted that shopping represents a considerable expenditure of time. With prepped and ready, all the ingredients are there, in exactly the right amounts
There’s also some cost savings that may not be obvious at first glance. A Pies & Plates customer, Huellen Randolph of Punta Gorda, said she thought the prepped and ready concept makes sense because you don’t have to buy more of an ingredient than you need. Suppose a recipe calls for a cup of grated cheese. What do you do with the rest of the bag you buy from the supermarket? Too often, it never gets used and goes bad in the refrigerator.
All the work can be done in about two hours, Murphy added. Customers will move from station to station, assembling ingredients for each dish in five to 10 minutes. Coaching will be available, but Murphy said that once people get the hang of it, assembling a meal is easy.
One of the main reasons is that most of the worst kitchen grunt work — chopping, peeling — is done by the restaurant.
Take for example, a quiche, that ever-popular brunch dish from France, which a comic writer in the 1980s assured us that “real men don’t eat.” But call it “bacon and egg pie,” and it’s not so frou-frou after all.
Anyway, what might be called a quiche assembly line consists of plastic bins of bacon bits and vegetables. First step: Mix and match one cup of whatever suits you — peppers, onions, tomatoes, mushrooms, and don’t forget that bacon. Dump it into a mixing bowl.
Over this goes a half cup of cheese — either Swiss or a blend of cheddar and Monterey Jack.
Next, pick up a Kool-Aid pitcher filled with the eggnog-like quiche mix — it actually does have a tiny shot of nutmeg — and pour in three cups. Now mix everything.
Pour the contents of the mixing bowl into a sturdy plastic bag. Give it to an attendant — who will also give you a prepared crust — for heat sealing.
Put the bag into your cooler and move on to the next station.
The whole dish takes about as much time to assemble as it takes to write about it.
Murphy said the bill of fare will rotate every month, with two dishes as regulars — quiche, complete with crust, and Pies & Plates’ signature dish, the puff-pastry topped, “mile-high” chicken potpie.
Richard Sargent, chef and Pies & Plates, said developing the menu was pure pleasure. He and Murphy combed the Internet and their personal recipe files for a solid state lineup of entrees that are big on taste and low on fat and sodium.
But the real challenge was coming up with a secure packaging system, Sargent said.
“Some of the places that do prepped and ready use Ziploc bags, which tend to come apart, even when you double bag,” The thought of quiche mix leaking all over the other packages isn’t pleasant to contemplate. Heat sealing takes a little while, but leaks aren’t a problem and you get a more compact container with less air inside. This maximizes the use of freezer space.
Sargent said he hopes Pies & Plates will be able to introduce customers to some foods they haven’t tried. One of his current favorites is bison meat — from the restored buffalo herds on Western ranches — which he plans to offer in August in a barbecue dish spiced with chipotle peppers.
“It’s as tender as beef and actually has less fat than chicken,” Sargent said.
|
