Dairy
industry gets a boost from ‘extreme’ Idaho restaurant
By Matthew Weaver Capital Press (Salem, Ore.) March 12, 2020
COEUR D’ALENE, Idaho — This is a
cheesy story.
This is a really cheesy story.
An extremely cheesy story.
Meltz, a restaurant in Coeur
d’Alene, Idaho, makes what it calls “extreme” toasted cheese sandwiches.
And a lot of them. The restaurant
gets an average of 200 customers a day, according to manager Nick Hart. They
buy 800 to 900 sandwiches each week in the winter and 2,000 a week during the
summer tourist season.
These are not your mother’s toasted
cheese sandwiches. What makes Meltz different is the creativity that goes into
them. According to Hart and Meltz supervisor Mari Gilge, there isn’t much they
haven’t tried.
Hart says 17 types of cheese are
always on the menu. Occasionally, the restaurant might add a specialty cheese,
such as a horseradish or spicy cheese, or a smoked cheese. Each sandwich uses
about a half-pound of cheese, Hart said.
In addition to the cheese,
ingredients can range from the sublime to the exotic. Spaghetti, ice cream,
shellfish, sushi, beef Wellington — you name it, and they’ve probably already
experimented with it.
That versatility has generated a
loyal following, Hart said.
“Anybody, anywhere, no matter what
you’re doing, if you say you work at Meltz, they care,” he said. “They all give
you the same reaction, too: ‘I love that place. Oh my God, I love that place.’”
That popularity adds up to a lot of
cheese — and a lot of milk used to make it. Meltz illustrates the outsized
impact even a single small restaurant in northern Idaho can have on dairy
farmers.
Let’s do the numbers.
Meltz sells an average of 1,500
sandwiches each week, or about 250 a day (it’s closed on Sundays). That’s 125
pounds of cheese that the diners at Meltz go through each day.
It takes 10 pounds of milk to make 1
pound of cheese, said Jenn Nelson, senior vice president of innovation
partnerships for Dairy West, an organization that represents dairy farmers in
Idaho and Utah. One cow produces an average of 80 pounds of milk a day.
That means Meltz alone keeps the
equivalent of 15.6 dairy cows busy each day just to produce the cheese that
goes into its toasted cheese sandwiches.
Big
business
But there’s more to this cheesy
story. Grilled cheese sandwiches are a big business in the U.S.
Some 180 million grilled cheese
sandwiches were ordered at U.S. restaurants last year, according to the NPD
Group, a market research company in Port Washington, N.Y. That was up 5% from
the previous year.
And that is just part of Americans’
love affair with cheese. According to the Dairy Farmers of Wisconsin
Foodservice Cheese Assessment and Outlook study, U.S. restaurants and other
food service facilities such as school and corporate cafeterias served 5.46
billion pounds of cheese in 2018.
Also from the study:
• Hamburger restaurants alone
accounted for 12% of that total, or 635 million pounds.
• Sandwich restaurants — think Meltz
— used 8% of the total, or 424 million pounds.
• The top varieties of cheese used
at sandwich restaurants, based on volume, are provolone, cream cheese, pepper
cheeses, American and Monterey jack. That’s in addition to a galaxy of other
cheeses that are served, from muenster and gouda to asiago, fresh mozzarella,
feta and gorgonzola.
‘Extreme’ ingredients
To the untrained eye, Meltz might
seem unassuming. It is tucked into the corner of a gas station in Coeur d’Alene
and seats 35 customers.
But it’s netted plenty of accolades
from foodie websites, magazines and newspapers.
Recently, the website Yelp and Eat
This, Not That magazine ranked Meltz the top grilled cheese sandwich shop in
Idaho. So did People magazine in 2019 and Yelp and Buzzfeed in 2018.
The newspaper USA Today rated Meltz
one of the Top 10 best grilled cheese sandwiches, and Thrillist magazine called
it one of the 33 top sandwiches in the country in 2019.
“Extreme” usually means at least
seven components, said owner Joe McCarthy.
“It’s usually got to be something
that has a starch to it — a potato, rice, pasta — something you wouldn’t think
would be in there,” he said. “We’re re-creating meals, sometimes, within a
sandwich. Then it has to have a crunch, some heat or some spice level to it.”
In coming up with a new sandwich,
the grilled cheese artisans at Meltz first think of a dish and what goes into
it.
“It’s everything you can imagine
between two slices of bread,” Hart, the manager, said. “The idea is to have a
little piece of every single ingredient in every single bite.”
The beginning
McCarthy got his start traveling for
11 years as a chef at several auto racing series, which included cooking for
racing team members and catering for VIP events.
He was on the road 16 to 20 weeks of
the year, and looking for something that would keep him closer to home.
He saw a TV special about the
Original Grilled Cheese Truck in Los Angeles, one of the first to offer grilled
cheese as a concept, and thought there might be interest in the idea at home in
Idaho.
“Grilled cheese is certainly
relatable and it appeals to most people — it’s cheese and bread,”
McCarthy
said.
Meltz opened in April 2012.
“For the first seven months, there
was a line out the door,” McCarthy said.
But it took 17 months to tweak the
process and break even, considering the startup costs, ingredients, labor and
equipment.
McCarthy bought out his partner in
the first year.
It’s been growth ever since, he
said.
A lot of chefs can create a great
grilled cheese sandwich in a restaurant — once, McCarthy said. But making it
consistently every day, with many different flavor profiles and ingredients,
requires a “very solid system” or else customers are waiting too long, he said.
Meltz has perfected the steps of
applying ahead of time a “schmear” containing 14 ingredients to the bread so
it’s ready for the grill, he said.
“Grilled cheese certainly isn’t
easy, although everybody would think that it is, but it’s not, by a long shot,”
McCarthy said.
Grilled cheese game
McCarthy said he’s seen a lot of
grilled cheese restaurants come and go in the eight years since Meltz opened.
“I think most of them close because
they’re not extreme enough,” he said.
Some go too simple, with ingredients
that customers could use at home.
Meltz goes for complex recipes,
McCarthy said.
Other grilled cheese companies go
too big, open up to 10 stores, and then have to scale back or vanish, he said.
“There’s a lot of people in my
business that would like to be the McDonald’s, Five Guys or In-N-Out, so to
speak, of grilled cheese and build them across the country,” McCarthy said.
McCarthy has tried to expand a few
times, but it hasn’t worked out. He’s open to working with the right partner,
he said.
The restaurant goes “way beyond” his
original vision, he said, noting it grossed nearly $1 million last year.
“It’s exceeded everything I ever
thought I could do in 1,200 square feet,” he said.
Local ingredients
Meltz primarily relies on suppliers
such as Sysco or U.S. Foods.
“We do go local as much as
possible,” Hart said. “Our beef is from Southern Idaho, our pulled pork from
Idaho, all of our produce is from Washington.”
That is music to Stephanie Littrel’s
ears.
“Local is a trend that isn’t going
away anytime soon,” the Deer Park, Wash., dairy farmer said. “Knowing that a
restaurant uses local ingredients makes us want to try their food even more,
knowing that it is produced close to home.”
Nelson, with Dairy West, said the
organization is working with Meltz to locally source more of its dairy
ingredients.
Farmers love any chance to have
their product directly affect their local communities, she said.
“Aside from getting to do what we
love, the best part of being a dairy farmer is to see consumers enjoying the
cheese and other delicious dairy products made from milk produced on dairies
like ours,” Littrel said.
“When they see their cheese or
products in some of their local restaurants or quick-serve restaurants, even
Starbucks or McDonald’s using some of those dairy ingredients, it means a whole
lot to them knowing they’re nourishing their local communities,” Nelson said.
Any time a local ingredient is
available, McCarthy said he is open to using it or forging new relationships
with farmers.
Featured items might include a
special ingredient, such as Washington apples, Walla Walla sweet onions, goat,
lamb, specialty potatoes or seasonings from local companies, he said.
McCarthy emphasized the importance
of consistent ingredients.
“It’s very important that I’m not
the guy that runs out of stuff,” he said.
Last December, when Meltz had
difficulty obtaining an ingredient for its annual post-Thanksgiving sandwich,
the Turducken — a combination of turkey, duck and chicken — the restaurant
delayed its release.
“We refuse to serve our food if it’s
not perfect,” the restaurant said in its announcement on Facebook.
Hart welcomes the opportunity to
visit farms, and extended a similar invitation for farmers to stop by the
restaurant.
They should “feel free to stop by
and see their food in action,” he said.
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