When The Frisc first met Keith Keswicke, culinary consultant, he had recently arrived in San Francisco, eager to establish a foothold in the sizzling, steaming, raw-yet-red-hot business of naming things in the food business.
We came away from our first meeting with big questions. Would his ambition and New York track record be enough to make it here? Can an outsider stake a claim in what could be the densest gastro-logo-philic 49 square miles on Earth?
We caught up with Keswicke recently to hear about his first major West Coast client, the Internet social-media giant Bigmouth.
Part dental-hygiene recommendation service, part disappearing photo engine, Bigmouth was losing the fierce recruiting game to its Valley competitors, despite the promise of free, while-you-wait sock repair at several locations on its Mountain View campus.
So Bigmouth brought in Keswicke to revamp the company cafeteria into a full-blown Silicon Valley food court.
Keswicke is eager to show off the results. After a drive down from the city, he escorts us down the hall past the security desk. He waves his photo badge in front of a blinking light, and the wall rolls up, garage-door style, to reveal a doorway shaped like the Rolling Stones logo: a lascivious tongue unfurling between two plump lips. My cell phone was confiscated at the front so I couldn’t take a picture, but it’s not hard to imagine.
“What could be more appetite-whetting?” Keswicke asks. “Brown sugar. She’s so cold like an ice-cream cone. Forty licks. Satisfaction! The Stones are all about appetite.”
Not to mention that the current members all look like prunes, I start to say. Noticing that I’m writing in my notebook, Keswicke hastily points out that the cracked front tooth and lumpy tastebuds pasted onto the back of the tongue will help avoid copyright infringement.
We step up to the first of eight stations ringing the walls. Before Keswicke came on board, Bigmouth offered its employees the corporate baseline. A salad bar. A half-dozen soups, all with either noodles or chowder. Two guys in hairnets assembling sandwiches. And a couple hot entrees that, Keswicke says, “would have made a 1970s hospital concessionaire proud.”
Now, each station has been rebranded, Keswicke-style. “I demand nothing short of senstational,” he says, making the “jazz hands” gesture for emphasis.
An employee passes by, about to bite into what looks like a crudité assortment on a gray rubber bathmat. I ask where she got it. She takes out her phone, opens the laser-pointer app, and directs the beam at the counter right in front of us. The hand-painted sign above it, swinging on a faux-oxidized chain, reads “Pizza Raw!”
“The exclamation point really drives it home,” Keswicke says over my shoulder.
It is, in fact, a pizza station without an oven. Or any kind of food-heating apparatus.
Next door, the salad bar has been expanded, the bowls are larger—so large, in fact, I ask why anyone would want two pounds of salad in one go. “This isn’t your Aunt Emma’s 5 p.m.-at-the-Sizzler, build-your-own-salad,” says Keswicke. “This is Team-Build Your Own Salad Platform.”
Keswicke knows his job is to help Bigmouth find every competitive edge possible. Mealtime must also be team-time. Each day features a different group exercise, like “Tomato Trust” or “We All Have Crouton Issues.”
We step back, because the cloud-server maintenance group is stepping up and grabbing virtual tongs, as directed by the interactive sneeze-guard display. It goes great until two engineers nearly come to blows over the pickled beets. One tries to slide them under the arugula, to avoid stains and sogginess. The other says they must go to the side “because they’re sub-optimal. And nasty.”
We move on to Keswicke’s favorite counter: “Mash-Up Plaza.” Two words I never thought I’d see together, but there they are. Keswicke has encouraged Bigmouth employees, who hail from 43 different countries, four Canadian provinces, and El Cerrito, Calif., to submit recipes from their homelands for consideration. Then Markus Markumsa-Markopoulos, a Greek-Ethiopian-German and ex-Olympian pole vaulter whom Keswicke brought in as “chef d’campus” for the rebranding, uses the recipes for inspiration — with Keswicke’s final approval, of course.
We sample the ones that have gotten the most “licks,” according to the logo on each dish’s placard: a blue thumb sprouting a tongue (another Keswicke creation).
— Naan Poutine
— Madame Croque Lumpia
— Super Ramenito
— The Cheddar Banh Wurst
“I never realized kosher beef, Velveeta, and fish sauce could be so complementary,” Keswicke declares, a teardrop of ketchup hanging from one of his silvery chin whiskers.
I cannot eat more, but he insists on crediting me 25 extra “Mouth Coins” straight onto my guest pass, so I can grab a serving of vegan bulgogi — “as much beef as you can eat, except it’s not beef” — and an allergy Epi-pen.
As we head for the exit, I prepare to be disgorged through the Jagger mouth like a forgotten track from Bridges to Babylon. No one notices me; the employees are either recalibrating the asymptotes of the cucumber spears at the salad bar or heads-down over their phones. Several of them are already placing late-afternoon orders with the snack drone, which doesn’t have a name yet despite its ability to fire M&Ms into an employee’s mouth from 50 meters. It could be Keswicke’s greatest challenge: hold true to his values and give the techies what they want. What they first wanted — calling the drone “Zuck”— felt too obscure to Keswicke. “Why nickname it after a summer squash?” he puzzles. “Why not a root vegetable? Or me?”
He’s not sure how to resolve the problem, but he knows doing so would be quite a feather in his cap. “The mandoline. The Cuisinart. The Bass-o-matic. All food technology ahead of its time, and all named after famous chefs,” says Keswicke. “I’m not a famous chef, but perhaps ‘The Keswicke’ will fly its way into the airspace of our future collective culinary consciousness.”
