One thing that quickly becomes apparent to most visitors of a Chipotle is the furniture and art in the stores. Much like the food, the finishings are a mix of rich style, common materials, and high design. In the cast of the art it's Maya/Aztec style; plywood, stell rod, stainless steel, corrugated metal; and the inspired artistic vision of Bruce Gueswel of MayaTek.

History of Mayatek and Chipotle

According to their marketing materials, Bruce met Chipotle founder Steve Ells during a wedding that they both attended in San Francisco. Shortly thereafter Bruce took on the task of building furniture and art for the original Chipotle in Denver. Since then Bruce has been coming up with new designs and creations for Chipotle restaurants across the nation.

Buy the Chipotle Look for Your Home

Bruce also sells these designs from his shop in Loveland, but don't expect that the everyday materials yield everyday prices. Each Chipotle chair sells for $100 and the art pieces from the walls of the Chipotle sell for several hundreds or thousands of dollars each.

I found this via Digg.

If you are unfamiliar with "rockroll" it is a relatively dumb techy in-joke. The idea is to trick someone into clicking on a link that will send them to a video of a 1980s Rick Astley video. Well, chipotle.com got rick rolled:

This is hilarious to me. If you're a chipotle fan/geek then perhaps this is funny to you...

For a while now I've had this idea to make a purse hook for Chipotle. My good friend Carrie returned from Spain a while ago with a purse hook (see the purse hook site for some photos on the idea if you are unaware of them). This seemed like a really brilliant thing and I started noticing that some bars provide hooks for purses (and other items) under the bar.

The Need for the Hook at Chipotle

Later on, I started noticing the stool+bar situation at Chipotle: pretty atrocious for anyone who has extra things with them. I started tracking meals and restaurants where the lack of hooks under the bar was a problem. There was the time a lady awkwardly moved her purse when I sat down two seats away from her - imagine if the seats were full how awkward a purse on the bar would be. There's the standing room only bar (sorry, fuzzy) in New York where people pile their jackets on the bar because there is no jacket hook under the bar.

Being a problem solver by nature I started to think of ideas for how to build a hook that would fit with the Chipotle style and provide the storage that they need.

My Final Chipotle Style Purse Hook Design

It’s a little late for a 2007 wrap up post, but I’m doing it anyway. With almost 90,000 pageviews from 40,000 people, 2007 was the quite a busy year for Chipotlog.com.

What were your favorite posts on this site from 2007?

Based on popularity ranking (and in order) they are:

1. When Chipotle.com had to take theirs offline, the scan of Chipotle Nutrition Information became a popular page.
2. The Barbacoa Recipe (which has since been determined to be from elsewhere…) is a perennial favorite
3. Everything you need to know about Chipotle Franchises, while a bit of a sarcastic title, was a hit with entrepreneurs while…
4. CMG Stock - Profitable way to Franchise Chipotle is a more practical tip for the Peter Lynch “Invest in what you know” crowd.
5. The interview with the Chipotle (rock star) Employee proved quite popular - perhaps due to people interested in life as an employee of the fine chain.
6. And finally, www.chipotle.com site review has proven popular among the folks interested in their website and some possible ideas for improvement

I’ve also added a new feature allowing people to vote on articles. That way I’ll be able to base the “best” articles on visitor votes instead of based upon just popularity.

Some recent problems in Chipotle-land:

The Food Poisoning Law Blog is reporting (and, in my opinion, trying to build up clients) on a potential Hepatitis A outbreak at a Chipotle in La Mesa, California.

That comes right on the heels of the “gastrointestinal illness” at the Kent State, Ohio, Chipotle location.

Which comes right on the heals of all the press coverage when Chipotle teamed up with polyface farms.

So…yikes? Is this just bad luck/timing and a natural occurrence when you run over 600 restaurants? Is this a sign of dropping quality as the chain expands so quickly?

NOTE: This is a followup to my earlier post about a personal tour of destination evans. The tour happened back in early October of 2007.

The Chief and the Photo

On the wall of the original chipotle (and many, if not all the other restaurants) is "The Chief". You could make up all sorts of ideas about how he guards over the quality of the food, or the Food with Integrity program or what have you. The bottom line is, that it's more of the cool maya-industrial art and now, much like the store is "Destination Evans" the chief gets to have his own name - at least as far as my tour guide Dave Hawkins is concerned.

Most Chipotle's have a photo of "Chipotle #1" on the wall. At Destination Evans itself they have photos on the walls, but the photo of their own location is from when it was a Dolly Madison restaurant. I need to double check the situation, but while I've heard that this is the only location that doesn't have a photo of "Destination Evans" on the wall I think there are others.

You can see the chief on the wall in the somerville chipotle which I visited recently.

Guacamole seasons

I’m currently in the middle of reading the Omnivore’s Dilemma and learning all about Polyface Farms and really loving their goals and the way they run their business. Then, I check my feed reader and see several new stories pop up - from the titles alone I was pretty excited:

• Chipotle Partners With Polyface For Sustainable Burritos
• One Polyface Burrito, Please
• Chipotle & Joel Salatin team up
• Chipotle and Polyface Farm
• In Trial Run, Chipotle Heads to the Farm

Wow. That’s a lot of great coverage for the new partnership (and both companies and their goals) including the obvious major coverage from the Washington Post. I won’t repeat the news that’s been posted by these folks other than to say if you like Chipotle for their Food With Integrity program, this seems like yet another great step down that road.

Now…to see about visiting that Chipotle location so that I can compare the carnitas at that location to the recipe I’m used to from the rest of the stores.

Food with Integrity Reading List (Media List)