The Tastemakers (42 page)

It is no coincidence that the fondue trend rose in concert with the budding sexual revolution in North America. The hotpot gatherings involved inherent physical and social contact, even in their most G-rated form, and so North Americans were given
permission to connect with one another while dining in a way they hadn't before. Fondue could not work with inhibitions—there were no individual portions, no fondue for one—it was a meal of forced intimacy. “It invariably proves to be a party ice-breaker, capable of thawing the glacial surface of even the Person Nobody Knows,” wrote Anita Prichard in her 1969 cookbook
Fondue Magic: Fun, Flame and Saucery Around the World
, widely regarded as the best fondue tome in a genre littered with crap. “You simply can't stay aloof from people who are dunking and dipping alongside of you.” Keep in mind that fondue took off at a time when riots were breaking out on the streets of American cities, urban crime was becoming more prevalent and violent, and many Americans were relocating to the suburbs, where social life was forced indoors. It was an early example of Faith Popcorn's cocooning trend, and fondue was the fad that answered cocooning's needs. With a bit of cheese and enough candles, your rec room in Cleveland could instantly become a luxury ski chalet in Zermatt. With enough wine and kirsch, a fondue party was the perfect setting to really get to know the Franklins from down the block, if you know what I mean. You can almost hear the Sergio Mendes record skipping softly against the turntable's needle in the background, its tracks forgotten in the heady haze of now-cold cheese, extinguished blue Sterno, and libido, as a jangle of keys sit in a bowl by the door. The Chalet Suisse and Konrad Egli may have been the tastemakers who introduced fondue to America, but it was the pill and the lifestyle it helped unleash that turned it into an era-defining food trend.

With fondues now associated with home entertaining and dozens of inexpensive fondue sets flooding department store shelves and wedding gift tables, interest in eating authentic fondue at the Chalet Suisse waned. “Fondue for us peaked around the early 1970s,” said Dietmar Schlüter, a cook at the Chalet Suisse who had been there since the early 1960s, and took over from Herger as chef in 1975. We were sitting in Swizz, one of the few remaining fondue restaurants in New York City, not far from where the Chalet Suisse had last been before it closed in the 1990s. He had recently written a cookbook of the restaurant's recipes, and as Schlüter swirled his bread
cube in a red enamel pot filled with a classic fondue Neuchâteloise (which he declared had a sufficiently balanced flavor), he sighed at the way fondue's favor had slipped away. “We tried all sorts of other things,” he recalled. “We made flambées in the dining room, but they weren't so practical, and dishes like beef filet à la mode.” The swinging couples of the sixties became more health conscious as the seventies wore on, and different diet trends cast dispersions on fat, sugar, oil, and cheese. The Me Generation moved from shared experiences to individual ones. People wanted to cook quicker, easier meals, and the microwave oven replaced the slow burner. Home dining fell out of favor, first with discos and then with the rise in a more exciting and varied restaurant culture. Continental Europe, once exotic, was replaced by Mexico and the Southwest, Japan, India, and other farther-flung destinations that offered newer, more exciting flavors. Meanwhile, the AIDS epidemic sucked the wind out of the sexual revolution and even made the prospect of sharing a common eating vessel a genuinely terrifying experience. Fondue became a punch line, a joke about a time of bad mustaches and Vaseline-smeared portraits, when people sat around their houses on a Saturday night eating melted cheese.

“It used to be that all everyone wanted for a wedding shower gift was a fondue pot,” lamented Gerda Herger as we sat having lunch with her husband. “Now nobody wants that. No one throws cocktail parties anymore. No one does a full-course dinner with appetizers.” The fondue set moved from the table to under the counter, to the basement, out to the garage, and finally to the end of the driveway at a yard sale, where it sold for just a few dollars. Recently she and Erwin had broken out their fondue pots and made the Chalet Suisse's original chocolate fondue for friends in Florida. But the evening was a dismal failure: No one even touched the fondue because they were on diets. Presented with what could be the world's best chocolate fondue, cooked by the very chef who invented the recipe that started the trend, their friends just sat there like fools and picked at the fruit.

I
n 1975, just as fondue's oily bubble was bursting, a small fondue restaurant opened in the suburbs of Orlando. Its owners, Roy Nelson and Bruce Knochel, were two friends who had no restaurant experience. They wanted to open a bar that served food, but neither of them could cook, so it had to be the simplest food possible, and fondue was an ideal fit. People always drank with fondue (which was good for business), and because the guests essentially cooked the food themselves, the kitchen operation would be minimal. The Melting Pot restaurant's original menu featured five items: the classic Chalet Suisse fondues (cheese, oil, broth, and chocolate) as well as a dish of mushrooms stuffed with a creamy onion dip, which guests could dip in batter and then fry tableside. The Melting Pot was located in the windowless basement of a strip mall and only had fourteen tables—all high, cozy booths that were dimly lit with chandeliers made from used wine bottles, which has since become a big restaurant-decorating trend.

One of the Melting Pot's first employees was a young waiter paying his way through college named Mark Johnston. A transplant from Long Island, Johnston had never tried fondue before he began working at the Melting Pot, but he quickly saw the potential of the restaurant, and within two years of working there he acquired the franchise rights and opened the second Melting Pot in Tallahassee with his older brother Mike. Their younger brother Bob, then just fourteen, came aboard to clear tables, and the Johnston brothers began building up the business, first in Tallahassee and then opening three more Melting Pots around central Florida. “The cheese is sticky, and it gets on you and it's hard to get off,” Bob Johnston, now CEO of the Melting Pot's parent company, Front Burner Brands, said, explaining how the brothers became obsessed with fondue. “I started developing a passion for it, too.”

The Johnstons acquired the Melting Pot outright in 1985, with an idea of growing the chain into something even larger. Even though fondue was already well out of fashion, the Johnstons believed its inherent qualities contained a formula for franchised growth that was uniquely advantageous. “Fondue was a fad, and fads do tend to run their course,” said Bob Johnston. “It was a
challenge at the start, because we really came in at the tail end of it. A lot of people didn't believe we'd be anything other than a fad, including lenders. People weren't wearing wide-lapel leisure suits and bell bottoms anymore, and fondue was part of that. However, we were doing something that people liked. It's not steak on a plate with a baked potato on the side. It's fun. Fondue is a fun experience, and the guests were drawn to that, and that propelled the concept for about a decade.”

The Melting Pot chain built its initial business around celebrations and special events: date nights, prom dinners, graduations, birthdays, and so forth—“What's the common thread you weave through these types of experiences?” Johnston asked me. “A celebration of something special and a desire to celebrate that something special in a unique way.” The way the Melting Pot dining experience was designed added to the excitement. Instead of fondues prepared in a kitchen, the Melting Pot outfitted each table with its own burner (initially electric coils, today induction cookers). Waiters brought out trays neatly arranged with custom-made aluminum pots and many small dishes of fresh ingredients, then assembled the fondues on the table. While the waiters stirred the cheese, they kept up a constant patter, engaging with the diners, who peered in awe at the cold ingredients quickly melting into something extraordinary. The Melting Pot's early employees were all young, highly motivated, and eager to build something. New franchises were sold to existing staff who believed strongly in the brand. Mark and Bob Johnston built each franchise by hand, even constructing the tables themselves.

That concept served the Melting Pot well for its first two decades as the chain expanded to nineteen outlets around Florida (it is headquartered in Tampa), with a few restaurants in other southern states. But by the mid-1990s growth and sales were stagnant. The Johnstons responded by refreshing the brand. They expanded the Melting Pot's wine program, updated the décor of all the restaurants, and added a lot more variety to the menu, which until then had not changed since opening day. “Seafood fondue, marinated meats like teriyaki sirloin, broth-based fondues, even vegetarian
dinners, pastas, pot stickers, and raviolis that could be cooked in fondue, marinated duck, crusted seafood like tuna covered in black sesame seeds,” said Johnston, rattling off a list of the additions. “A lot of it was tied into trends at that time.”

The most impactful change was “The Perfect Night Out,” a service credo that came to define the brand, more for the quality of a guest's experience than for the consistency of their fondue. “We began to look for ways to go above and beyond what the guest might expect in serving them,” said Johnston. “If someone was there celebrating something, we'd take their picture, and it'd go inside a frame and maybe go on their fridge on a magnet so they could remember their experience.” Waiters took notes on guests, and these were entered into a database so when those same guests made dinner reservations months later, their server would ask how their bodybuilding business was going or whether their daughter had completed her SAT course. “When we did that, we started to build on an almost fanatical fan base that exists to this day. No longer was it ‘That was a cool place to go because it's fondue and unique.' It became ‘Man, these people made us feel like we're the only people in the restaurant.' ”

Over the past decade and a half the Melting Pot has expanded from 19 locations to well over 130 all over the United States and a handful more around the world. Once again, however, the Melting Pot was looking to reinvent itself. American dining habits had continued to change, and the chain's strength had become its weakness. The focus on service and a unique dining experience may draw guests who spend well when they enjoy a four-course meal—but only once or twice a year. “The reality is that people's dining habits have changed when they dine out,” Johnston told me in his large, modern Tampa office. “Even my wife and I eat smaller samples at the bar instead of a full meal because we're so pressed for time.” Since the recession of 2008 diners sought greater value from restaurants, and the Melting Pot had trouble delivering this easily. To keep fondue growing and alive—a cross the Melting Pot essentially carries alone—the restaurant needed to rethink the way fondue would look and taste in the twenty-first century.

The man they tapped to do that was Shane Schaibly, who was recruited in 2007 as the Melting Pot's executive chef. A tall, brawny thirty-one-year-old from Dunedin, Florida, a small city outside Tampa, Schaibly was the type of badass chef you'd expect to find slinging foie gras bone marrow bacon burgers in a hipster restaurant. His father had been an undercover narcotics cop, and he grew up in the kind of ballsy Florida culture where you hunted sharks and alligators on weekends as part of what Schaibly called “Redneck fun.” Schaibly had worked in restaurants since he was fourteen, including small trendy bistros and the large hotel kitchens of Miami Beach's Ritz Carlton, though he had only eaten fondue at the Melting Pot—or anywhere, really—twice in his life before taking the job on his twenty-fifth birthday. Covered in tattoos from his ankles to his neck, the mischievous, smiling Schaibly met me that morning in Tampa at the Melting Pot's main location, the third to open, wearing an iPot T-shirt with a Melting Pot logo on it. Unlocking the door was like unsealing a vault of cheesy 1970s decor that had been made worse with some hideous 1990s touch-ups. The dimly lit restaurant was a warren of narrow passages and tucked-away rooms, ringed by an endless flow of dark wood wainscoting, like a long-shuttered Holiday Inn lobby bar. Glass bottles filled with colored water and lit from the bottom provided ambience, and the walls were painted either Barney purple, stained mustard, or “baby puke green,” as Schaibly so eloquently put it. The location was slated for a renovation within the next year or two to bring it up to the more current décor most of the other Melting Pot locations enjoyed. “We're all trying to steer these 130 ships in a new direction,” said Schaibly, flipping on the lights to the kitchen.

The Melting Pot's kitchen was unlike any I'd ever seen. There was no stove, no oven, no fryer—no source of heat whatsoever. “This is totally different from the rock-star chef life,” said Schaibly, who was shocked when he first took the job. “It's nine to five, with no cooking equipment.” It was basically a big prep kitchen where platters of fondue and salads were cut and assembled according to pictures of how they should look, piled onto trays, and brought tableside, where the waiters would cook them in front of diners. Aside
from Schaibly, there were no other cooks or chefs working in the chain, which was a big attraction to those who were operating franchises. So long as everything was portioned and displayed correctly and the servers followed their training, it was almost impossible to screw up a Melting Pot fondue. For the most part Schaibly's job consisted of managing staff, ordering the food, and ensuring supply quality across the chain, a huge logistical task that took him to suppliers around the country, including Nueske's for bacon and sausages and Emmi-Roth Käse, a Wisconsin cheese maker that made traditional Swiss cheeses in copper kettles.