What do grilled cheese sandwiches and flip cameras have in common? Jonathan Kaplan.
Jonathan Kaplan founded The Melt ("yup, it's just cheese and bread) restaurants applying his formula for the Flip camera: simple product, limited options, mass appeal. His goal is to open 500 The Melt restaurants. As this article is being written, there are 14 The Melt locations. At the end of 2012 their two most recent brick and mortar locations opened in Los Angeles (L.A.): Sunset and Vine, FIGat7TH. There are also two The Melt food trucks that may be found in the USC area. Prior to the L.A. openings, The Melt locations were all in the San Francisco area.
The Melt positions itself as a step up from normal fast food fare betting on comfort food, such as the grilled cheese sandwich, being an enticing lure to customers in these trying financial times.
The Melt menu has five different versions of the grilled cheese sandwich and five different soups. You have the option to add bacon and/or tomato to your sandwich choice, included in the price of the sandwich. Each soup is purposely created to be the optimal consistency for sandwich dunking. Just to mix it up a little, there is a changing sixth option: the weekly special.
Your examiner has already visited The Melt three times. Yummy! Being the bright bulb your examiner likes to think she is, it wasn't until her last visit at the Sunset/Vine location that she realized the soup was meant for dunking. So, if you are a dunker, you will enjoy this opportunity.
Their appears to be an interesting juxtaposition in that The Melt is basically fast food fare regardless of how the powers that be of The Melt corporate staff are looking to convince the public that its position in the market is a step up. To your examiner's discerning eye, the step up seems to mostly be that it is new and novel fare for fast food. This doesn't necessarily seem like enough to justify that sandwich, soup and beverage will run you at least one of the two U.S. currency denominations that is not a dead president, the Alexander Hamilton ten spot. That's about an average of twenty-five percent more than the average fast food value meal.
The combo (sandwich/soup) also comes with a pickle and potato chips. Soup and sandwich are quite filling. Perhaps, The Melt could lose the chips and possibly slightly lower the price point as a result. Just sayin'!
Sometimes reviews are kind of stoooopid (purposely misspelled) in your examiner's interesting point of view. Your examiner enjoys grilled cheese sandwiches. When she is in the mood for one and even more so if she hasn't eaten for a while, it would be fairly difficult to make a grilled cheese sandwich she wouldn't enjoy. After all, it is just cheese and bread, right? While if she were not lactose tolerant or disliked grilled cheese sandwiches, The Melt would be a place she avoided like the plague.
Bottom line: if you enjoy grilled cheese sandwiches, The Melt is sure to satisfy your taste buds.
Comments