The breakfast business

Posted by Josef Desimone, Executive Chef

At a technology company you might think no one's around for a morning meal, but that's not so here in Mountain View. The cafe I run on campus is open for breakfast from 8-9:30 a.m. five days a week. My team of 12 feeds a steady crowd of about 750 every morning -- and these folks are big on breakfast. Our record so far is making 201 (custom) omelets in 90 minutes. We blend 300 12 oz. fruit smoothies that typically disappear in an hour. Some other stats from the front lines (all of these are per-day numbers, by the way):

- Googlers prefer Canadian bacon (45 lbs.) to chicken-apple sausage (30 lbs.)
- Steel-cut oatmeal (10-12 gallons) wins out over organic grits (6-8 gallons)
- We polish off 5 cases of fresh fruit (cantaloupe, honeydew, pineapple)
- Devour 160 breakfast burritos (eggs, veggies, cheese)
- We cook 80-100 lbs. of red bliss potatoes
- We use 2 gallons of egg whites (for the omelets)
- Googlers gulp down 9 gallons of fresh coffee every morning (just in our cafe)

My biggest surprises: people consume 1-1/2 gallons of kombucha tea - a little-known fermented drink - every day; and against all logic, some people ask for an omelet that's half egg whites, half regular eggs. What can I say? We aim to please.