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Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Fricano’s Deli is the business
Maybe it was my fondness for my grandmother’s summer afternoon preparations, passed down to my mother, to which I was paying homage. Maybe I was portending a future in the service industry or a life as a stay-at-home dad. Or maybe I felt guilty for acting like a jerk to my friends. Whatever the reason, I always had a love for sandwiches, their quality and construction and our desires to have unique and personalized creations even in the simplest of forms.
Over the years, sandwiches have been my staple, my go-to food. Sure, I love steak and tacos … and lobster … and pizza. But I can’t resist a wonderful sandwich. My passion has led me to find stacked pleasures across the country and abroad. Wagshal’s in Washington D.C., Parkway Deli in Silver Spring, Maryland, the original Antone’s in Houston, The Italian Store in Arlington, Virginia and countless sandwich places in Italy have all made me swoon and hold a special place in my heart. In Austin, I have made the occasional love connection to various degrees of intensity at Hogg Island Deli, Wisk (R.I.P.), Spec’s, Central Market, Food Heads, Buenos Aires Café, Whole Foods, Sullivan’s, Tam Deli, Wheatsville Co-Op.
Add Fricano’s Deli to the list.
A hole-in-the-wall spot located near the Bermuda Triangle that is the area where East 31st Street and Speedway Street collide, Fricano’s feels like the kind of sandwich shop that despite being open only three years feels like it has been there forever. And it feels like the kind of sandwich shop I’d want to open, or at least eat at a couple of times a week. There are small bookshelves stuffed with books and board games, a few seats at the counter bar, two-tops with seating for about a dozen people and about two dozen sandwiches and hot dogs on the menu.
The sandwiches refrain from trying too hard, offering just the right number of ingredients to provide good flavor, without putting on a show. Take for example the Jamilio’s Italian Cheesesteak I had earlier this week. While the only thing Italian about it was the mozzarella, the combination of Boar’s Head pastrami, grilled onions and peppers, homemade Rocket sauce and the aforementioned cheese on a crunchy, flaky hoagie provided a wonderful combination of savory and spicy. It comes warmed to perfection on a Panini press that looks like it gets a thorough workout each day and hit all of the right notes.
Longtime Austinite Paul Fricano, and his business partners, husband-and-wife team Jamil Muhaisen and DeeAnne Bullard, take pride in their attention to detail, fresh ingredients and the fact that almost everything in the store is homemade, excepting the ketchup. And, really, people can be fussy about their ketchup, so probably safe to stick with the store bought.
Homemade offerings include potato and pasta salads, salad dressings and a red and green cabbage slaw, five original spreads that can be added to any sandwich and a soup of the day. When I was in Monday, I sampled a bit of the corn chowder, which was rich without relying too heavily on the cream, and featured crisp flavors of crunchy vegetables punctuated by refreshing cilantro. Although I passed on dessert my last time in, next time I will be sure to pick up one of DeeAnne’s homemade cupcakes, which she bakes daily.
While I have yet to make my way through the menu, I will be certain to tackle their roster of Reubens (five in all), and am unafraid to bring vegetarian friends, as the menu boasts four delicious veggie options.
Fricano seems a natural behind the counter, which makes sense when you discover his parents once ran a Chicago-style deli. He and his partners fill the worn joint with an affable vibe that almost makes it feel as if one of your buddies is fixing you a sandwich after a grueling match of ping pong. And they don’t cheat.
Fricano’s Deli [site]
104 C E. 31st St. [map]
482.9980
Hours
Monday - Friday: 11 am - 7 pm
Saturday: Noon - 5 pm
Closed Sunday
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Facebook is for looking at pictures of chicks; MySpace is for hillbillies
That headline doesn’t quite summarize the findings of a recent study of social networking by Harvard Business School professor Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, but it does capture a part of his findings. Minus the pejoratives, of course.
Sean Silverthorne has an article, “Understanding Users of Social Networks,” on the Harvard Business School Web site that examines Piskorski’s findings, which indicate that men generally use social networking site Facebook to look at pictures of women, who receive two-thirds of all page views. Additionally, all Facebookers utilize the photo app. to create a visual narrative of their lives.
One of the more curious cases is Twitter, which has more female users than men, although “researchers still saw differences between how men and women are followed, perhaps pointing to a fundamental representation of the role of men and women in society,” according to the findings.
Back to the purpose of the study, it seems corporations are prolific in their use of social media, but their ability to come up with an actual social strategy to attract consumers and build off that base is another story entirely.
Some of the highlights from the article:
- With these general ideas of why people use these sites, Piskorski examined weblogs of social networking sites (not LinkedIn) to see what people did when they were online. “I just wondered why people spend so much time on these sites; what do they do?”
The biggest discovery: pictures. “People just love to look at pictures,” says Piskorski. “That’s the killer app of all online social networks. Seventy percent of all actions are related to viewing pictures or viewing other people’s profiles.” Why the popularity of photos? Piskorski hypothesizes that people who post pictures of themselves can show they are having fun and are popular without having to boast. Another draw of photos (and of SN sites in general) is that they enable a form of voyeurism. In real life there is a strong norm against prying into other people’s lives. But online enables “a very delicate way for me to pry into your life without really prying,” the researcher says. “Harvard undergrads do it all the time. They know all about each other before they meet face to face. ‘Oh, you’re that guy that did that internship in D.C. last summer.’ ” Piskorski has also found deep gender differences in the use of sites. The biggest usage categories are men looking at women they don’t know, followed by men looking at women they do know. Women look at other women they know. Overall, women receive two-thirds of all page views.
- Looking at who uses Twitter, which restricts users to 140-character messages, Piskorski and student-researcher Bill Heil (HBS MBA ‘09) found that 90 percent of Twitter posts were created by only 10 percent of users. This was not surprising, he says, because the technology uses words without photos to communicate. “Only the people who are willing to put themselves out there publicly in words to people who they may not know will use Twitter. Some people will find this incredibly appealing, others will find this too scary.” But the remarkable finding was the gender dynamics. According to the research, there are more women on Twitter than men, women tweet about the same rate as men, but men’s tweets are followed by both sexes much more than expected by chance. “That was stunning because on all these other social networks you see the opposite,” Piskorski says.
- So why doesn’t MySpace get the attention it deserves? The fascinating answer, acquired by studying a dataset of 100,000 MySpace users, is that they largely populate smaller cities and communities in the south and central parts of the country. Piskorski rattles off some MySpace hotspots: “Alabama, Arkansas, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Florida.”
- Corporate marketers by and large struggle with how to use social networking sites to reach potential customers, says Piskorski, who advises companies on this subject. The problem is that execs think of online social networks as social media and treat it as another channel to get people to click through to a site. It doesn’t work that way. For one thing, findings show that people don’t click through on advertising on social networks. “A good analogy is to imagine sitting at a table with friends when a stranger pulls up a chair, sits down, and tries to sell you something while you are talking to your friends. You will not get far with a strategy like this.”
Thanks to Clay Crenshaw for the link, whose Facebook page I read even though he’s not an anonymous good looking girl with a ton of pics on his page.
Images from Photos.com.
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