10/20/2019
**** How Our Sauce Came About (Part 1) ***
🤔 "Seriously, Gluten-Free is Just a Fad 😕. It will go away"
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👉 That was what all of our vendors and many customers said to us in the summer of 2006 (yes, 13 years ago!). Thanks Goodness, we went ahead with our GF-quest JUST BECAUSE the needs of a couple of our customers at that time.
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➡️ In the summer of 2006, a couple of our regular customers came to us asking if we can cook things "without wheat" as they have Celiac disease. We had no idea what Celiac was and did not know what food has wheat and which ones don't.
➡️ We researched and found out - at that time 1 in 133 people have the auto-immune disease and gluten is something they desperately have to avoid. So, we (Yume actually) started looking at all the ingredients in the kitchen and wrote down which dish we can design to make them gluten-free. As we use soy sauce in many dishes, we asked Shamrock (our food supplier) if there are gluten-free soy sauce like Tamari GF that we can get. Well, their answer was: "this is a fad. Don't invest your time in it. Also, we don't carry them". Well, we found out where to get the GF Tamari by San-J and asked if they can special order. As it turned out, at the same time, PF Chang was also placing special order with San-J so we "tagged" our order with PF Chang. While regular soy sauce costs $29 for 5 gallon, San-J GF Tamari was $155 for 5 gallons!
➡️ Then we checked into wheat flour versus rice flour so that we can change out all the recipes that use flour. Similar to the difference in pricing of the soy sauce, rice flour was $3.99 per pound versus wheat flour was $0.89 per pound. Indochine was still in our small space then (The main room of the current Portofino now). That space's capacity was 28 people then. As you can imagine, no matter how busy we were, the justification for the massive cost increase to make things GF was not there. However, we decided that it is important to take care of our customers who NEED things to be GF - even if there were only a couple at that time. So, that started our journey to slowly change our menu to GF to accommodate (at that time) less than 0.1% of our customer base.
➡️ Slowly, one recipe at a time, we have been "converting" our recipes to GF and now our menu is 90% with GF as the only option :-). We were very careful to make sure the taste are still delicious. It has taken YEARS and are so excited to see our vendors who now know why GF option is not a "fad" and that "if the customers want, they can bring their own GF soy sauce for you to cook with" is NOT an acceptable mode of operations.
➡️ We often said Yume got her "start in TV" when she was called by the producer of the News segment in Channel 7 way back in the winter Fall of 2007 to show case the Gluten Free options at Indochine. All because the Producer's Dad has Celiac and no one talked about GF food at that time. As you can imagine, the day Yume appeared on that segment (we think it was December 5th, 2007 around 11am with Christian Chang), Indochine had a long-line out the door for lunch with everyone travelling from the mountain, from Colorado Springs because what they saw on TV. That was when we know that we are offering solutions to a very significant health issue. Knowing that we are not just cooking great food - but we are cooking food that help people, to give them choices, to add to their enjoyment....There is no word that can describe how great that feeling of being useful, adding values...
We THANK YOU all of you for supporting us and helping us getting to where we are today. We know that many of you think we have done so much....but the quest is still on....for healthier and yummier food....for food that our customers can confidently feed their families and salivate when they think about our food. THANK YOU!
👉 👉 👉 Now.....You know the rest of the story :-).
Eat Well. Be Well.
