Caffe Mac—legend or fact? Does this Shangri-la of no-compromise corporate consumables actually exist? And if Caffe Mac does exist, does its menu roundly trump the “food” we Mac|Life staffers must hunt and gather within the hostile-to-haute-cuisine hinterlands of our own corporate HQ? I was intent on answering these questions during a recent trip to One Infinite Loop. Read on for the full scoop—and don’t miss my paparazzi shots of The Steve!

 

Jump to the section of your choice below:
Atmosphere/First Impressions
The Steve Descends
Food Review: The Raw Edition
Disposition: All Good Trays Go to Heaven

 

 

Atmosphere/First Impressions

 

 

For more than 10 years, I’ve suffered talk of Caffe Mac and its abbondanza of delicious food options. As legend has it, this height of schmorga-style dining is located smack dab in the middle of the Apple campus, ready to sate the hunger of a time-challenged work force.

An on-site cafeteria. It must be nice.

Before we get into the review, let me provide some context: On any given day, the typical Mac|Life staffer might be just a single desk-drawer condiment collection away from a Donner Party scenario. If we can’t make it to the taco truck by 12 noon sharp, we are left with the following lunch options: (a) a snack machine, (b) the candy jar intermittently replenished by Human Resources, and (c) what in corporate circles has come to be known as “emergency oatmeal.”

Personally, I also know the whereabouts of a long-forgotten box of apple cider mix packets. One might assume these packets could offer some form of sustenance, or even be used in the fermentation of an alcoholic beverage, Mac|Life’s version of “prison pruno,” which is what it might come to when zombies finally attack.

But an on-site Cafeteria? The mind reels at the implications. And so it was with great anticipation (and even greater jealousy) that I entered the cavernous culinary cornucopia of Caffe Mac.

Oh. My. GOD. My first impression was that I had somehow found my way into the Prepared Foods Department of Whole Foods. Station upon station upon station offered a mind-boggling variety of international cuisine. There were kiosks for burritos, pizza, pasta, sushi, hot entrées, burgers, sandwiches, salads, smoothies, frozen yogurt. They even had a gelato bar.

Then there were the kiosks for Spanish tapas and paellas. For British bangers and mushy peas. For Ethiopian wat and injera bread. And for traditional Inuit preparations of caribou, walrus and seal. Amazing.

OK, truth be told, I didn’t see any kiosks for food from Spain, England, Ethiopia or the Canadian Arctic. But because the Caffe Mac food selection was so incredibly plentiful and varied, I couldn’t help but imagine such exotic cuisines. And, in fact, because this new world order of lunch possibilities was so overwhelming, I found myself paralyzed with indecision. Pizza or past? A sandwich or sushi? Or maybe a bold trifecta of blended and/or frozen delights?

The Apple campus regulars didn’t seem quite so awestruck. The Caffe atmosphere was at a calm, low boil as happy, soon-to-be-well-fed employees gathered in knowing clumps at the more popular food stations. The brick-oven pizza dispensary had a line reaching from Cupertino to Santa Clara—all this despite the fact that the pizzeria was (apparently) no longer making pies to order, a development that (according to rumor) absolutely rocked the Apple work force.
 
By the time my thought-paralysis subsided, I was ready to order a pizza, but the long line (and a tight schedule) sent me elsewhere. What could be faster than raw food? I thought. And so it was to be: My first dining at Caffe Mac would consist of salad and sushi, fitting choices considering The Steve’s well-publicized fondness for vegetarianism and raw foods. Eat as The Steve does. Surely they save the best heirloom tomatoes for The Steve and his vegetarian brethren, right?

Right?

 

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Jump to the section of your choice below:
Atmosphere/First Impressions
The Steve Descends
Food Review: The Raw Edition
Disposition: All Good Trays Go to Heaven

 

The Steve Descends

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I had barely sat down in the Caffe Mac patio, when who should stroll by but The Steve himself. My sushi and salad samplers would have to wait, as sighting The Steve in his indigenous habitat (as opposed to, say, on the stage at Moscone) is a rare event. If you’re absolutely intent on reading about food in this “food review,” you can jump to the next section (Food Review: The Raw Edition). But for now, let me provide some details on my brush with Steveness.

First, let me report The Steve was still looking exceedingly trim; probably still recuperating from the health problems (surgery- and bug-related) that plagued him just prior to the iPhone 3G launch. Now, I’ve said this before within the confines of the Mac|Life office, but now I’ll make this declaration publically: I’m not comfortable with Steve at this weight. I think he’s taken this whole vegan/macrobiotic/breatharian thing too far. It’s time for Steve to go middle America. Pork rinds. Bags and bags of them. That’s what The Steve needs.

I wanted to reach out and grab him, and ply him with high-calorie sushi rice and mozzarella balls (both of which were on my Caffe Mac dining tray!), or even the stuff they feed sumo wrestlers to bulk up, because surely Caffe Mac offers that too.

But I resisted the impulse to reach out and touch The Steve. I resisted the impulse, because (a) The Steve knows his dietary needs better than I, and he doesn't need some wise-ass "blogger" giving him any advice, and (b) it’s almost certain that armed security men, robust and full of burl, would have sprang from surrounding foliage and gang-tackled me—ending my meal short, and thus kaiboshing the review you’re reading now.

If it’s not a part of the Apple Employee Handbook, it should be: No one touches The Steve. Let’s repeat: No one touches The Steve. No one removes lint from The Steve’s sweater, no one play-punches The Steve’s arm, and no one gives The Steve one of those brief, awkward two-handed shoulder pinches that say, “Hey, if I knew you better, I’d give you a proper back rub, but I don’t, so the warmth stops here.”

No, I did not touch The Steve. But if I had touched him, it would have been perfectly reasonable for my lunch partner -- the individual who sponsored my entrée into Caffe Mac -- to pull a knife and slit my throat before the foliage-dwelling security guards ever made their move.

Indeed, one would have to surmise – nay, hope -- that all Apple employees are issued a special quick-kill knife, and have a binding responsibility to immediately dispatch all attackers in the event The Steve is ever threatened in their vicinity. (First Law of Apple Employees: An Apple employee may not injure The Steve or, through inaction, allow The Steve to come to harm.)

At any rate, by the time I got my iPhone out and began snapping photos, The Steve was already some 40-50 feet away. He was on a walk-talk with someone I didn’t recognize. I can only hope they were discussing complete and enduring world domination.

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Jump to the section of your choice below:
Atmosphere/First Impressions
The Steve Descends
Food Review: The Raw Edition
Disposition: All Good Trays Go to Heaven

 

Food Review: The Raw Edition

With The Steve safely tucked away in his corporate cocoon – safe from the looky-loo gazes of star-struck reporters -- I was now ready to sample the preparations of Caffe Mac’s finest. If one subscribes to the maxim that a restaurant can be most accurately judged by the relative freshness of its least fresh food (and one might not subscribe to this maxim, for I just made it up), then it stands to reason that buying plates of raw fish and vegetables might give one a pretty good idea of just how wonderful Caffe Mac really is.

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Here we go. First the sushi. There was not a large variety of fish in the refrigerated sushi case. As a result, the small collections of fish that were actually on display looked a bit lost and lonely. Nonetheless, the color of the salmon, tuna, yellowtail, et al appeared perfectly correct, so I settled on a familiar collection of maki and nigiri.

With an uncanny consistency, the sushi tasted fresh but bland. Professional food writers (I am not one of them) will describe proper ebi as being succulent and almost sweet. Unfortunately, the shrimp on my slab of sushi rice was, for a lack of a better term, “flat.” No sweetness, and not a hint of that perfect turgidity one experiences when biting into a perfectly prepared piece of shrimp. It almost seemed as if the shrimp had been treated with something from a spray can, some kind of neutralizing agent that locks fish in a permanent state of freshness but also robs it of all flavor.

My tobiko-themed pieces were equally disappointing. With trademark amounts of saltiness and crunchiness, one should be able to detect a single, miniscule tobiko egg on the tip of one’s tongue, and then toss it around like a hacky-sack—from molar to tongue, from molar to tongue--because that’s just how strong and rigid a good flying fish egg will be. Sadly, while Caffe Mac’s tobiko had all the structural integrity one would expect from a crunchy, high-quality roe, it had none of the saltiness.

And so it was to be with all the sushi. The hamachi roll: bland but inoffensive. The California roll: bland but inoffensive. The unagi roll: OK, this one was a bit offensive, because the chef went heavy with the teriyaki sauce on top.

My total sushi upshot? It was two steps above the packaged stuff one gets at the supermarket, but also three or four steps below the truly sublime sushi one gets at in Northern California finest fish bars. In other words: In the context of Asian-themed lunch cuisine, Caffe Mac’s sushi was fan-bloody-tastic compared to the Monosodium Ramenate we get from the Mac|life snack machine, and I would gladly give up 50 percent of my vacation days if a sushi bar of Caffe Mac’s caliber set up shop at my own corporate HQ.

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Dining only improved after the sushi, as my second course consisted of a hand-selected medley of salad fixings, with each element being both fresh and packed with flavor. As you can see from the accompanying photograph, I sourced an eclectic mixture of beans, cheeses, and tomatoes.

Let’s talk beans first. I went for garbanzos and what can only be described as “non-specific members of the legume family, green.” Perhaps I chose the green ones because they reminded me of pear Jelly-Bellies, I don’t know, but I can tell you that both the ‘banzos and greenies had none of that waxy-starchy pulpiness that crappy canned beans are famous for.

The cheese? High-quality and absolutely fresh. The mozzarella balls were soft, creamy, and perfectly coated in herbs. The hard cheese? I don’t know what kind it was—maybe Parmesan, maybe Romano, maybe even Asiago—but it certainly wasn’t the crap from the green can.

And finally we come to the tomatoes. This meal was consumed in early August, arguably a few weeks short of the prime heirloom harvest period, but the tomatoes were just as rich, meaty, and bursting with flavor as anything you would have found at your local Farmer’s Market. And don’t be alarmed by the pink-colored thing you see in the photo. That’s a slice of tomato, not a piece of sushi. It’s supposed to look that way.

All in all, my lunch at Caffe Mac was a revelation. Even the somewhat disappointing food was spectacular within the context of what’s available in the Mac|Life offices. I can’t wait to try Apple’s pizza – in the almost inconceivable event that I’m ever invited back.

Oh, and by the way, Caffe Mac was also home to a piece of technology that left me thoroughly mesmerized. To omit any discussion of it would be a crime. So let’s continue, shall we?

 

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Jump to the section of your choice below:
Atmosphere/First Impressions
The Steve Descends
Food Review: The Raw Edition
Disposition: All Good Trays Go to Heaven

 

Disposition: All Good Trays Go to Heaven

 

Click to embiggen

 

So, my meal was over and it was time to bus my tray. None of those familiar garbage-can-looking things were to be seen. Surely, Caffe Mac doesn’t offer bussing service too, does it? No, it does not. It offers better than a team of white-aproned bussing attendants. It offers what I will call the Ever-Rotating Tray-Bussing-o-Matic.

As I was looking for a home for my now-messy tray, a kind Apple employee pointed me toward what appeared to be a utility closet. I was reluctant to enter, because I’m barely even a guest of Apple, let alone anyone with clearance to go poking around semi-walled-off corners. But poke I did, and there I found the Ever-Rotating Tray-Bussing-o-Matic.

The contraption works thusly: You slide your dirty tray -- plates, utensils and all -- onto one of the wired slots, and then walk away. The humongoid contraption then rotates your tray away to unknown lands. That’s it. Job done.

One would assume the contraption gently deposits all the plasticware into some kind of slow-churning soak cycle. Or, who knows, maybe workers on the other side grab everything, and slide the dishes and trays into a massive dishwasher, something akin to a dishwashing mainframe. I don’t know.

But what I do know is that if I were mentally challenged—or some kind of savant, or just prone to lengthy episodes of awestruck wonder—I would have stood in front of the Ever-Rotating Tray-Bussing-o-Matic all day, watching the machine go ‘round and ‘round and ‘round. Because, yes, friends: The Ever-Rotating Tray-Bussing-o-Matic was just that captivating to watch.

So let’s see that unveiled on September 9, OK?