
the gorilla cheese bus, new york city
So, what do you do when you invent a successful tech product and sell it for a bag of bucks? Why, start a grilled cheese restaurant, of course. According to the New York Times, Jonathan Kaplan, founder of the company that created the popular Flip camera and then sold it to Cisco for $590 million, plans to open 500 grilled cheese restaurants by 2015.
Kaplan plans to call the chain The Melt, and it will offer soup with the sandwiches. Customers will order from their smart phones, then they will receive QR barcodes (those little square things that look like the snow on a broken TV set). They’ll hold the codes up to a scanner when they arrive to pick up their orders. What you’re supposed to do if you possess a phone that is merely above average, I don’t know.
Grilled cheese is looking like the next cupcake in the world of food fads. The Grilled Cheese Bus is starting up in Durham, N.C., and I dined on a grilled cheese on challah with prosciutto and gruyere from the Gorilla Cheese Bus in New York recently.