It's Christmas and all is well at the GoNOMAD Cafe. We have hit a stride in these past few weeks, our new manager Donna has taken charge and is doing a great job organizing the staff and introducing many new menu items. Among these are soup, pannini grilled sandwiches and oatmeal.

This last item is following a trend started by Starbucks, Jamba Juice and others who have realized that people want more choices for healthy breakfasts. They like cereals more than just eggs...so we'll be adding this to our offerings starting next week.

One suggestion came from Tama, our barista. She suggested four kinds of cold cereal along with the oatmeal. The hot oatmeal will be offered with your choice of seven toppings. Dried cranberries, walnuts, almonds, flax seeds, maple syrup and apple and bananas. We think people are going to love this, I just hope we have patience since new menu items take a while to catch on.

The big news in December at the cafe is that our coffee is better. Way better. We have changed to new, larger baskets and now brew more coffee in one brewing, so it's better tasting.

We are here in NY doing research about more great coffees and foods for the cafe. We will report on them when we find them.

I'm the toastmaster general now, seeing as how we've upgraded to a new superdeluxe conveyor belt toaster in the cafe. This baby just keeps on rolling, taking in the bagels and spitting them out lovely brown and ready to eat. We've had so many problems with burned bread, pasty white bagels and so I sprung for this nearly $600 contraption to make everybody happy.

Donna our manager was thrilled, and greeted me with a big hug. It's nice that our staff and manager take such pride and have a lot of fun at their jobs. With the climate of layoffs looming and so much bad economic news, you can feel it when you place a help wanted ad on Craig's list and get swamped with so many people who want a job.

Now a great guy named Dean who left us just called to say he wanted to come back. Hey, have we got a job for you!

I'm back from a trip to a place where they don't have a coffee tradition. In Iran, tea is the name of the game. In fact I learned while I was there that chai means tea. So when we put up signs selling "Chai Tea," we're saying T
ea Tea.

Here in Iran, you order 'chai' and they bring it in a little glass. It's non-sweetened and you add a bunch of blocks of sugar. The server brings it and just as he approaches, he flips the saucer down as if he was going to drop it. Then he pops it back straight and you breath a sigh of relief.

Tea has been a big success for us at the cafe. When we first brought in our Tea Guys teas, they didn't sell that well. But now about every fourth or fifth customer asks for a tea. People love seeing how we make that special tea bag, and the care we take to measure it just right.

We tried switching our 'Chai Tea' to a version without the powerdered milk in it, but customers asked for the old one back. So we relented and are proud to continue to serve Big Train Spiced, Chocolate and Vanila hot or iced chai.

The cafe has come to Hollywood California to learn more about cafes, internet cafes, and coffee to better serve our customers!  We are adding soups to our menu very soon, too many customers asked us about it so we're taking the plunge.

On Hollywood Boulevard tonight, I walked down to pick up a late night salad after a long flight. I went to an internet cafe where they charge the same $6 per hour as we do. They served up a salad with mesclun and chicken with pesto. It was ok. But it made me think about adding chicken or pork to our Asian noodles that are so popular.

More and more variations are coming, we're going to be offering many more variations on the noodles that people love. Asian noodles, peanut noodles, and soon, chicken and pork noodles with spicy sauce!

We have a new manager now, Donna McCartney, who is taking charge and is doing a fantastic job, we welcome her and we are happy to have the cafe in good hands when the boss is off traveling the world for new recipes and ideas!

The cafe has many new faces as we move into the thick of the fall season. Manager Sam has moved on, and Caitlin is in Scotland. Now we have Tama, and Sara, and Maggie and even more to come!

This Saturday is the big Tag Sale Day in Deerfield. So far we have almost 50 tag sales registered and ready and we expect to be very busy in the cafe feeding all of those out of town visitors.  People can download a map to all of the sales at the www.deerfieldattractions.com website.

We will be staffing a tent out on Elm St., right off Rte 5, where we will have tag sale maps and offer samples of our delicious GoNOMAD Coffee. We were going to sell coffee there but we think instead we will give samples and then direct people to our cafe where they can find a great deal more than just coffee.

We have gotten a ton of press with this, and we are proud to be the people who came up with this idea. I love it.....charity begins at home, so why not organize an event that makes everyone in town a little money!?

There is no bigger news than this....Deerfieldattractions.com the group of businesses in Deerfield, have spearheaded an idea that's getting headlines and making Deerfield excited. It will be as many as 100 tag sales all taking place on the beautiful fall morning of October 4!

People can come into the cafe and pick up the application forms. Then once they've gone over to town hall and registered their sale,  we will list each tag sale on the www.Deerfieldattractions.com website in a printable map. Imagine, just print and go and spend the day poring over the treasures that tag sales bring....BIG TIME.

We are so excited we are planning a special TAG SALE DAY MENU...watch for specials and also our tent out on Elm St. promoting the sales!

We are getting into the festival business. We will be setting up a booth at the Deerfield Farm Fest, a music and food celebration that will feature many local bands, local beers and of course, the local cafe, GoNOMAD! 

We've bought a 10 x 10 tent that we will set up with tables and serve our great hot coffee and ice coffee with coffee icecubes and our cookies and some cakes and muffins. We think this is a great opportunity to pass out our menus and to get more people to know about the cafe.

Events like this can be great exposure. So in this spirit, I've also ordered a new vinyl banner, which will be two color four feet by three feet. This will have a new message that we're using to promote the cafe--The Center of South Deerfield...GoNOMAD Cafe!

Join us at the festival and have an ear of corn and listen to some of Buddy's music next Saturday.

We have introduced pasta salads to the cafe and so far it's taking a little longer than we thought for them to really catch on. Maybe we just need to continue to experiment to find the right blend of salads. I still want to do Vietnamese noodles but we haven't found the right noodles yet.

But the new glass-front refrigerator is helping to move lots of sodas water and ice tea. And we have a place to put our most fragile baked goods so that they don't melt in the heat of the case. We have been pleased with the response to our Mango Lassis and especially with our new Real Indian Chai Tea. This is not as sweet as the mix we sell, it's more authentic and like what you might find in India.

Sandwich specials included grilled bratwurst, and yesterday a salad that had honey-fried mangoes on top. These salads are going very well. We are also beefing up the different sandwich ideas, such as one with avocado, turkey that sold really well.

We are going great guns this summer--and we can't wait until we get Frontier's teachers back to really hit our stride. Stay tuned!

GoNOMAD Cafe blog is taking a trip to Malaysia to check out new and exciting coffee innovations that we can bring back to the cafe. In the local newspaper, we read about a coffee bean roaster who did something awful to his beans. He added margarine and sugar as he was roasting them...yuch!

In the airport in Kuala Lumpur, we ordered a latte, paying with a $50 US bill and gettin back nearly $149 in Malyasian Ringets. But the coffee has a sickly sweet taste, that I couldn't describe. It must have been some of those beans that are roasted with the sugar and margarine. It adds this slippery sweetness that is just bad...bad.

But I was inspired later on in the trip when we visited the little down of Batawan, and I took a walk down the porticoed sidewalks to a Chinese run cafe. There the man was making noodles. He'd take rice noodles and dunk them in hot water, adding some sugar, some hot pepper sauce, some scallions and then mix it all up. Then he added some chopped up roasted chicken on top. Boy that was good and it cost all of about $1.50 US. I am inspired by these noodles and so we are going to be adding noodles to the cafe menu.

No, they won't be cooked outside like this, and won't even be hot. But we have just added a refrigerated open glass case, and so now we can put things like Vietnamese noodles and Asian peanut noodles in the case, ready to take away.
We will also be adding premade sandwiches and other things like the Mango lassi I mentioned. Who knows this might be a real winner!?