Thicker is easier
What began as a mild preference or a rational instinct, however, has turned into an irrational and self-reinforcing consensus that has consigned an entire generation of diners to what by any objective measure is an inferior chowder. Restaurants were only too happy to accommodate this trend, if for no other reason than it has made it easy to get away with using fewer clams. Try that trick with a thin broth and your chowder fraud would be obvious. It also makes it easier to use something other than real clam broth, which is the big hassle. Because it is less delicate, thick chowder is also more amenable to being prepared in large vats at central locations, refrigerated or frozen and then shipped out to restaurants in plastic bags to restaurants that call it their own.
This trend has been allowed to go on for so long that there’s barely anyone left who even remembers what authentic chowder tastes like, or many restaurants that serve it. So when restaurant owners tell me that thick is the way the customers prefer their chowder, it has an air of plausibility to it.
“There are huge incentives in consumer markets even for competing companies to make everything the same,” says Dan McGinn, president of the McGinn Group, a research and strategy consultancy in Arlington. Established, dominant firms crave the predictability of doing what they are already doing, making only minor tweaks and modifications and fighting to take small increments of market share from competitors who are basically doing the same thing.
To be sure, businesses are always ordering up marketing studies to search for changing tastes or new opportunities, but McGinn says that unless the research is done well, it inevitably winds up confirming that consumers have a strong and immutable preference for the products now offered. The old joke — that companies use market research the way drunks use a lamppost, more for support than illumination — would be funny if it weren’t also so often true.
The curse of bad market research is that it lulls companies into the kind of complacency that eventually makes them vulnerable to an upstart challenger who comes along offering a more fuel-efficient car, a stronger cup of coffee, a more healthful soft drink, a more interesting hotel room or — let us hope — a tastier and more authentic chowder.
As it turns out, just as I was despairing of finding an authentic bowl of chowder, I found one just up the street from where I’m staying in Wellfleet, at PJ’s. Every day during the summer season, owner Don Reeves makes up 10 gallons of his own clam juice using freshly chopped sea clams from a local supplier. He adds onions and potatoes and finishes it with some light cream and butter.
“We like to say that we thicken our chowder with clams,” said Reeves, whose family has owned and operated the family restaurant for 40 years after moving from Texas.
Despite the tasty authenticity of his chowder — perhaps because of it — the always-packed PJ’s today sells less chowder than it did years ago. In a whispered aside, Reeves allowed how even his 19-year-old son prefers the thicker version that his mother cooks up for him at home during the off-season.
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