A restaurant in South Carolina has been accused of reselling Costco pizzas at a 700% markup as 'gourmet Roman-style thin crust pizza'

A restaurant in South Carolina has been accused of reselling Costco pizzas at a 700% markup as 'gourmet Roman-style thin crust pizza'

A restaurant in South Carolina has been accused of reselling Costco pizzas at a 700% markup as 'gourmet Roman-style thin crust pizza'

Diners and employees accused the restaurant of selling $18 to $20 'gourmet' pizzas that were just frozen Costco pizzas that cost around $2.50 each.

www.businessinsider.com

http://archive.is/37MIG

There's nothing unusual about an $18 to $20 gourmet pizza from an upscale wine bar. But there's definitely something unusual about passing off a $2 to $2.50 frozen pizza from Costco as an $18 to $20 gourmet pizza from an upscale wine bar.

That's what may have been happening at Charleston, South Carolina restaurant Coquin, the Post and Courier first reported.

Coquin opened in October 2019 as a neighborhood tapas and wine bar. Since the coronavirus pandemic prompted sweeping restaurant shutdowns, Coquin, like many other restaurants, has pivoted to delivery. Grimalda told the Post and Courier that he hasn't had to lay off any employees yet, saying the staff is "all kind of busting our butts" to get by.

But this week, diners and Coquin employees tipped off the Post and Courier, saying the $18 to $20 pizzas that Coquin was selling for delivery were actually just frozen Costco pizzas.

Coquin started selling the pizzas on its website last weekend, marketing them on the restaurant's Instagram. The restaurant's owner, Chip Grimalda, says that Coquin has since sold around 20 pizzas a day.


A reporter from the Post and Courier watched Grimalda go from the restaurant to his private apartment after receiving a pizza-delivery order. Grimalda then left to deliver pizzas in boxes marked, "Fresh Pizza, Oven Baked."

The reporter then found four-pack boxes for frozen Costco pizzas in the dumpster outside Coquin. A four-pack of Kirkland Signature Cheese Pizza with Breadcrumb Crusts costs around $10, or $2.50 per pizza. The mark-up if sold for $20 each? 700%.

When asked if he was passing off Costco pizza as homemade, Grimalda told the Post and Courier reporter, "I don't know what you're talking about. It's definitely not Costco, and that's all I have to say."

Business Insider has reached out to Coquin for additional comment.

 

[DrunkenDozing]

How dare they besmirch the good name of Kirkland Signature. I love Costco brand products and their pizzas are legit good. Not premium or healthy but I don't expect them to be.

 

[ColtWalker1847]

Fraud is always bad and always illegal and should always be punished, because by tolerating it, we degrade society itself and the networks of trust that any decent society requires.

Hope you have a lot of free time and money then. Every restaurant pulls this shit. Grocery stores too. In heath food stores it is nothing BUT marketing bullshit and lies.

 

[Haramburger]

Stories like this are the reason I enjoy eating at the various 1000 degree pizza restaurants that were cropping up, assembling a pizza from ingredients you can see a la Subway, and cooking that pie in 2 minutes via a superoven that Haephestus would be proud of. You get to see the whole process and tastes great. The preppers will even arrange your toppings if you ask nice into smiley faces or swastikas or whatnot.

 

[General Tug Boat]

Actually I can say this is a pretty brilliant business strategy of this establishment if they lacked the ovens required to do pizza's to begin with. Typically in any type of restaurant decent enough to do gourmet pizzas, you would have a classic wood burning oven, or just a industrialized pizza oven. In my younger days as a cook, one of our sister restaurants had a conveyor style oven that had all of the temps mapped out, and literally cooked these pizza's in like 5 minutes or so. Pizza generally isn't that hard to do when you have the equipment, but the equipment is the biggest inhibiting factor because these ovens cost a lot higher than most margins that many of these businesses can afford. Costco frozen pizzas with some fancy garnish as a sharing plate would be ideal in this style of a restaurant. Looking at their menu, it's more or so a sharing plate wine bar, where it appeals more or so to hipsters, and upper scale Karrens that want their selection of charcuterie while sipping on a 15 dollar glass of wine. In these type of places you do not typically make the money off the food but the booze, the food just serves as a palette cleanser. 700% markup is of course excessive, but that's how the business goes I suppose. As a chef though I find it a bit disrespectful to the clientele to pawn off frozen shit as gourmet, I would of probably walked out at that point if I seen that accepted. But most owners are not willing to fork out the money or pay enough for people that know what the fuck they are doing, so Costco pizzas is what you get! Guess the industry secrets are starting to spill out!

 

[Dysnomia]

We had something similar to this in Korea a year or two ago. A "dessert speciality" bakery in a small town got caught using Costco bakery goods. It wasn't until they started getting rather famous that some people started connecting the dots.

That nutty lady on Chef Ramsey resold other stores' desserts. Amy's Baking Company.

It's pretty dishonest. And a total ripoff because of markup.

 

[Mr. Skeltal]

That is the saddest excuse for a "gourmet" pizza I have ever seen. Even so, I'd still rather eat that than anything from California Pizza Kitchen.

I've been to places that make their own noodles and you can tell the difference because the noodles will be sticky, it's just that every place that claims to make their own pasta has always somehow ruined the sauce. Like i remember eating at once place and the red sauce would constantly shift from an overly sweet taste to a balsamic vinegar taste, it was pretty bad. I know some places that have decided to go overly overly fucking eccentric do shit like candy their tomatoes before adding them to the sauce or will dump some expensive whisky or brandy in their red sauce to jack up the price, but it's like you ruin it with shit like that. Cooking isn't about throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks.

If you can't make a sauce reliably from a known recipe then you have failed as a cook, full stop. Even more so with tomato based sauces, they are much more forgiving than white sauces or things like hollandaise.
I have a family recipe for a meat sauce/bolognese that I can replicate with 100% accuracy without needing the recipe on hand. If you make a dish enough it becomes second nature. I understand that a restaurant often needs some kind of gimmick if they're not the only game in town, but adding fancy shit for the sake of it annoys me greatly.

As for tomato sauces, you can make them the day prior and they will be just as good or better than they were fresh. My family's recipe is like that, damn good on day one but perfect after chilling in the fridge overnight.

 

[Niggernerd]

That pizza doesn't even look gourmet at all who the fuck did they think they were fooling?!

Fat people

 

[Sneed's Feed And Seed]

California Pizza Kitchen

I went to one of those in Nevada.

The booze was the best part. Perhaps they should just be a wine bar -- but California Wine Bar doesn't have the same ring to it, does it?

 

[Ira the Weatherman]

'According to Grimalda, the restaurant has since sold about 20 pizzas a day, priced at $18 for cheese or $20 for a pizza topped with meat or vegetables.'

“Everyone who’s ordered it has given us rave reviews,” Grimalda told The Post and Courier earlier this week. “Right now, we’re still getting (the needed) ingredients in: That may change in the future, but we’re just trying to, you know, make it through to the next week.”
On Tuesday, The Post and Courier watched Grimalda, having received a pizza order, go from the restaurant to his nearby apartment, then leave on a delivery run with corrugated cardboard boxes that read, “Fresh Pizza, Oven Baked.”

Asked if he was passing off frozen pizza as homemade, Grimalda said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s definitely not Costco, and that’s all I have to say.”

lmao the fucking balls on this guy.

He should have called it a 'Pompeian-style pizza'. Because it looks like it was baked in a fucking volcano.

Isn't it cheaper to just make them yourself? Pizza places have some of the best markups ever. It's just flour, yeast, sugar and salt, then you can charge extra for the toppings...

It's flatbread with some shit on it. If you're even remotely familiar with baking, this should be ezpz. After all, it's a dish created for and by donkey-fucking peasants, not royal chefs. The real issue is that it costs some time and effort to make one, and most people would rather spend an hour waiting in a restaurant for a $20 pizza-shit than do some cooking.

 

[Hux]

I have no sympathy for the dumbasses that bought into this shit. A hipster faggot and his money are soon parted

 

[Mr. Skeltal]

I have no sympathy for the dumbasses that bought into this shit. A hipster faggot and his money are soon parted

Yup, tell a hipster that the totally-not-Sysco dish you served them is really some ethically sourced organic non-GMO product from a local farm or business and they'll throw their money at you.
Most of it is just virtue signaling. The big difference in ingredients comes from the freshness of the vegetables and quality of the meat, not their pedigree or providence.
Save for things like peas and carrots mix, most frozen vegetables are inferior to their fresh counterparts. A cheap cut of meat typically has some less desirable properties like tough muscle fibers or lots of connective gristle that negatively impacts flavor or texture.
Knowledge of what spices taste like and their intensity is also essential. Quality is king in the world of spices - it is often worth the expense to shell out extra cash for something like true Ceylon cinnamon instead of Chinese cassia cinnamon. Saffron is a racket though, turmeric and anchiote give a similar color and impart actual flavors. If your recipe calls for saffron then just get the cheap shit at the local Price Chopper or whatever.

The rest is up to a cook's skill and the recipe's intended result.
A cheap chuck roast is merely a tough cut of beef, but in the right hands it can be turned into the most tender and succulent barbacoa this side of the Rio Grande.
Conversely a filet mignon is the Rolls Royce of beef but an unskilled or conceited cook can and will turn that delicate cut into a hockey puck of dissatisfaction.

 

[Hux]

Yup, tell a hipster that the totally-not-Sysco dish you served them is really some ethically sourced organic non-GMO product from a local farm or business and they'll throw their money at you.

It's what I've always said about hipsters, these millennials have lived under the thumb of the boomers all their lives, so they'll naturally take up their same mannerisms. The Hipster is nothing more than all of the worst qualities of the Hippie and the Yuppie rolled into one

 

[moocow]

I've seen what Sysco receives. Everything.

It's a bummer sometimes that regular ol' John Q. Public can't just order stuff from Sysco directly to get (decent if not great) meals at reasonable prices and skip the chain-restaurant-with-shitty-service experience altogether, especially given the upscale-restaurant-with-fancy-menus-and-high-prices experience involves the same reheated food anyway.

 

[Sped Xing]

It's a bummer sometimes that regular ol' John Q. Public can't just order stuff from Sysco directly to get (decent if not great) meals at reasonable prices and skip the chain-restaurant-with-shitty-service experience altogether, especially given the upscale-restaurant-with-fancy-menus-and-high-prices experience involves the same reheated food anyway.

Go to a grocery store.

 

[The best and greatest]

Hope you have a lot of free time and money then. Every restaurant pulls this shit. Grocery stores too. In heath food stores it is nothing BUT marketing bullshit and lies.

Sad but true. Part of being a modern Consoomer is being able to just cut through the bullshit yourself in real time. This is also why I am perfectly happy to just cook for myself nowadays, never mind the high cost of eating out.