Food · Medellín · Colombia
Crepes & Waffles
I walked in with contempt for chains and walked out a convert.
Crepes & Waffles is an institution in Colombia. Over two hundred restaurants and getting on for a hundred and fifty ice cream shops across six countries, which is exactly the size at which food usually sags into the average. Here it did not happen. I do not understand how they do it and I would rather like to know.
I had a savoury crêpe with pulled chicken in a spicy sauce, with avocado and red pepper. It was perfect. Not good, not very good, perfect. On taste I would put it next to places that hold a star, and I paid a fraction of what it would cost at home.
And the setting is part of it. This is not a canteen with plastic trays, it is a place where you can sit and where it is pleasant. Every time and everywhere I have been.
A bit of history
Behind this chain is a story that deserves more than the food on the plate.
It was started in 1980 in Bogotá by two students, Beatriz Fernández and Eduardo Macía, as a single small crêperie. They began in her father's garage and opened the first place on Calle 85. Since then it has grown into a chain across six countries and two continents.
The interesting part is something else.
Crepes & Waffles employs almost exclusively women, and it does so deliberately. The figures given are around six thousand employees, of whom roughly ninety two per cent are women, and about three quarters of those women are single mothers. It is not a marketing gesture, it is how the company has been built from the start. The founders saw what their employees were dealing with and decided to build the firm around it: the job comes with healthcare, a housing programme and continuing education.
Beatriz Fernández summed it up in a sentence plenty of people at home could print out: employing women gives a business a soul.
It interests me professionally too. For fifteen years I walked through companies looking at how work is done in them, and I know how rare it is when caring for people is not done for a certificate on the wall. Here you can see the result on the plate, which makes it rarer still.
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