For years, the words “Great Buy!” have been printed on the sides of pastel-colored, sort-of-Southwestern-looking cans of Arizona Iced Tea in a bid to get the attention of gas-station customers and convenience-store shoppers. This month, both the catchphrase and the sugary drink it advertises are being splashed around some unusual new territory: the Brooklyn branch of Mission Chinese Food.
The restaurant’s chef, Danny Bowien, is running a monthlong “Great Buy” menu that promotes and uses Arizona’s products in two savory dishes, one cocktail and a dessert. Green Tea noodles with chicken, “Mucho Mango fried rice” and a tequila-vermouth cooler are $9.99 each. The dessert, whipped cream and a gelatin made from Arizona Grapeade topped with Arizona fruit snacks, is 99 cents, the price at which Arizona Beverages has kept its 23-ounce cans of sweetened drinks for more than a quarter-century.
Mr. Bowien has made space for a corporate product on his menu before. For three days in 2015, his Mission Chinese Food in Manhattan served breakfast dishes that introduced Kellogg’s cereals to such ingredients as persimmon jam and bacon-infused soy milk. Proceeds were donated to a Bowery shelter that feeds homeless men and women. The Arizona campaign has no charitable component, said Mr. Bowien, who would not discuss other specifics of the deal.
Creditvia Arizona Iced Tea
Menus in chain restaurants are frequently embellished with the names of barbecue sauces, spirits and other brands. The chefs of independently owned restaurants, though, tend to be extremely protective of their menus.
The culinary talent agent Shep Gordon, one of the first in the business to appreciate the financial opportunities that fame had brought within reach of chefs, wrote in an email that he had never brokered a deal like the Arizona promotion for any of his clients, who have included Emeril Lagasse and Wolfgang Puck. (Representatives for both chefs confirmed that they have named farms on their menus but not brands.) Mr. Gordon did see the potential, however, calling it “a great idea to monetize the menu experience.”
Chefs have not been shy about endorsing mass-produced food like Lay’s potato chips (Michael Symon), Diet Coke (Tom Colicchio) and Knorr bouillon cubes (Marco Pierre White). For most, though, the notion of bringing an endorsed product into their dining rooms has seemed to cross a line.
“My restaurants, especially my menus, are completely sacred to me,” said the chef Bobby Flay, who has endorsed Fage yogurt and other products. “I would never take a product and force it into my menu, ever. Ever. If I liked the product, I might create some ideas for their website or some platform they had. But I would never implement it into my restaurant.”
Some respected chefs made an exception for the Impossible Burger, a manufactured meatless patty that appears to bleed, like a medieval statue. In San Francisco, Traci Des Jardins worked as a consultant as the burger was being formulated. When it came to the market in 2016, she served it in her restaurant Jardinière, which she recently closed. Ms. Des Jardins said she was not paid to promote the Impossible Burger.
“My motivations were being a true believer in the possibility that a product like this could change the way we think about food,” she said, “and hold hope for the ideas we have about sustainability and environmental impact and other things I feel strongly about.”
Arizona’s best-known products are made from high-fructose corn syrup diluted with water or tea. Every eight ounces of Mucho Mango or Grapeade contains 110 calories, 10 more than in the same amount of Coca-Cola. Each 23-ounce can of those flavors, which Mission Chinese Food now stocks in a help-yourself refrigerator just inside the front door in Bushwick (under a neon sign that says, Great Buy!), contains about 70 grams of sugar. Rates of obesity and diabetes among adults have been slightly higher in Bushwick than citywide, according to a 2018 report by the New York Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
In a telephone interview, Mr. Bowien said he saw the promotion — and others he plans with Arizona — “as an opportunity to reach more people.” He added, “We already appeal to people in the food world, but I really wanted to reach, like, kids that are familiar with Arizona to branch out and try something different.”
Mr. Bowien said he was not aware that the neighborhood had elevated levels of obesity and diabetes. “I don’t really have a comment,” he said.
Mr. Bowien’s Arizona-friendly menu items are not as sweet as they might have been, all things considered, although the cocktail is highly reminiscent of the sugary, chemically enhanced, watered-down margaritas served at the kind of Mexican restaurants where the servers wear sombreros and shot-glass bandoleers. The Green Tea noodles with ground chicken do, in fact, taste like green tea, perhaps because they are freely sprinkled with matcha.
If the grated mango and the mango jerky were both subtracted from the Mucho Mango fried rice, would any mango flavor remain? Maybe not.
Early one recent evening, the restaurant was giving away cross-branded cocktail cups and chopsticks to anyone who bought one of the Arizona items. The swag didn’t seem to be helping sales of the sponsored menu to the point of eclipsing more celebrated Bowien dishes like Chongqing wings or kung pao pastrami.
