gritty musings...Bright Shiny Pennies

So the experiment that was and is Isla Mujeres has moved to a new place.  The experience was fantastic, the people were inspiring and the learning curve for this fifty something chef was worth all the world.  The restaurant is built, the menu, wine list, servers and bar are in place.  The space is fantastic, seriously one of the most beautiful rooms I have had the good fortune to help birth. So now I move on.  Did I want to live on in this beautiful job. of course!  But like all things in my career of opening peoples dreams in the form of restaurants, the track is unpredictable and the path unknown.  Ilsa proved to be like many challenges I have confronted during my life's passage in kitchens.   Language, infra structure, and the staffing, were all at once difficult, befuddling and gratifying. The cuisine, something I felt really conformable with, was even more enlightening that I had hoped.  The people were far more complicated than their gentle disposition would ever reveal.  Wh

thanksgiving 2014...there have been some years with more life altering change than this...  but they are difficult to imagine...there was the move from Pennsylvania, almost twenty years ago...leaving all the friends I grew up with, my family and the comfort of a place that... i knew so well... but there were new friends..a new family of people that would surround me...and I was at home in St. Pete..loved the beauty of a small town...and the state of Florida...the keys... both coasts..loving the ease with which you can travel anywhere in 8 hours..and there was the birth of a fantastic little girl that made all our lives more exciting and love filled every day... . then there was that morning four years ago to the day...a tablesaw changed my everyday life..but with the help of the people most important to me..i recovered.. a beautiful mangled paw..but everything was still attached...there were a slew of restaurants...more fantastic people...some life changing..proving the adage ..you ju

 So those of you that read this, the very few  who actually see me...know something is afoot.  There was the weird face book "roller coaster" entry.  There were some strange posts from me in Mexico without the beautiful girl, a wholly unspeakable act.  Very few actually know whats happening and just a few are instrumental in the happening. And so it is the great reveal.  I am, at the ridiculous age of fifty seven leaving this country to try my hand at running a couple restaurants on my "lovely island".  I realize that I am doing this at a time when most people my age are gearing down.  I keep in mind that Georgia O'Keefe didn't paint until she was in her eighties.  But I was always slow on the uptake.  I have been told that it took a very long time for me to grow up.  I still hold some reluctance to that point. That I have grown.  It happened with a friend. This  friend  runs a hotel, We met through a suitcase of school supplies. Us  paying for our incredibl

As I age, i find that I am far less accepting of life's little faux pas.  I am surly.  I growl. I snap at unsuspecting irritants.  I look in the mirror and see  what my life has pulled down on me.  Wrinkles, saddle bags, hair in very strange palaces.  I expect things...simple things to proceed as planned.  If my cellular bill, for example, is due on the 24th, I expect it to be taken out on that date. Not the 21st, because it falls on a weekend.  And when I call the huge multi-national  corporation, which I hate, to question why this simple act, cannot happen...when i question the scripted autonoton on the other end of the line...when i point out that the weekend constitutes no variation to a computer tasked with taking that money on the date in question...I am told, snubbingly, that that's how it works...I point out that the computer has no weekend plans, no beach party to attend, no dinner plans with friends.  That in fact the only fucking thing that this program, written for

It came from the tube...A television show...But when I heard the line it struck me so hard that I found myself muttering the line all day.  I spent my time in the kitchen mulling over the context.  Still muttering, I drove home the sentence fragment hanging in my consciousness .  "all suffering and no salvation" Life's struggles, the endless drudgery we all endure.  The heartbreaks, the obstacles the injustices of life that wear down on us.  The suffering.  Some people find the call of this misery and accept, possibly even nourish the malaise that life's journey can bring.  I have a friend, whose life at this point is hard.  Every possible fucked up thing that could possibly happen to this poor soul does.  It is like watching a reoccurring car wreck in slow motion.  And  it happens daily.  To be around this, to be their friend is to embrace "the suffering".  I have had periods in my life that engulf, no celebrate and rejoice in the "suffering".  S

I don't know if I walk a normal path.  Although I realize that everyone, not just chefs, must circumnavigate a life with more bends than a cavatappi noodle.  The road at this point seems to be strewn with obstacles to joy.  Impediments to the "ultimate success. This last joint, a happy, bubbling, cauldron of gastronomic joy, died far too soon and scarred my heart.. To say I have been bedside at the demise of really good restaurants, would be to deny my laying in the the bed next to the cadaver of culinary dreams.  I have seen more than a few, die that festering slow death  assigned to greasy, roach infested , dimly lit shacks. BUT THEY WERE NOT!  Some died for lack of interest, bad location or economic climes.  Some died from lack of start up capital, the number one killer of restaurant dreams.  Still others died from ownership and or mismanagement.  I suppose it really doesn't matter why they die. In the end, the lights are out, the staff is scattered and the dream lie o

The word is used without regulation.  It is tossed about like "nice" or "delicious".  The term chef.  I have met 23 year old men who call themselves chef.  Line cooks, great line cooks cringe when their uncle introduces them at family functions as "a chef".  It took me years of being in charge of my kitchens to be comfortable with being addressed as  "chef".  The chefs that I had met, on my path were not all great, or talented.  They were not all team leaders, insightful or creative.  But their were a few that set the parameters that I aspire to today. And to me they defined, "chef".   I write this as I bury yet another dream.  Hours of hard work and compromise down the drain in the flush of an owners pen.  Don't get me wrong owning a restaurant is in very rare cases satisfying or rewarding. It is in most cases all about your check book and nothing about the ego or idea that brought them to the table and ultimately, me.  I can say

came home from another half of the clock days at the restaurant...sparked up and came up with this...  the last time I was in Amsterdam, I did what all Americans do...at least the ones I know...I smoked pot in a coffee house..it was all at once exhilarating and forbidden...My whole life I, smoked stealthily, hidden away...towels under doors...secret hiding places for my stash in my car...eye drops at the ready.  The freedom of the "sensi bar" or the bulldog was so fuckin cool.  I had a friend who got a ticket for smoking on the street, on the grand platz...because it freaked him out to sit with a bunch of stoned strangers in an establishment designed for getting stoned... I can only assume that the pot was really good... and the paranoia grabbed him by the throat.  I bring this up because on the eve of our country finally looking seriously a decriminalization or in some cases of legalization, it will a bright and stony day ahead.  I saw that pot stores in Boulder Colorado