gritty musings...Bright Shiny Pennies

 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 scho...

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 fuck...

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...

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, t...

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. ...

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 po...

Its true.  In this age of social media, absolutely anyone can critique your shop, your hotel,  your car dealership  and of course in my case my restaurant.  In one way its fantastic, instantaneous  response to what you offer.  A server is slow, you hear about...drinks weak you get it.  the kitchen screws up you know.  Fantastic right.  Even if you'd rather not know, go to sleep with the blessed ignorance of a job well done, you get to hear it...all of it.  But you know the other side is, the uniformed or mis- informed.  The guy that says all your dressing come from a bottle when they are all made in house, by you.  The lady who says your number 1 sauce on your best selling appetizer is bitter...when you sold 20 of them that night to rave reviews.  I had couple who once said I went too heavy on the mint sauce on my lamb chops...the lamb came with a zinfandel reduction that had absolutely... no mint....