Your friends tell you on an hourly basis you make the best boiled ‘whatever’ and you must open a restaurant. Perhaps you DO make the best boiled whatever. I don’t care, and chances are, no one else will either…Reality.

Opening up a restaurant requires far more than the ability to sauté a vegetable, or that banal excuse…“I love to cook…my friends are always telling me I need to open up my own place.” Tell ‘ya what, next time your friends say that, just have them write you a check for $100,000 instead.

Let me explain…I love the food business. I have dedicated my life to it. Although my career has evolved to the private chef sector, I’ve had over 15 years in the restaurant, hotel and upscale catering business. I have sacrificed family, relationships, money, health and a personal life, all to create wonderful foods and develop eateries with great energy.

If you actually think that the self proclaimed ‘Mother Teresa’ of the culinary world, Alice Waters, has even a remote grip on reality, with her visions of hand picking an individual sprig of lavender to be placed loving on the plate by ethereal cooking cherubs…then its time to understand the reality of the business.

Horse owners from Texas who just won the Belmont stakes! My best clients! Some of my favorite foods!

So, what’s not to be perfect?

It was the ultimate barbeque. A sprawling estate in which we created an event of southern hospitality to rival any of our longhorn and cowboy friends! A stunning white horse and carriage escorted the guests from the valet at bottom of the football field lengthen driveway to the start of the event!  Before the guests entered the main party, I created a pre party socializing area, where there was ice cold shiner bock beer, pitchers of sangria and shots of tequila lemonade.  

150 bales of hay were randomly placed around the courtyard and used as foundation for the bars while cocktail tables were draped with chiffon ‘yellow rose of Texas’ prints and of course, the states’ flower ‘Blue Bonnets’ were arranged in actual cowboy boots.

Every inch of the property was filled with Texan charm…the beginning foods were all variations of southwestern and Tex-Mex cuisine all created in small elegant bites and butler tray passed on framed pictures of the winning horse and collages of the ubiquitous Texas scenery.

Sometimes we wait weeks for a dinner reservation, or even wait months for a world famous chef to dazzle us. Then again, we may just be walking by a cute place and want to stop in for a bite and a cocktail. Whatever the circumstance, and no matter what the style of dining, restaurants are the fabric of our social wear and chefs are the tailors.

So, when you have made the commitment to patronize an eatery…is it really supposed to be about you?

You have followed a chefs’ restaurant for weeks, you have browsed the ‘yelp’ reviews and educated yourself with the critics opinions and have viewed the restaurants’ website menu.  To further your commitment for the night, you have invited some of your circle of influence to dine with you to share the epicurean experience. After all of this preparatory review… you arrive at the hottest steak house in the city, although you have been a vegetarian for years...

I had just opened my catering company; so small, so innocent. My visions were as big as the estates I was catering in. My marketing plan was simple: blatantly lie about my successes until I actually HAD successes. If I did an event for 10 people, I would tell the next client it was for 100 people, you get the idea. Eventually, I didn’t have to fib anymore; I developed a real track record and real success. But for this event…I was still a newbie!

My first official kitchen was a rented space in a now long defunct bakery in San Diego. For 500 dollars a month, I got the honor of renting a table and two shelves in the walk-in refrigerator, where I was allowed to prepare foods from 8pm until 3am. I do believe that the alcoholic megalomaniac narcissist baker has long since departed this earth, so, I won’t make the story about him. 

I received a call 3 days before the “end of the year” holiday. Two twenty something year old brothers had just rented a mansion in the exclusive Fairbanks Ranch neighborhood in Rancho Santa Fe, California. They wanted a fun and festive New Years Eve party, yet with fairly casual foods for their non ‘foodie’ guests. They insisted on a design of black, white and yellow. Why Yellow? Who knows, however, if they wanted a ‘bumble bee’ party, I was the guy for the job! 

It seems to me, that after one discovers about 11 seconds of fame, the next step is to write a cookbook. I won’t even give the “how to make frozen dinners on a budget” type of book the respect of detailing why that crap should not be allowed even to wipe up human excrement, however there are other cookbooks out there that are written by the uber famous and sometimes amazingly fabulous real chefs. The folks that write these beautifully photographed memoirs are wonderful, yet, they give you no sense of what goes on behind the scenes, nor does the reader ever get an idea why our reputation for being neurotic, workaholic, heavy drinking, egomaniacs is well founded and true. For some reason, the food TV world has decided to only have you believe that chefs are either multi millionaire celebrities, annoying overly produced southern women with whom we are supposed to feel somehow connected to, or a limitless bevy of talent free show-folk that have never dripped sweat in a real kitchen.

That being stated, thank you for reading this blog and I hope that these pages can offer you some understanding, some insight to the industry, some workable knowledge, perhaps a smile or two and a mostly a bit of empathy. To get to the envied chef position that I now enjoy… I started just like everyone else…at the beginning!!