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.