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.