Anyway, halfway through breakfast a girl and her companion came out of the shop, sat down at one of the sidewalk tables, and lit up a cigarette. So I moseyed inside and asked the barista whether, under New York’s new smoking laws, one was allowed to smoke under the awning.

“They are not” said the barista. “Why? Is someone out there smoking?”

Not just someone, I noted, but an employee of the coffee shop. “Well,” they paused, “I guess we should, um….”

“Fire her?” I said, half in jest.

Whereupon a customer (in his early 30’s I’d say) piped up “I say live and let live.”

Me: Really. That’s interesting because that’s what I say as well. Let me live without breathing in cigarette smoke.

Him: Your advocating her being fired was a bit extreme, I’d say.

Me: I said it (half) in jest. Nevertheless it is against the law and reflects poorly on the
establishment.”

Him: You can always vote with your feet.

Me: Let me get this straight. You’re suggesting that I, what, walk away in the middle of my breakfast? Or should I just sit there and breathe in cigarette smoke? You do know by now, like anybody who can read, that cigarette smoke is a class A carcinogen.

Him: So are a lot of things. Deal with it.

Me: And that guy outside with his baby in the stroller, should he just sit there as well? Or perhaps he should grab his baby and run away. Is that what you’re suggesting?

Him: That’s not what I’m suggesting at all. Goodbye.

Me: Goodbye. And don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.

(Ok, I didn’t really say that. After all, this is still New York. Or, as a good friend of mine once said: The subways here are very safe. Just don’t make eye contact with anybody).

The space is very nice.  Somebody sank a chit ton of money into it, and it shows.  Outside, the garden, front porch and side building/bar showed lots of attention and good taste.  Inside, across from the hostess was a large slate tally board that showed where every main ingredient came from and who produced it.  Quite impressive.  The menu relied on the farm to table philosophy and showed me that great thought, time and talent went into writing it.  Best of all, there were a dozen dishes that appealed to me.  My juices were flowing.

Here we go.  The two managers walked the floor wearing ill fitting suits (one too long and the other far too tight) and shoes that could have been Emmett Kelly hand-me-downs.  If these gentlemen were indeed managers, they should stop the servers from wiping their brows and serving food.   They should teach the back waiters how to set a plate on the table without jarring the food and they should impart the importance of not running your hands through your hair and then handling silverware.  And they should show the staff how NOT to pick water glasses up by the rim to refill ‘em.  Yuck.

The chef/inspiration of this restaurant is very talented, but nowhere to be found.  When asked, the server said he may or may not show up on any given day.  So while the concept is great, the execution suffers from a lack of professionalism.  It ain’t easy.  Somebody with high standards, and experience doing it right, needs to mentor the staff.  Believe me, servers and cooks want nothing more than to do a great job, especially if the restaurant puts out great food.

Oh, on that note:  Again, the concepting of the food is great.  It’s the execution, stupid!  (Oops, sorry.  The Carville in me took over for a second.)  The assortment of heirloom tomatoes would have been awesome with a slight drizzle of great salt.  No drizzle on the tomatoes, no salt on the table.  Lucky us, I carry a container of RealSalt wherever I go.  And the shrimp and grits?  Great shrimp, I’m guessing.  And great grits, I’m also guessing.  And maybe great lardon.  Hard to tell ‘cause everything was swimming under a tidepool of cream and mixed together.  You could have put the whole mess into a Vita-Mix and it would have tasted the same.  Shame.  And my sous vide cooked farm eggs with spicy hollandaise?  Eggs, great.  Hollandaise, uninspired.  And the consistency wrong, causing the ‘sauce’ to slide off the eggs.  Should’ve been great.

What to do?  You would know the solution if you had read my book, which I’m going to write one day.  First you have to identify the problem.  And the problem is you’re treating the staff as if they were employees.  Bad move.  Think of them as members of a crew team that need to pull in unison in order to get to the goal: an awesome experience for all.  It’s the owner’s job to inspire them, make them want to be a part of a great restaurant.  Trust me; they all want that and if you give them high standards and the right environment to achieve them, they’ll work their hearts out.  That’s what will make your restaurant great.  This goes for the cooks as well as the servers, and managers, and everybody else.

The cooks are especially easy to inspire.  Why?  Because if you hired the right people, they want this to be their career and they’d like to be good at it.  During the hiring interview, ask them where they want to be in five years and each and every one will answer the same:  I want to be a chef; I want my own restaurant.  Only twice in 15 years has someone given me the right answer:  “I want to be the best cook I can be.”

Once they understand that, their goal for the next five years changes.  Now they’re focused on wanting to become great cooks.  Oh my god!  From now on every day, every dish, every bite needs to rock somebody’s world.  Believe it or not, very few cooks approach our art this way.  But once you set the standards and get them, um, aroused about their profession, they will make it their mission to learn. And that’s what you want.

But it can’t be done from afar. You have to be their muse, their inspiration.

This being about food, there’s a recipe.  Here it is: 90% respect, 10% fear.  Get it right and you’ll get 110% effort every day.  I worked for a chef, whom I won’t name (but he was French, duh) that got it backwards.  90% fear and 10% respect gets you erratic greatness and when you remove the fear, the place goes to shit.

And the respect?  It needs to be real and it needs to be a respect for our great profession, not for an individual.  And the fear?  It’s a fear of letting the team down, not a fear of being fired or screamed at.

Oh, the screaming?  Sometimes it can’t be helped.  There’s too much emotion, pride, reputation involved.  But it needs to be directed at a situation.  Do not make it personal!

There it is.  The holy freakin’ grail.

“No way,” she said, “the last time I ate there they served me iced tea that had soured.”

Ouch.

“And, your father’s chicken was dry.”

Pause.

“Mom.”

Pause.

“Dad’s been dead for 36 years.”

Lesson for restaurants?  Don’t piss off Mom.

Anyway, there were two waitresses there named Nancy.  One, a blonde with a bit of a complexion issue, was soooo nice, so sweet.  “Hi Guys”, she’d coo, “what can I get you today?”  The other Nancy was old, maybe 26 or so, and had no time for niceties.  “Are you guys going to order or just sit there acting like asses?”

Next thing I know, Jerry was dating Nice Nancy and then inviting her to move into our house.  Then, as fate would have it, Nasty Nancy’s boyfriend gets busted for selling drugs and Nancy needs a place to stay, so she takes our spare bedroom.  Now we have Nice Nancy and Nasty Nancy living with us.  Guess what?  Turns out Nice Nancy was nasty.  And Nasty Nancy was nice.

Margaret:  Umm.  Umm.  Sorry chef, I have nothing for ya.

Don:  Uh, let me think.  Uh.  Can’t come up with anything.

Joey:  I don’t eat out much, sorry.

Billy:  None stand out Chef.

Ryan:  It was in Charleston, South Carolina.

Me:  Great.  What did you have?

Ryan:  I don’t remember, but I know I liked it.

Me:  OK, interesting.  What was it called?

Ryan:  I don’t remember the name.

Me:  Let me get this straight.  The best meal you’ve ever eaten in your life was at a restaurant whose name you don’t remember and you have no idea what you ate?

Ryan:  Yes Chef.

Hard as it is to believe, only one of the 15 or so waiters had eaten a meal so memorable that they could recall it.  That server had eaten with her parents at the French Laundry.  Not too shabby.

Now it gets really bad.  I challenged the chef of this restaurant’s other location to name a great restaurant in Richmond.  His reply (in front of the mortified owner) was “I like Applebee’s.”  Five for five, Baby.

Just picked up some ramps from the West Virginia/Virginia border.  My digger is a true mountain man, Bill Kincaid.  He pretty much hunts every day of the year:  deer, turkey, ramps, morels or chanterelles.  He has become a friend as well.  We have a lot in common seein’ as how my Dad was born not far away, in the hills of WV.  Hey, maybe we’re related!

Years ago ramps made my personal list of the ten great foods of the world.  They’re either a wild leek, wild garlic, wild onion, lily of the valley or the source of all that’s holy, depending on whom you ask.  Raw, they’ll make your eyes flutter.  Dip them into good salt first.  Cooked they become rich and deeply flavorful.  Ramps seem to grow best throughout the Ohio Valley, and not too well anywhere else.  I’ve had ‘em from the Northwest but they’re wimpy.

Back in the days before interstates, very little ‘foreign’ produce made its way to the dinner tables in the ‘hollers’ of West Virginia.  So the Hatfields and the McCoys made do with whatever they could hunt, or forage.  They ate ramps and eggs for breakfast, ramp sandwiches for lunch and ramp salad with dinner.  Out of self defense, they passed a law that allowed teachers to send home any students that ate ramps to the point that ramp essence oozed out their pores.

To that point, the first time Bill dug ramps for me I went to him to get them.  The next time I told him to stick them on a Greyhound bound for Richmond and I picked them up at the Greyhound station in Richmond.  A week later he got a letter from Greyhound saying that whatever it was he shipped, please don’t do it again.

Hopefully we’ll have ramps into early May.  Today I added a couple of raw ramps to an egg salad sandwich on warm, freshly baked pita.  Holy shit.

Back in the day I had a choice:

• .   Cook crap in awful restaurants (been there, done that).
• .   Cook simple food to the best of my limited abilities (btdt as well).
• .   Cook fancy food for wealthy people.
• .   Learn fancy food, cook simple food.

My first serious job in a legit kitchen was at the Four Seasons Hotel in D.C., back in ’81.  Then Jean-Louis Palladin, then Guenter Seeger.  I spent six years working with unimaginable product:

• .    Freshly killed capons, still steaming under a bed of shaved ice.
• .    Tree sections flown in from Brazil, to be stripped of their bark layer by layer until the heart of the palm was exposed.
• .   Buckets of live elvers, or baby eel, clear as rice noodles with two miniscule black dots for eyes.
• .   Truffles the size of tennis balls, filling the entire restaurant with their remarkable perfume.
• .   Caviar.  Not just caviar, but Royal Golden Albino Osetra from Iran.
• .   Langoustine from Spain, caught yesterday.
• .   Olive oil from Chateau Lafite.
• .   Armagnac that made Louis XIII taste like soap.
• .   Rabbit livers, turtle eggs, duck balls, kidneys, brains and marrow.
• .   Forty kinds of mushrooms, all hunted within 100 miles of D.C. (hey Ray!).

I knew this wasn’t the type of food that I would be cooking in my own restaurant one day.  But I certainly wanted to discover it, enjoy it, learn to respect it, if only to be able to use this experience to better appreciate a perfectly ripe tomato, or a great burger.

Will I do another ‘major’ restaurant?  I think about it all the time.  The Frog and the Redneck was a magnificent undertaking, as was Tristan in Charleston, and SugarToad outside of Chicago.  Yep, I probably will.  I’ve even identified some locations, here in Richmond of course.  Will it be ‘better’ or more fulfilling than Fresca?  I doubt it.  But hopefully it’ll make more money.  Hey, I might want to retire someday.

* * * * * * *

Speaking of SugarToad: a real challenge it was.  After all, opening a luxury hotel 35 miles west of Chicago with a 70 seat restaurant?  And to boot, it opened in September of 2008 as the economy was hitting the proverbial fan.  Yet, just 8 weeks open the Chicago Tribune awarded us 3 stars out of four, practically unheard of for a restaurant so far out in the ‘burbs’.  A month later their restaurant critic, Phil Vettel, then named us as one of the “Ten Best New Restaurants in Chicago” and, a month after that, he named our crabcakes as one of the Ten Best Dishes of the Year.  Not too shabby.

The point of this ‘self patting on the back’ is to acknowledge that it happened in no small part because of the efforts of the Chef de Cuisine that I hired, Geoff Rhyne.  Now, two and a half years later, I’m confident in saying that Geoff is as good a cook, at 30, as I have known.  He’s leaving SugarToad and coming back east to be with his wife-of-a-year.  If you’re anywhere near Chicago in the next few weeks, go to SugarToad.  Really.

Generally speaking, here’s how it plays out:  I arrive at the venue at the same time as 20 other chefs with their staff or, in some cases, entourage.  The organizers offer me a couple of helpers, usually from a local cooking school.  I pull them aside and lay down the rules: button your chef coats to the top, fold your cuffs one turn only, no cigarette breaks and no alcohol until everything is cleaned up and put away at the end of the night.  You’re here to work and not prance around like some kind of prima donna.  Listen to what I tell you; I’ll give you clear instructions as to what you need to do.  Do not ask me to repeat myself.  I hate repeating myself.  I hate repeating myself.  I hate repeating myself.

Example: John, core the tomato like this, make an X on the bottom with the point of your knife, drop it into boiling water for 15 seconds then immediately into ice water.  Peel the skin off, trim the flesh from the seeds and cut into strips, then dices exactly this size (see specimen on cutting board).  I need two quarts of diced tomatoes.  Debbie, take these baguettes and give me 600 slices exactly this thick, use long strokes when you slice, let the weight of the knife do the cutting, don’t push down.  Like this.

So for six hours we slice, dice, sauté, toast, portion, serve, clean up and do it again.  Meanwhile, their buddies are walking around (remember these are culinary students) with their champagne glasses, Ray Bans, open collars and ‘cock of the walk’ attitude checking out all the auction items, and the other chefs.

While my guys are working I walk up to them and say, “Some of your diced tomatoes look like sugar cubes and others look like you stepped on them.  Where’s the example I left you?  I want every dice to look exactly like the next.”

At the end of the night these kids have learned soooo much.  They’ve learned to follow instructions, work clean, symmetry, knife skills, humility and pride.  Holy shit.  No wonder they [love/hate] me.

* * * * * *

Richmond story: I was interviewing a local cook for a position at The Frog and the Redneck 15 years ago.  I asked him where he worked.

I’m the chef at ——- he said.

Who owns it? I asked.

—– —–, he responded, and boy does he hate your guts.

—– —–?  I don’t remember meeting him before.

Oh, said Mathew.  He’s never met you.

So Emil asked if I want to deliver the food with him.  Do I ever!  I put on a clean chef coat and went up the room service elevator with him.  As we approached the suite I had second thoughts.  These guys are probably hassled all of the time by fans.  Emil, just get me their autographs, please.

So Emil delivers the food and then asks if he could get their autographs for the chef (loose term) that’s cowering in the hallway.  “Tell him to come in” bellows David Crosby.  Emil waves me in, and there sat Stephen Stills with two young, really young, women on his lap, and David Crosby and Graham Nash at a table playing chess.  Wow, I mean, Wow.

Emil grabs a Watergate envelope and hands it to Crosby, who signs it, and Nash, who signs it.  He takes the envelope over to Stephen Stills, who announces “I don’t sign autographs”.  Jerk.

Emboldened, I approached Crosby and Nash and blurted “Guys, for me there are only three bands.  The Beatles, Poco and CSN&Y at which point Graham Nash asked “What about the Hollies?  Oh, yeah, they were good too.

They then said that they were giving a concert the next night at the Capital Center.  I know, I have tickets!  Well then, come by the suite after the concert, we’re having a get together.  OHMYGOD, I must be tripping!

Went to the concert with four friends, unbelievable.  Awesome.  Headed back to D.C.  Again, second thoughts.  They invited me, but not my four friends, and I didn’t want to abandon them.  Thanks anyway.

The next day hotel security told me there must have been 300 people in the suite.

So what about my near encounter with Neil Young?  Turns out he and Stills were feuding (again) and he got a room on a different floor.  Hey, I almost met him.

* * * *

I need four tickets to his show on April 17^th!

* * * *

That’s not the only noteworthy event for me at the Watergate in the summer of ’74.  On August 8^th we were herded into the lounge to watch Richard Nixon resign on TV.  If you don’t understand the significance of this, ask your parents.

Anyway, when I went to work for Guenter Seeger (at the new Regent Hotel in D.C. circa 1983) he was pretty adamant that we not use French terms on the menu.  I thought about English options and figured we were ‘teasing’ the diner about what’s to come.

So he introduced it to a group of influential women that had been invited for a pre-opening luncheon to sample what Guenter could do.  As he took out the first tidbit he announced that this was his ‘Teaser’.  At that, the women in the room all began to giggle.  “Vut is so funny?” he asked.  “Well,” said one of the women, “most of us live near Middleburg, horse country, and a teaser is something we use to get the stallions, um, excited, so they’re, um , eager.”

“Yah,” said Guenter.  “That is exactly what I want!”

Teaser it is.