beer, a love story...

I don’t drink as much as I should...well, at least not as much as I should if I still want to be considered an ‘expert’ which, I guess, at one time I sort of was. But when I do, like most folks around here, it’s usually a beer. My first beer was a Heineken, of all things, shared between at least three of us boys, stolen out from one of our parents’ stash, and furtively gulped down in the woods out behind the house. Like most folks, I didn’t quite get it at first—but, there it was—a new experience. It wasn’t terrible, but I didn’t quite get the appeal either. When I got older, drinking beer with the guys was sort of ‘something that you did’ and I latched on to Budweiser—I appreciated the red label, (red was my favorite colour!) and, of course, the cool chef at my restaurant drank it. It was my ‘favourite’ beer, because, well, everyone needs a favourite, right? Then one night, at a party, a friend produced a Guinness.

I’ll never forget that first sip—bitter...rich, intense. At first taste, I was not a fan—I thought, fleetingly, that it might have been a joke drink—you know, like you’d find a fart scented perfume at a novelty shop or something. It was too much—it reminded me of when the soda machine at work broke and you got a cup of undiluted syrup...It reminded me of a coffee from a gas station that had been stewing since yesterday morning...It reminded me of hot tar. Then I had a second sip, and I began to recognize that all those big flavours were there on purpose, and that they even fit together in a sort of weird architectural balance—a structure—by the end of the bottle, I was hooked. I still love that beer—although, I have to admit, it’s no longer quite as devastating to me as it was that first time...it’s a context thing. That bout with Guinness lead me on a long quest—It opened up a world to me, flavours that I’d never before encountered—the world of the art of the glass...

We had a pizza joint in my home town, Double Dave’s, which offered an ‘alternative degree program’ (...it was a college town...) where one could earn diplomas and degrees in the beers of the world. My brother was an employee for just long enough for the two of us to earn our doctorates , that is to say, we tried them all—an invaluable experience for a couple of youngsters and one that has shaped my tastes in the years since. Most of the beers they had were, I know now, fairly mainstream, the ‘Budweiser’ of their respective countries; but luckily, a few were good introductions to the world that was just starting to open up to the average consumer back at that time, the world of ‘craft beer’.

A few years later, I was lucky enough to work in a brewpub in my hometown. I was on the opening crew and got to work with a selection of beers made for us alone—we were encouraged to be creative and to try to use the beers in our cuisine—it was awesome, I took every opportunity to quiz the brewmaster and spent my breaks spying on the brewery and hoping for a chance to play. It was invaluable for me to see, first hand, that beer was something that could be made—it sounds silly, I know, but it’s true—when you see something done, it makes it possible, not theoretical. It makes it real, it’s the same with cooking—you can read all you want, but until you see it done, it’s just a theory. We were busy at the start, but it didn’t work out, they had a bad chef and an owner with no experience and they failed within 2 years, I was gone in just a few months. The beer (and the experience), however, was wonderful and it’s really too bad it didn’t live on...

By the time I moved to San Francisco, I had begun to flirt, even start to get serious with ‘the other beverage’. Wine, to the average male Texan in those days was generally considered a necessary evil at an event, you know, so the girls would have something sweet to drink; but in the years between that first Guinness and through my gradual ascension into finer dining, I had come to understand that it was actually quite a bit more. So much so, in fact, that it is generally accepted that culturally, wine is the only important beverage in a fine restaurant setting. Imagine that bottle of Bud on a white tablecloth; you’ll see what I mean...And accept it I did, especially once I found the ‘college with a thousand classrooms’ that is the California wine country. I learned in earnest, especially at my work, where my professors brought the class to me, and for at least an hour or two a week I was treated to tastings of some of the world’s best organic wines, the wines that made up Millennium’s incredible (and the world’s largest) exclusively organic wine list. But through it all, I never lost interest in my first bottled love—beer—in fact, I learned even more, thanks to a fella named Captain Jack Fecchal, B.L.F.

Captain Jack was an oddball when he came to work with us at Millennium; it was by way of Italy, where he had attended a cooking school, and Colorado, where he apparently attended an Ultimate Frisbee school. Colorado was, and still is, ground zero for the US homebrewing movement. In fact, just weeks after President Carter signed the bill that legalized it, a couple of guys named Charlie Papazian and Charlie Matzen launched the American Homebrewers Association (AHA) in Boulder, Colorado on December 7, 1978 (happy birthday, AHA!) with the publication of the first issue of Zymurgy magazine. Captain Jack had apparently minored in this fairly recent but grand tradition at his Frisbee school, and by the time he got to California, he brought his knowledge and the tools of homebrewing with him. I was lucky enough to brew my first few batches with him on his elaborate 10 gallon system made up of converted kegs, propane burners, plumbing supplies and recycled angle iron, all welded together into a giant contraption that brought tears to the eyes of his roommates, especially when they realized that it wasn’t going to just ‘go away’, as they had earnestly hoped. We brewed several ‘all grain’ batches, the most difficult style, which means that we actually did the serious lab work of converting starch into sugar over low heat for long periods before applying yeast to ferment. I was glad to have learned this method, but was also a little happy to later discover that there were easier methods involving extracts and partial extracts that brewed some reliably tasty batches with quite a bit less time and work; I (and my wife) was also a bit pleased to discover that giant contraptions were not, necessarily, critical to the success of the batch. Beer was fun.

Wine, however, was where my brain continued to lead me, and my ‘expertise’ in that field continued to grow; I was even invited to be a judge at a prestigious wine event in Los Angeles—I was one of many judges, granted, but I was honoured, nonetheless. Beer was still a hobby, not a serious pursuit, and though it did occasionally appear in our restaurant as a feature, or in a serious trade magazine in some article or another, it was not ever something I allowed myself to believe was ever quite as important as wine. Beer was for fun, wine was for work.

I never really understood why wine culture was so much different than beer culture, but I did (and do) think about it a lot. Wine has a reputation, among ‘regular’ folks as being a snob’s drink—something that has bothered me since day one. It is, after all, just a beverage, just a way to lubricate social interaction, to relax, to consume the same drug that beer delivers, but by way of grapes instead of grains...so why all the fuss? Why does wine get ritual where beer gets games? Why does beer get neon lights when wine is lit by candles? Why does wine require a jacket when beer gets a t-shirt and blue jeans? It really does just come down culture.

When Nicole and I travelled to Europe, I went as a wine enthusiast. I was excited to experience wine close to the source, to see the old Chateaus and vineyards, to taste and to explore. I was also fairly poor—we were not going on a wine tour, per se, we were going to experience what we could, but also what we could afford. So we bought cheap, Budweiser cheap. We bought what was on the shelf at the corner stores, and I was pleased to discover, we bought quite well. At first I thought I was just lucky—after all, I had tasted literally hundreds of wines at this point, and how cool was it that with wines that were averaging in price around 3 to 5 dollars a bottle, how lucky was it that we kept scoring with completely drinkable bottles of regular wine? Everything else around us, hotels, restaurants, coffee, was more expensive than home, but bottle after bottle presented cheap but drinkable wine! I, at first, like I said, felt lucky, but as time went on, I had to admit, I started to get a little annoyed.

You probably know what kind of wine 3 or 5 bucks would get you here. You probably also know how much it would cost you to buy an equivalent amount of cheap, yes, but also entirely drinkable beer. It didn’t take long for me to figure out why wine is a North American snob drink and why our mainstream culture prefers beer.

In 2004 and 2005, I was lucky enough to attend the Book and the Cook Festival in Philadelphia, as an author (co-author of ‘The Artful Vegan’, 2001 Ten Speed Press) and as a cook alongside my old friend and mentor (and fellow beer enthusiast) Chef Eric Tucker. We reunited those two times to prepare a five course dinner paired with the beers of Philadelphia’s treasure, The Nodding Head brewpub. The Nodding Head is co-owned by a group that also includes Monk’s Cafe, easily one of the most important bars for the true beer enthusiast in North America—and it was there that we found the beer bible, a menu including over 200 beers—some available nowhere else in the world, and it was also there, under the excellent tutelage of the owner, Tom Peters, that we attempted to taste every one of them. Or something like that; it gets a little fuzzy. The important part of the story is this—we were in a hallowed hall of beer—surrounded by the best of the best—and the most expensive bottles were still well under 50 bucks. Try finding that with wine...Try finding that with anything; the best of the best just doesn’t have a good habit of staying that far under the dollar amount of the average person’s single days paycheck.

It’s a cultural thing; I guess, when I thought about it, I started to understand. In Europe, where drinkable wine is cheap, and I do mean cheap, the ‘average, regular’ person can afford to enjoy a glass or two, without making it a special occasion. But here, for those prices, the fact is that we often get undrinkable swill (sorry, North American wine industry, but you know it’s true.) Here, the ‘average, regular,’ person is going to choose a cheap, perfectly drinkable beverage that doesn’t break the bank. I appreciate wine, good wine, and I really appreciate great wine, but the fact is, that until all those ‘average, regular’ folks come on board, the culture of North America is going to continue to prefer their beer. And , well, maybe if I drank a little more, I’d have the time to find those rare and often rumoured ‘great, cheap wines’, but since I don’t (...and since we’ve got Beau’s right here!), for now, anyway, I’ll probably just have a beer.

McJob...

So yes, I had a McJob. Not proud, but it makes me one of (depending on who you ask) as many as 15% of the North American workforce. I guess it comforts me to know that one out of eight of you probably served at the altar of Ronald at some point in your working life as well. Life, however, is about choices. And though many of us have worked at a McDonalds at some point in our careers, few of us have chosen to stay.



My first restaurant ‘job’ was at Samuel’s Fine Foods—my dad being the Samuel in question, and with our family making up a majority of the staff. The restaurant was dad’s dream—he had wanted it for years. It was a tough road, fraught with challenges, but he loved the very idea of it. He wanted a fine restaurant, beautiful, a celebration of quality and excellence, and with Samuel’s, he had it. The restaurant embodied many of his ideals; as a good Baptist, he chose not to serve alcohol, he didn’t open on Sundays, he also chose the best before the cheapest, and the food was real, made from scratch. Ask him about it today and he still smiles at the memory. I, too, remember that restaurant with the fondness and idealism that only the frosted filter of childhood memory can reproduce. We served orange scented ice tea in heavy goblets and things like juicy steaks, chicken crepes with sherry cream sauce, and huge slices of my mom’s amazing cheesecake. It was, by far, the best food in the world. The building was an old, majestic home, converted for business use. It had chandeliers and wooden floors and we filled it with antique tables and chairs, floral print china, multifold linen napkins and cut glass crystal stemware. There was another person in this story: a guy who became my hero, our restaurant’s chef. I followed him around like a loyal pup—to me, he was an outlaw and a priest; his motorcycle, the leaping flames, and the razor sharp knives were all the forbidden and the beautiful accessories to the palate pleasing sculptures on heavy china that he sent out to be shown and enjoyed in the gallery beyond the swinging kitchen doors. His world—the kitchen—was mystical and inviting. My parents had me bussing tables and refilling glasses; but I was enchanted, I begged the chef to let me learn. He offered me the pit—the dish pit—and I faced a choice: work out front and refill glasses or scrub and scrub and maybe someday learn his magic art. I chose, and I scrubbed until the pots shined. And finally, eventually, he did teach me a little. I was enchanted, and in some ways, I still am. But his cooking was only one thing—he was a talented chef—in the end what I learned most from my parent’s restaurant was from my father. It was how one earns, and deserves, respect.



My parents’ restaurant didn’t make it—neither do most restaurants, I have come to learn. This is sad. Most restaurants are an act of passion and faith, and it sad that such noble intent usually ends so poorly. It leaves us all poorer. Our challenges overwhelmed us—a lack of visible parking, the oil bust, banking issues, and other things...few people who are not small business owners realize what a razor’s edge those of us who are walk in order to open our doors every day. Profit can be an elusive prey, the public’s taste a fickle friend, the bills must be met, the employees paid, and the last one paid, if there’s anything left, is the boss. This is fair—providing jobs and building networks of suppliers are acts that benefit the community; they are noble intentions, and, as they say, no good deed goes unpunished; but it is fair—for in the end, if it works, we also stand to gain the most. A successful business is not just a source of profit—the community it supports also rewards its founders with a more valuable commodity than the money in the bank, it earns them respect. And succeeding in such a difficult business? Perhaps even more so. I’d venture that most small business owners, whether they realize it or not, choose this life because they are seeking this respect, more than even the money.



Respect is a valuable asset. It is hard to come by and easy to lose. But, I should be clear; it is not the respect of others, rather, it is the sense of self respect that is most dear. We are all faced with choices, and the choices we make in business are no different from those in life: how we treat others, whether or not to be good neighbours, whether or not to give of ourselves when we can...Those choices, ultimately, are how we earn the right of self respect.



Here’s where the subject gets tricky...as a lifelong left wing advocate for fair trade, for employee rights, for the environment, for health care, for charity, and with the sincere belief that a community must stand together to be strong—my choices, though slightly different from my father, are nonetheless imbued with my own sense of idealism. Which is why it pains me to admit that some of my feelings in the three years we’ve had this business have made me (like many before me, I’m sure) feel conflicted. I’ll be honest, and perhaps even more honest than I should be, when I say that I sometimes struggle with fair pay and benefits when we can afford neither for ourselves. I’ve even occasionally balked at the money we’ve collected for charity when we could not, sometimes, pay our own bills on time. In those moments, sometimes, I’ve even caught myself empathizing with what I always considered to be ‘the opposition’ or ‘the other’. As I walk that razor, I feel a temptation (but not an attraction) to, well, not try quite so hard. To make a choice and run the restaurant that lots of folks seem to want. A restaurant with cheap food; consistent food, you know, with coca cola, with fries and ketchup. The things McDonalds serves—turn and burn food. Junk food. Drive through food.



A few years after Samuel’s closed, my second restaurant job was at McDonalds. I was informed that I had this job by my juvenile probation officer. He wanted me somewhere where he could keep tabs on me during the day while my folks were at work and I, for reasons that I hesitate to go into (it involved some bad choices...), was not in school. I was 16 years old. There was no mysterious outlaw priest in this kitchen. In fact, by the end of my first shift I was, in effect, a head chef, working the burger station by myself—preparing food that was served to our small percentage of our company’s well documented billions and billions of customers. I steamed buns; I dropped frozen hockey pucks into a machine that was essentially a flat grill sandwich, pushed a button and retrieved the cooked results when the timer blared. I used modified caulk guns to dispense ketchup, mustard, and special sauce. I placed pre-portioned quantities of frozen fries into baskets and pushed more buttons. Over time, I learned how to not sweat the unannounced appearance of busloads of schoolkids, and eventually I learned other things, like that both 5 minutes late and 5 minutes early were transgressions punishable by public humiliation and possible loss of privilege. McDonalds was like a prison camp. Most of us were miserable, but had to be there—the rules were strict and the pay was low, the managers were only months older than us, and the work was as mind-numbingly anti-creative as could be imagined. Trust was nonexistent, to the point that we were forbidden from handling the burgers that were thrown out for being 20 minutes too old; in fact, the managers were invested with the duty of counting those burgers, in the trash can, to make sure that they were not redirected to the tight, polyester pant pocket of an employee’s uniform. They were then taken, at the end of the shift, supervised, to a dumpster which was kept locked. That was just the trash. The rest of our employed minutes were watched just as closely. Employee breaks were letter of the law—fifteen minutes, OFF THE CLOCK, every four hours, 16 minutes was a criminal act, and punishable. Don’t even consider forgetting to clock out. The food was...what food? I never peeled an onion, sliced a tomato, shredded a head of lettuce...All these things arrived, prepared, numbered...Once I was asked to cut a hamburger in half; I had to use a plastic knife from one of the individually wrapped cutlery packages out front.



I shudder now at the memories. It was like being in a war. It was five months of my life when...I learned a lot. McDonalds was very, very good at the one thing that eludes me the most now, consistency. It eludes me for all of the reasons I was so miserable then and struggle so much now. Every day I face the fact that what some customers seem to want most, seem to crave and require of me, is that I provide exactly what McDonalds was so damn good at preparing: a consistent, uniform and tightly controlled product. That today, tomorrow, and six weeks from now, they can walk in, say ‘the usual, Joe’ and get exactly that product that they have gotten so many times before. I have been quoted as saying that consistency is the enemy of the good, and it’s true. This animal urge for a consistent product may have served some important function at a pre-modern point in our evolution, presumably to insure our safety in a diverse world—after all, two mushrooms with just slightly different gill structures can mean delicious...or death...but what function this instinct serves in modern man is difficult for me to fathom. I try to avoid this whole issue by explaining that we are ‘consistently good’ or some such thing, but again and again I find myself being drawn into keeping ‘signature items’ or offering a ‘bar menu’ of easy favorites to satisfy the masses. And every time I do, every time I train an employee to press this timer or use that ¼ teaspoon measure, I find myself slouching towards McDonaldland.



You see, no two onions are exactly alike. No two onions should be exactly alike. Onions, like people, are living things, as are all of the plants, delicious animals, and even the yeasts that ferment our wines and cheese. It is this life, this heart, this soul that feeds us and sustains us. To not acknowledge its presence, well, is to ignore the very core of the idea of sustenance. To treat the ingredients without respect for their individual characteristics is to deny our connection to this vast network of life that is what we are. Consistency and conformity in food is acceptance, even the advocacy of conformity in life and spirit. We do not celebrate consistency in humans (that’s called fascism), so why do we require it of our foods? I am mystified and baffled by this urge. But, sadly, not even immune to it. To me, McDonalds, and all it represents, is such a dark and wicked, soul-less place. But in all honesty, here I am, as human as the rest, with the memory of a McDLT on my lips and knowing that the McRib was a preformed press meat, and still craving its blend of sweet tangy barbecue sauce, onions and pickles. Why is this urge still here?



We yearn for our past. We long to stop time in our happiest moments and savour the lingering sweet taste of youth. The frosted filter of memory works on us all and dilutes our anxieties, polishes the rough edges, and reminds us only of our glory. It helps us to ignore or gloss over the unpleasant truths about things like how and why our food is so cheap, so uniform, and so consistent...and things like why our best attempts sometimes fail. I remember my parent’s restaurant as a paradise—but an honest retelling will admit that some of my dad’s idealistic choices helped to speed his restaurant’s decline and that ultimately, the paradise collapsed when the chef, my ‘hero’, ran off with the night’s receipts and the banks came knocking on our door. We lived lean for years after that, bankrupt and almost beaten. And like it or not, it was during those years that McDonalds always paid my check with the same timeliness and efficiency that they required of me. My heart pulls me to Samuel’s but my head, well, Ronald, sometimes it pulls me to you.



So if my head is right, if the ‘customer is always right,’ why struggle? Why not succumb to the machine? Sysco or Tannis will, no doubt, sweep in today, if I call, and they will be happy to fill my orders post haste with a ten percent discount across the board if I am willing to give up the fight, quit trying to serve local and small farm organic food, if I am willing to order exclusively from big agri-business factories that have done their diligence, commodified, and sucked all the heart out of everything they do in order to provide a cheap, consistent product.



Well that’s where we come back to the question of respect. You see, if I make that call, if I ‘give up’, then tomorrow, I’ll have to admit that the respect I sought to earn wasn’t for something I believed in, but for something, well, less than noble. I’ll have to face the fact that my success was gained not by investing in my community, but by giving up on it. I guess it all comes down to a simple fact. Life is about choices. Some folks choose the consistent. I consistently choose the variety, the individual, and the good; things with a live heart & soul behind them. And, if I’m lucky, well then maybe I’ll even be consistently good.



My father faced similar choices and his restaurant failed. But in the end, he chose right, he did the right thing, and he left with his well earned self respect intact.



So yes, I had a McJob. And I had a hero, and no, it wasn’t the chef, and it wasn’t Ronald McDonald...it was the guy I still, and will always, respect: my dad.

a working class hero is something to be...

The sandwich shop is the only job I ever went back to. I first got the job in college, and it was the perfect college job; the owners were a couple of childless hippies who adopted the entire crew as a surrogate family and as a social circle; they took it upon themselves to teach us all how to work hard, and, well, how to party just as hard...OK, maybe it was the perfect college job if you had slightly less than lofty ambitions, but it seemed perfect to me at the time. The owners were, perhaps, a bit messed up personally, but as managers, they were outstanding. It was a small shop, but even after over twenty years in this industry, when I look back, it was the cleanest and most efficient place I have ever worked; it had the best morale, the highest rate of loyalty, and to be honest, it offered some of the most fun of any job I’ve had. I left it when I left college. I left college because of ‘personal reasons’ which is to say, I had learned how to party a little too well and it had fouled up both my first marriage and my college ambitions, much to my parent’s disappointment (if you can call a pissing away of a few thousand bucks ‘disappointment’ with a straight face). I, like many young folks in my privileged position, screwed up.



After college came a couple of years in Austin, where I tried to finish sowing my unsowed oats, and where I embarked upon an honest attempt at a music career. In retrospect, that, much like my college career, was more honestly described as skipping the hard parts (practice, touring, promotion, ‘homework’) and going straight to the parts I felt most suited for (parties, shows, and, well, did I mention parties?) I continued to cook through those years, graduating from sandwiches to fine-dining Italian and eventually vegetarian cuisine. I seemed able to get a little farther down that road even in spite of myself. But, finally, in an act of ironic, intentional rebellion, I ended up in another boozy, ill-advised marriage that was also destined for much of the same success as my life had rewarded me prior to that point. She was from West Texas, and when an opportunity came to live on a farm out there for next to nothing, we jumped at the chance to ‘play redneck.’



When we arrived at our dirt farm (I can’t imagine what else we would have harvested; stones? Mesquite? Cactus?), I did give the local restaurant a once over, if not a fair shake. It was owned by a former Dairy Queen franchisee who had expanded his ambitions into a family dining establishment that was both informed by his experience in fast food and a perhaps a little, but not too much, more. I applied, half-heartedly, but didn’t want it, and decided, for fun, to try something new for a change. Most of the men out there were oilmen, mainly because the land and climate yielded little else of value to be exploited as a trade. It was a small town, and if you didn’t work on the rigs, in the fields or on the derricks, chances are you made your money off of folks who did. And so it was that, I, in an act of hilarious ironic intent, a long-haired cook, an environmentalist, a musician type, a vegetarian even, ended up working (for a couple of weeks, I thought) as a welder’s helper.



I quickly found out that ‘welder’s helper’ is a bit of a euphemism like saying ‘washroom’ instead of ‘shit-hole.’ My status as a newbie and a city boy did not make my life any easier, and these flaws were only compounded by the fact that most of our days were spent crammed together in truck cabs driving from job to job listening to America’s latest (at the time) invention of dubious value, right wing talk radio. I still have scars from the holes I bit through my tongue. This is not to say that my life was completely miserable. Working among men has its moments, when the tensions start to ease and the humour comes out, and when the fear of the unknown or ‘the other’ is supplanted by the familiarity of shared experience. There were, working as we were in areas rarely visited by civilized folks, moments of startling beauty; we once saw a herd of wild deer numbering in the hundreds, and stopped to watch this rare sight in silence with a profound sense of privilege. In time, I (almost...) seemed to become accepted as one of the crew. Personal stories among these fellows were rare, but over time the welder’s story began to emerge.



His family had lived and worked on this dry, difficult land for generations. When the oil came along, his father had learned to weld (a trade he passed on to his son), but only to help cover expenses for the family ranch. Hard work was rooted deep in the bodies of these men like knots in a twisted log. In his family (unlike mine), education was not considered work, but a frivolity for the weak willed and the lazy, and ambition was all well and good as long as it didn’t interfere with the chores. The man I worked for had eased away from the family ranch and pursued a career of welding, even becoming a foreman and leader of his own crew, but in keeping with the family tradition, he had done this with little more than a seventh grade education. I recall that a portion of every day we worked together was spent with him agonizing over a calculator assembling the numbers required by his contract, his brow deeply furrowed as he used fierce determination to bridge the divide between what he needed to do and what he had been taught.



In all honesty, I didn’t really like him; my true (but mostly hidden) self was too far removed from his experience. He did not drink, he did not discuss politics, books, or even films, he did not seem interested in music, and his work was his life. His tough exterior was betrayed by his sensitive fascination with the natural world, and had he discussed this, I might have liked him more, but no verbal admission of this passion ever seemed to pass his lips. Outside of work, his wife and children were his only priority, a fact that, also unspoken, was understood. I was not in a place to appreciate these priorities, nor did I see myself heading in that direction and I didn’t get it. He was a gruff, knee-jerk xenophobe, and I was a rock and roll freak. I didn’t like him.



But even so, the ‘couple of weeks’ of work stretched into a couple of months, and as my comfort level among the roughnecks slowly grew, I left the occasional messages from the local restaurateur unreturned. I was not feeling creatively challenged by this new line of work, nor was there any glimpse of a future I could take pride in (oil work for a former environmental activist?) but the money was outrageous, much more than I’d ever made cooking, and though the work was hard on my body, it was easy on my brain. Maybe even a little too easy; which is probably why I was shocked the day we drove past the rocks.



Texas A&M was the university in my hometown where I had wasted my parents hard earned money. It is an internationally recognized math, engineering, science and agricultural school. So, naturally, I had majored in Theatre Arts; a department that existed here with the sole purpose of filling fine arts credits for students pursuing degrees in more practical areas of study. And, in case you didn’t get it, Theatre Arts was not a practical course of study.



I was required to complete a science credit for my degree, and in keeping with my flawed logic, I chose a course that seems to have sounded both easy and equally as impractical as the rest of my schooling; Geology. To this day, I have not got the slightest idea why I chose such an odd course; I did not collect rocks as a kid, I did not have an interest in mountains or volcanoes beyond that of casual appreciation, I love the natural world and rocks are, I suppose, just as nice as anything else in that genre, but why someone interested in food would choose the one science with probably the least to offer in that area is beyond the scope of my memory. It must have been my hope for an easy ‘A’, I can’t imagine what else, except perhaps ...fate... that would have motivated me.



You see, back in the oil field on the day in question, we drove past some rocks; well, actually, it was a row of bubble shaped hills. Hills, which I recalled from my Geology course, as being formed when lava shoots formed long tunnels that almost, but didn’t quite, push through the surface of the earth. It was an odd fact to remember, and one which I casually mentioned out loud. The welder, to my astonishment, immediately stopped the truck and began to quiz me intensively, and then, after a few minutes, astonished me yet again when he impulsively decided to end the work day, turned the truck around, and drive an hour out of our way to another interesting rock formation where we stopped again and the quizzing resumed. I was humbled. I had spent months alongside this fellow, watched him struggle with numbers, show casual disdain for things I considered to be of high importance (like music, film, books, politics or philosophy), I had seen him express little or no interest in any culture beyond the oilfield and ranchland that surrounded us. And I had, frankly, written him off in my head as a simple man. And then he had done what I, in my self-centered universe, had never expected a simple man to do. He had surprised me.



You see, I had lived these past few months, years even, in a sort of ironic fog. I had accepted, even rationalized my journey through the world of the ‘blue collar man’ with a laugh and a self-righteous sense of superiority; knowing that I was ‘among’ them, but not ‘of’ them. It had started when I dropped out of college, and been expanded when I moved to Austin. I drank cheap beer and wrote comedic country songs, I drove an old truck because it looked the part; I’d even rented a trailer home, because it was cheap, sure, but mainly because it was a campy cliché. But the western shirts I wore were from an upscale thrift store and my leather belts had somebody else’s name on them. I was a pretender, an interloper, and even the oil job and the farm were part of the play that the Theatre Arts major was performing in his head. But then, in a truck on highway in West Texas, the entire character was shattered. The whole play fell apart. I realized, in a moment, and with a startling clarity that I was a punk, a lousy little punk, who had hoped to walk in this world unnoticed only to be betrayed by his own lack of true worth.



The welder was no simple man. Had he been born in my family, where education was valued, he may very well have studied Geology, not for an easy ‘A’ but for interest and fascination. But my parents had given me an opportunity to have an education, and I had pissed it away. In my shoes, he would have graduated, he would have made my (I guess ‘his’ in this iteration) parents proud, in the same way he made his (actual) parents proud with the life he had actually lead. A life that wasn’t what he wanted to do, but what he needed to do. But me? I had failed at college and, these days, had even turned my back on the only career that had stood any chance of redeeming me...cooking. Cooking was the career that had paid for my lifestyle when my parents help had run out, the career that was my creative outlet; that meant something to me, the career that could actually not just pay my bills but that could probably save my soul. The only thing I’ve ever done of consequence besides fail at college (and vacuum cleaner sales, but that’s another story...) was cooking. And instead of keeping at it, focusing and getting better, I was slogging through crude oil and pretending to listen to Rush Limbaugh with a man who was still, for all his shortcomings, a better man than I. Me, I was just a lousy pretender; I had never done what I needed to do, just what I had wanted, and in a moment I realized that if I ever really wanted to be someone worthy of respect, the fact was, I had a lot of work to do.



I snapped out the fog that had followed me. I left the oilfields that week, went to the little restaurant in town, accepted the position he had offered, gave it my all, and helped bring a few special meals to some folks in a small town; and yes, in spite of myself, I managed to learn a few things as well. As the fog lifted, the marriage, with its ironic core, dissolved into mist. When we split up, I left, but I didn’t go back to Austin, not yet, that was where the irony had begun to take root—I went back to my home town, my college town and tried to start again. I went back to the sandwich shop and tried to do it right this time, and learn how those owners had become such good managers, paying attention to the work this time, not the parties, because this time, it counted. It was the only job I ever went back to, because this time, I needed to go back and do it right.

You are what you read...

Abigail turned one this weekend and my folks are in town for that and to help celebrate Nicole’s folks’ fiftieth (!) wedding anniversary... Among Abigail’s many gifts were several books; she’s generally too young to appreciate them yet for any qualities beyond, say, flavour or texture, but she will, soon enough, and for now, the colours and pictures do seem to draw her eyes, and the pages are already fun to turn. The birthday morning I noticed another gift, this one to me, while sitting on the couch with my mom and a cup of coffee, both of us chatting and...reading. You see, in my family, we don’t just ‘like to read’ we READ like crazy; there are books, newspapers and magazines everywhere you look. Our lives are storied and lettered to the point that it is a perfectly natural act for a conversation to go on hold while I ‘just finish this page...’ or to walk around one of our houses and see an open or bookmarked book in more than three rooms, thus outnumbering the actual number of people in the given home (unless you count Meg, my parents’ Chihuahua.) The gift my folks gave me is that love of the word, that life alongside, that ability to think on the page and to escape, to imagine, and to learn.

Music was my big dream in my late teens and early twenties, and at that point in my life you would have found my bookshelves stacked with biographies of my favorite musicians; trade and music entertainment magazines littering my coffee table; and other books just mentioned by the musicians I favored (thanks, Jim Morrison, did you actually finish Thus Spake Zarathustra? Really?) I also found a love of theatre and its trappings in college and my shelves filled with plays by the increasingly more literary but probably less likely to be staged fringe of modern, absurdist, and surreal playwrights (I’m not exactly sure what career that degree would have brought me, but based on the few staged plays of Beckett, Pinter, or Ionesco that I did manage to attend, I’m fairly sure it would have involved some incredibly tiny and just more than slightly uncomfortable audiences...)

It is telling that when I realized I wanted to be, not just a cook, but a chef and artisan in a food tradition, one of my first acts was a yearlong (circa 1996) decision to put aside all other reading. I did not read novels, I read food and cooking memoirs; I did not read music magazines, I read food trade magazines; I did not read plays, I read cookbooks. I immersed myself in the literary, philosophical and practical world of cooking words. I am not claiming that this choice alone would have made me into a great cook or a chef—that path is only blazed through a forest of cuts, burns and many long, hot days at the stove—but it did give me an edge. It gave me a language to describe what I did, a sense of camaraderie and kinship, and a means to communicate.

Reading does not replace learning, it colourizes it. It fills in the gaps; it makes learning more fun. In my first year of college I, unsure of my eventual vocation, took introductory courses in a number of different disciplines—through that experience I determined a pattern. Each of these courses offered a vocabulary; each spent a class period covering a word, a term, a group of phrases; they were teaching us how to speak the sacred tongue of Anthropologese, or, say, a dialect of Psychology-ican. In some cases, the learning of another language was literal, as in Latin for the sciences or Spanish, for, well, Spanish...But in others it was more subtle, English using English to describe English, or words we knew that meant a new thing in the context of our new (potential) discipline.

Kitchens are no different. Once through the swinging door, you are in the ‘back of house’ you are grabbing ‘half-pans,’ ‘firing tickets,’ ‘counting covers,’ ‘plating four-tops,’ ‘eighty-sixing’ items, or even ‘digging yourself out of the weeds.’ Words and phrases appear unannounced; for instance, in our kitchen at the branch we use a loft space for the storage of dry goods, and within a couple of months of being open it became ‘the sky’ and the ladder to reach it became the ‘flight’ (as in ‘flight of stairs’) When open, the ladder blocks one of our hand sinks, a condition that led to the perfectly logical mnemonic couplet ‘when you sky at night, don’t forget to remove your flight’ a bit of nonsense that is completely sensible in context. Our small silicon spatulas became ‘jerries’ for no reason other than that ‘jerry’ is easier to say than ‘small silicon spatula’ 300 times in an evening service. A girl from New Jersey introduced me to the term ‘wazzing’ for blending, and a friend in San Francisco gave me the Yiddish word ‘schmutz’ (which I’m fairly sure has an unpleasant definition...) to refer to any pasty concoction with a smear-able texture like that of hummus or peanut butter. These terms travel from kitchen to kitchen like viruses and eventually, as a whole, become the lexicon of our daily life. Our language.

I feel very lucky that I love to read. It has helped with all of my choices, helped me find context for my interests and it has made me a more complete person. Usually, within a few minutes of meeting someone, I can tell if they are readers as well and have a foundation on which to build a common bond. I sometimes feel like the readers out there are like Harry Potter’s wizarding friends with the non-readers making up the Muggle population—I would be slightly worried about that comparison offending the humourless, but I doubt that a non-reader would even get it. Or be reading this. See what I mean?

My year of cookbooks didn’t just help me learn how to be a better cook; it helped me begin the process of thinking about cooking, eating, and food as a whole philosophy. Cookbooks by Alice Waters and Deborah Madison helped me find food philosophy books by Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser, which lead me older books by Rudolf Steiner and even Esscoffier. I spent time with Harold McGee and Julia Child and Peter Mayle; and I travelled the world on a plate, with books about food from every corner of the globe. Through these discoveries and adventures I became informed, not just about how to be a chef, but why. I came to understand that eating is more than just sustenance, but also a way to relate to the world. Cooking, as a trade, came through my work, practice and effort, but my reading filled in the gaps, my reading is what gave me the confidence to be a chef.

Abigail may only taste her books right now, but I do hope she develops that taste--it has certainly made my life sweeter.

a funny thing happened on the way to Syracuse,

Last week I visited Texas for a family get-together we call the Ogg-in (Ogg is my mother’s maiden name); it is a big family, close and fun. This tradition of getting together in June started about four or five years ago, and my uncle said it was my fault, it was a year when I was back in Texas and my mom wanted to try to get everyone together one more time before I moved...I’ll take the blame—this party is well worth being held responsible for. Like everyone, I’m sure, I come from a diverse, interesting and colorful family that includes CFOs and mechanics, soldiers, bankers, teachers, actors, carpenters, nurses, and more than a few food professionals and food lovers—Uncle Jim and Aunt Suzie, who host the party, have a catering business run out of a kitchen my uncle built himself on the back half of their hill country home in Marble Falls, Texas.



Uncle Jim moved to Marble Falls in High School with his parents in an intermission from their life in my home town of Bryan. The way I’ve heard the story, my Granddaddy Leo and my Grandmother Chris (Christine, as in ‘Abigail Christine’) loved the Hill Country and vacationed there frequently and finally decided to stay for a bit. They had a picture framing business called ‘The Mitre Box’ (which my uncle bought back and ran as well, years later), and my uncle (the youngest of five siblings) was the only one who actually still lived with his folks while they were there. Good thing, too, because that’s where he met the love of his life, and Suzie is assuredly one the sweetest people ever born. They are very comfortable in Marble Falls; it is a beautiful area, with probably the most rewarding scenery in Texas—beautiful slopes melting into glassy rivers and lakes, bright and quiet and just green enough to provide a spare but adequate shade from the powerful Texas summer sun. Their generosity and efficiency as hosts is only equaled by their warmth, humour, and pleasant company as people and this family event is well worth traveling from Canada to enjoy.



The drive my grandparents made from Bryan to vacation in Marble Falls is about 3 hours. From Canada, it’s more like three days, if you’re hopped up on bennies and willing to wear a catheter. Vacationing, but perhaps even more strange, living far away from home, in the age of the airplane, has come to mean a very different thing than it did in times past. Being spread out, as we are, can now mean living thousands of miles from family and loved ones, without, thanks to the internet and relatively cheap plane tickets, necessarily even feeling removed. But this separation, at least for the not so rich and famous such as ourselves, has also come to affect the ways and whys of how we vacation.



At the outset of this adventure, I coined the word ‘oblication’ to describe my attitude about the number of stops expected of us during our short visit, a visit cut even shorter by the (gasp) loss of a half days travel when our plane missed its connection in Newark on the way down. It is a weird world in which a 1000 mile trip is considered inconvenient by taking more than half a day. But that is, nevertheless, how it feels. With numerous friends, family and a month’s worth of ‘important’ stops to make in a week’s trip, the pressure to ‘oblige’ makes the desire to ‘vacate’ seem very appealing. But oblige we did, and when we could, vacate we did as well; which was actually fairly easy to do under the guidance of our excellent west Texas hosts.



We spent a day or two in Austin, where I visited my recently rebuilt old haunt of Mother’s Café, which seems to have survived the fire without having suffered much pain in the way of rebirth...we met a new young friend, a second daughter to one of my oldest friends, just hours after her birth. We visited Boggy Creek Farm and chatted with other friends of ours (as well as Uncle Jim and Aunt Suzie’s), Carol Ann Sayle and Larry Butler, the urban farmers who inspire me as much or more than any other two folks alive. And we took a day in Dripping Springs to play some music, grill some veggies, help build a lego city and enjoy the incredible Hill Country sunset with some other old friends and their children. We didn’t manage to do about seventeen other things that we had promised ourselves that we definitely would...but in the end, I think we did just about enough.



The weekend was spent enjoying family at the Ogg-in, introducing Abigail to her cousins for the first time and playing washers while drinking longnecks, crowding around jigsaw puzzles, eating well and smiling, laughing, maybe even crying, just a little, for a couple of folks who should have been there, and had been there in years before, and were still there, in a way...



Then a stop at home, my parents’ house, where I can’t seem to sleep anywhere except for my old room, even though my sister’s old room has a bigger bed and its own bathroom. Some habits are hard to break. I could have spent the whole week in that room—it is like visiting a younger version of my self; it is amazing how much of our inner lives are scripted in those teenage bedrooms, and how much of that inner dialogue follows us in the years that pass as we grow. I still go through all the drawers, expecting to find some document or talisman that proves that room is still mine. This time, I saw an old green blanket on the shelf of the closet—I remembered its smell on the cool evenings of my youth when it kept me warm in my insomnia, my brain racing to capture all those important things before they faded, never realizing that those thoughts would still be with me to mull over for the rest of my years...



Thoughts like how we live and love and what it means to be alive and live well. What it means to be good and to be happy. What it means to be successful. Thoughts about God and atheism, about sneaking out the window (the screen is still broken, another reminder...), and thoughts about things like drugs and sex, even death, and about what it means to feel good and how.



Abigail was a champ, she flew well, and (with maybe one exception) was in good spirits for the duration of the often blisteringly hot, sometimes chaotic and always completely new to her experience of the whole adventure. Even when we hit the worst of it.



We can’t seem to fly through Newark without some glitch...even on previous trips, that airport has tripped us up with delays, weather issues and the like. Our trip home looked OK, we had a mechanical issue with our scheduled plane, but the airline kicked us over to another small jet at another gate in record time—even the flight attendant seemed impressed. We took off on schedule and seemed to be moving well...we were about halfway to Syracuse when the weather hit. Nicole, Abigail and I were in the last row, which is, I understand, the worst spot for a bumpy ride, but this seemed even more violent than usual, it didn’t help that a pilot on the next row looked visibly alarmed by ‘the ride’, the seatbelt lights were on and the flight attendant was buckled in and using phrases like ‘a little rough’ and ‘looking for a better route’. Nicole had her head between her knees and was breathing like she did the day we met Abigail and I realized I couldn’t keep reading and should probably put my book away. The tension was palpable. The pilots were quiet, focused, and the plane was loud with sound of whitening knuckles and gritting teeth. I was feeling something I knew I was supposed to feel, anxiety, tightening in my neck and tensing my arms around my girls. Fearing for my daughter, coaching Nicole in her breaths; but then, suddenly, calm.



Suddenly I was back in my old room, smelling that blanket, staring out the broken screen. I was thinking, what if this is it?



The plane hit a hail storm; it was a quick, loud metallic ripping noise. Not a noise you want to hear 20,000 feet in the air. The pilot in the adjacent row lifted up in her seat. The wingtip pointed down and our (excellent) captain swung us around and out of there. A minute later, the flight attendant told us that we were going back to Newark and blah, blah, blah. I was still lost in my calm.



What if this is it? I have the best job in the world. I have the most beautiful daughter in the world. I have found the love of my life. I have few regrets and I have just spent a week in the company of many of the people I love most in the world. What if this is it? Well, OK. I’ve done quite well—better than that teenage kid could have ever imagined. More than lucky, I am blessed. I don’t crave death, this is not some sick wish, I just realized, all over, with a sense of shock that no matter what happened, I couldn’t control it, and if this was it, well, OK.



Suddenly ‘oblication’ felt like far too harsh a critique. I felt lucky, so damn lucky for every moment I had spent in the last few days with the folks I loved so much. I felt so lucky for the last several years, in fact, for the whole life I’ve had. Much of me knew that we weren’t going down, but I did know that we could, just as we could all meet our moment at any time, whether we liked the idea or not. The important thing was that something about that moment reminded me to think about those big thoughts, the ones I used to chase wrapped in that old green blanket on those sleepless nights in my room at home. I knew that we probably weren’t going down but I also knew that if we did, that if this was it, there wasn’t one thing that I could do about it.



The plane leveled out and left the clouds. We found our way back to Newark and were ‘inconvenienced’ by another six or seven hour wait. Eventually, we made it home; back to Kemptville, to the branch, to our other family, here.



Abigail slept through the whole thing, safe in her daddy’s arm, my other arm around Nicole, reminding her to breathe, calm, and smiling.

entering the foie gras fray:

I submitted this letter to a call-in about foie gras on Tuesday's 'Ontario Today' show on the CBC. They read an edited version of the letter, here is the full submission:

In regards to Wednesday’s foie gras conversation, I’d like to submit the following: as a chef and a former vegan, (I was the co-author of a vegan cookbook!) I visited a foie gras farm in Gascony while travelling and working on organic farms. I came to the farm as a chef, not as a vegan or an activist, and my tour was conducted with mutual respect and genuine curiosity. I was walked through every aspect of the operation and was not disgusted or horrified by what I saw. I saw a small farmer using traditional methods, I saw ducks that were happy and quacking within seconds of the feeds, which were conducted individually, by hand--and yes, at the end of the line, I saw a slaughterhouse where ducks were killed and processed for meat, which is, I know as a former vegan, what this conversation is really about, anyway. There are probably terrible farms out there where the ducks are handled with less care than the farm I visited, but I know in my heart that every factory farmed chicken (and that means most every chicken that costs less than 4 bucks a pound) is handled more inhumanely than the ducks I saw. I guess what I’m trying to say is that it is not a real victory to target small restaurants who are the front line of the battle for ethical purchasing by already choosing small, artisan farmers. As someone who has been on both sides of this issue I’d like to say to the vegans, choose your battles, it is the CAFOs and the giant centralized meat processors that supply the big chain restaurants and fast food joints that are robbing us of our humanity--not small traditional farmers. As a chef and a small restaurant owner, I don't serve foie gras, but I have, and I would again under the right circumstances—but, for now, I don't have a fine dining restaurant--I can't afford the stuff, and as a small restaurateur, honestly, I can't afford to alienate my vegan clientele over a subject on which we happen to disagree. But I sure wish that all the energy my former co-vegans spent on these hot button issues was directed at the real culprits at the big cheap corporate feed troughs that populate the mall food courts of our collective popcorn reality instead of at these little guys. Choose your battles. Everyone is watching and the more people you alienate with hollow victories the less will stand up for you when the real battles begin.
--Chef Bruce

sore loser...

I am not a competitive person. Which is what you say when you are, in fact, a sore loser. When I was a kid, my brother was just enough older than me that he was always physically two steps ahead—a condition that has a tendency to level out eventually, but also one that can be a source of much anxiety through the younger years. Our neighborhood friends were also his age (and size), so in the games that boys play...soccer, football, baseball, basketball (I suppose it would have been hockey had I been born somewhere a little less, well, Texas-y)...I guess you could say I had a tendency to lose. I was probably fine with this for a while, I honestly don’t remember, but eventually, it started to tick me off. Loss after loss became a source of manifest frustration. Screaming tantrums, crying jags, the whole bit. Little kid frustration at the fact that the world didn’t seem to work the way it did in the Disney sports movies. I wasn’t upset that I was losing; I was upset that the whole thing seemed so unfair.

Being the runt made me agitated, and I say that I was not competitive, but I was actually the worst of the bunch. But losing time after time made me hate the games, made me throw up my hands and eventually walk away in disgust. Finally I just quit playing, if anyone asked, I just said I wasn’t competitive, I found other outlets, comfort zones where physicality wasn’t critical; books, music, things like swimming or theatre, places where I played alongside rather than against.

Business is not a comfortable or un-competitive space. Even before I was a business owner it had become manifestly obvious that competition, even ruthless competition, was a fact of business life. Just like big kids dominate little kids, big fish swallow small fish, corporations will feast on small businesses. Only the biggest, strongest or sometimes the most creative, quickest or smartest survive in the big game—unfortunately, that doesn’t always mean the best.

Being ‘non-competitive’ in my youth gave me some perspective. It helped me distance myself and observe—it helped me to look for the merit in things that existed beyond the usual benchmarks, the trophies, the material successes.

As a restauranteur, for instance, my obvious goal in a purely competitive mode would be to become McDonald’s, arguably the most successful ‘restaurant’ concept in history. Money, power, market share...it’s all there. They are the Superbowl champs of food. And they are also a blight upon the land. I feel no love for this monstrous beast—It has leveled rainforests in its quest for cheap meat, it has created an entire industry where genetically modified corn fattens grass eaters beyond reason in concentrated toxic spaces that have made me, at times, question whether or not humanity has lost its soul. And then there’s what they’ve done to the cattle (wait for it...). But seriously, McDonald’s is all plastic and disposable in a world where every indication is that plastic and disposable will eventually choke the life from our oceans, our land, and, inevitably, ourselves. This competitive edge has brought them fortune, but we have all lost much for their gains (even as we have gained much from their fries...) All because they are very, very good at winning. It is as if they have successfully mastered the sport of feeding us our own feet, the better to keep us from walking away from this destructive path.

What would be an alternative? Is there one? Or is competing so aligned with our nature that we are trapped into this Sisyphean game forever?

When I lived in Oakland, California—I was down the street from an awesome coffee shop—they used to make an iced mocha with chocolate ice cream that would kill you dead on the spot, and then restart your heart at double speed all in the space of one quick gulp. Let’s just call it delicious. One day Starbucks decided to open a shop on the same stretch of road. Next door. It’s vicious. I mean, my little coffee shop was good, but not so good that it could afford to share a small market. It was pure predatory behaviour—That Starbucks didn’t need to succeed, it just had to outlast...I’ve got a dozen stories like that, and so do you. And the fact is that there is a twisted logic to it all, that is to say, when the object is to win at all costs, anything goes.

Are these corporations evil? No, just good competitors. A positive case could even be made for McDonald’s, Starbucks or WalMart; these guys are huge and generally irresponsible, but when they do make a choice on the side of angels, it can have massive effects...McDonald’s has implemented programs certifying and only using slaughterhouses that kill humanely, has had positive effects on millions through charitable actions such as the creation of the Ronald McDonald houses or their sponsorship of the Special Olympics; StarBucks has made choices like providing the options of Fair Trade or organic coffee, even turning these formerly fringe products into household words (without necessarily always being the best at choosing them...) Even WalMart stands poised to completely inflate the market share for organic foods, albeit at the very real risk of diluting the meaning of that word to the point of meaninglessness. The point is that when a corporation is a good citizen, its impact is on a scale that few small businesses could ever hope to achieve.

So why do I despise these places so much? If we are hardwired, if it is inevitable that we compete, and if, within the competitive world there is always going to be a winner, why can’t I just accept it and move on like everyone else seems to have? Maybe it’s because I am a sore loser. I can’t stand to see that smirking jerk in the winners circle with the babes and the trophy, knowing full well that he cheated his way to the top; it is the unfairness of the game that irks me most. And maybe, just maybe, it’s because I know there really could be a better way. I feel like the corporate big kids all acknowledge it, with these charitable acts, these nods to environmental responsibility or to social justice. They realize that some large part of our success as humans is contingent upon the interconnected nature of our actions.

When it comes to how I spend my dollars, I always prefer the quirk to the quick, the creative to the consistent, the human to the machine. Give me greasy spoons and mismatched forks over McStyrofoam™ any day. I love to see the kinds of restaurants where people sit and talk and feel like they own the place—and I don’t feel any sense of competition with them, even when they are next door. Little restaurants like the ones we’ve got (and have sadly sometimes lost) around our downtown are special, as are the bookshops, bead stores, thrift shops, yoga studios...we are blessed with a host of real and worthy businesses around here. The kind of spots that are worth supporting and the kind that deserve to win—even though you can also choose cheaper, faster and less thoughtful versions of anything they sell at franchise version of the same around the corner or up on the highway. Maybe what I like is that these little places exist in the same way that healthy people and ecosystems work, with diversity, interconnectedness, care and love.

When I was a teenager, I met Bob Atkins at his house long before I entered his homey little health food store—he had two beautiful daughters about my age and I was lucky enough to spend enough time with them to at least meet dad (if too unlucky for much else...), and though they were cute, but it was on my first trip to the health food store that I really fell in love. Rows of bulk bins, bags of flours, seaweed, tofu, sprouts...I had never found such an array of strange and wonderful delights—I felt like a young wizard in an alchemist’s laboratory. Brazos Natural Foods had the particular smell that I have since come to associate with every health food store: that blend of incense, musk, patchouli, yeast and garlic, that rich, savoury scent which I have found again and again in my life, in tiny shops and in giant groceries, scattered throughout a hundred small towns and sprawling cities, in Canada, throughout the U.S., even in Europe. It is a particular and comforting scent for me and every time I smell it, it always feels like coming home.

One of the things that attracted me to Kemptville, in fact to the area in general, was that every small town around here supports at least one if not more of these quirky little health food shops. It was a big factor in helping me have the faith that this community could also support an organic foods restaurant. Kemptville has a particularly nice one, Nature’s Way, which I have shopped at regularly since moving here, and where I am now known well enough that I am always greeted by name by most of the staff, a gaggle of sweethearts who genuinely care about the health of this community (and who definitely care less about me and more about my baby daughter...). I’m not going to say anything rude, but I couldn’t help but notice that recently a local grocery store, which although Independently (oops, sorry!) owned is still part of a much larger entity, which also happens to be practically next door to our little shop is adding a ‘store within a store’ health food area...and, well, I’ll just say that I’m a little peeved. The grocery store doesn’t need that market segment to survive, at least I don’t think it does, and, well, I guess the whole thing just feels fishy to me. It seems like that predatory, anything goes, play to win sort of nonsense that made me such a sore loser in the first place. Part of me says ‘Well, think of the positive, think of all the folks who would never go to a quirky little health food store who will now be exposed to organic foods, maybe even for the first time.’ But part of me, that sore loser side, sees a problem on the horizon for a cool little shop that deserves to win but has a big brother that’s always going to be a little stronger and a little faster.

I mentioned earlier that big brothers don’t stay bigger forever. There came a point for me where I certainly could no longer use that excuse in my losing to mine. Not being competitive is a nice idea, but compete I do, every day, for the hearts and minds (and especially the stomachs) of a small town outside of the city—knowing full well that the big kids can do almost everything I do faster and cheaper—but also knowing that they can never do it better or with more heart. They can smirk and strut in the winners circle, but they also have to try to sleep knowing that they cheated to get there. And they also know that someday, sore loser or not, I’m not going to be quite so little anymore. And neither are you.

Nature’s Way is located at 2676 County Rd. 43 in Kemptville; they are open Monday through Saturday from 9 to 6, stop by if you’re in the area.

--Chef Bruce

dandy poem

Why would we celebrate the dandelion?
This crooked little weed—
This fruit of fertile, feral seed—
This yellow and this green that speak out Spring! Spring! Spring!

For what this little flower with its splash across the lawn—
Aggravating those who seek an order to the grass and long to poison it and us by proxy—

What moxie shows this humble little plant—
It can’t be beaten back, just slowed—
It springs back each and every time it’s mowed, its seeds sown again and again, by wind!
How can one defend against such a hearty foe?

Embrace, and buss, enjoy, we must!
This lion’s tooth, so humble, and so strong—
Why celebrate this weed, this flower, this first sign of spring, this bitter green?
Why celebrate when we have lost the battle it has fought?

Why would we not?

Locavore

A couple of months back, Nicole and I were present at the second annual Savour Ottawa summit meeting, held (this year) in the opulent surroundings of the National Art Centre. Savour Ottawa is the hub of the wheel that is moving our National Capital Region towards having a functioning local foods network. It is a joint program of Ottawa Tourism and a non-profit group called Just Foods, and is supported and loosely connected to many other local, provincial and Canadian efforts that all aim to put a little sanity back into the way we purchase, source, and ultimately consume food. In our area, it is our biggest and best means of participating in the local foods movement. This organization attempts to do this by putting chefs in the room with farmers (...and the media...and many other concerned folks, such as grocery store owners, distributors, micro-processors and farmers’ markets...) and it seems to be working; attendance at each event has increased as has interest and membership, with a surprising number of restaurants and farmers seeming anxious to climb aboard and help move this stuck wheel out of the mud. Much of the event was a series of progress reports and information bits, delivered in an organized and thoughtful fashion. Savour Ottawa has been quite active and engaged since its inception, just three short years ago, and I’ve enjoyed attending, participating, and even sitting on the advisory committee of this effective, smart and forward thinking group. We have gained a great deal by way of this group, but by far, the best thing has been the opportunity to meet, hear, talk to, and get to know a wonderful community of like minded folks. Folks like Terry McEvoy.

‘Locavore’ is a new word; the folks at the Oxford American Dictionary added it to their lexicon and named it the word of the year for 2007. It was coined in San Francisco by someone named Jessica Prentice for the 2005 World Environment Day to describe folks who choose locally produced foods over the high mileage options we find in most stores, and in a short time, it has come to describe a movement some folks are calling the new ‘organic’. That would have been funny to our grandparents who would have called it ‘normal’. I spend a lot of my time thinking about this kind of stuff, so much so that it actually surprises me when I discover that other folks don’t necessarily do the same. That’s why it is always a pleasure to find other people who are as passionate about it as I am.

I never set out to be a local foods guy; for me, it started with a love of food combined with a sincere interest in and love of nature and the environment. It began in my teens and, I’m usually sorry to say, the earliest manifestations were a precocious political bent, usually expressed with a passionate lecture or a blind criticism of anyone whose knee didn’t jerk to the left. Needless to say, this approach didn’t win me many fans and I eventually learned to tone down the preachy-ness in favour of a more personalized expression in the form of a series of experiments with vegetarian, vegan, and finally organic eating. My career path being what it was (with few exceptions, I’ve only ever cooked for a living), and because of my other hunger for things to read and learn, it was natural for me to follow each of these personal experiments into both extreme research in the form of articles and books as well as into a variety of professional settings. This path has led me to where I am now, cooking philosophical local and organic food in a small town—reaching out and teaching folks (I hope) about some of the things I’ve learned along the way. When we opened the branch, I made a promise to myself that I would start shopping at my door, and really, honestly try to forge a local network that would supply our restaurant, of course, and support my family, but also to contribute to the community as a whole; that we would be a part of something bigger than just a business, and that we would make an honest effort to be a part of a positive world change.

Doing that meant meeting local farmers and producers, a task that is the least work-ish part of my work. It meant going to farmers’ markets, cold-calling numbers from the internet or the phone book, and occasionally, it meant pulling a dangerous u-turn to stop and buy a tub of honey at a self serve shack like Terry McEvoy’s, which was right on the side of one of the main roads out of town.

I am a local food geek, for sure, but I am not a local food armageddonist, which is to say, I no longer think that the world will end if I eat a slice of processed cheese (it might...but I doubt it); nor am I completely convinced that there is absolutely no place for giant mechanized and centralized farming operations in the matrix of the future of how we feed this planet (hey, I love Star Trek, I’d love to think that there is a scientific solution to every problem!) But, as far as the benefits of local eating go, what I have come to believe is that big economies (such as giant centralized and mechanized farms) and big corporations (such as agro-chemical, food processing plants, or giant feedlot and slaughter operations) are too easily made victim to the violent side effects of one of nature’s fundamental laws, the law of inertia, or momentum. And until humans can subvert this basic law of nature, (God help us when we do...) I can’t help but feel that we are needlessly endangering ourselves, our fellow humans, our children and our planet, and usually for all of the wrong reasons, like money, power or ‘security’; but most often, as I stated before, simply because of momentum. Big systems like our agricultural and industrial food processing ones can turn a bad idea into a devastating one in a short time (think DDT or gene modification); ideas which seem like good science in the lab can suddenly become toxic and widespread when applied to our enormous food system as a whole. Also, when things go wrong, (think Mad Cow Disease, or E. coli) they tend to go very wrong, very quickly because the system is so big that by its nature, by its momentum, it is difficult, or even impossible to slow or stop. In other words, with each new iteration of a poorly tested or poorly understood catch-all agricultural ‘solution’, or with each new manifestation (...watch the papers, what is it that is being recalled this week: Peanut Butter? Spinach? Deli Meats?) of a systemic problem, we open Pandora’s Box; and by the time we realize what we’ve done, it is too big, too bad and too late.

You see, I do believe in the science of agriculture, it’s just that my favorite farm laboratories are not climate or temperature controlled (at least not by the hand of man) or located in a Monsanto complex, they are scattered around the countryside of every rural route in the world—and they are operated by scientists who understand things about plants that can’t be taught in a clean white lab-coat or with a test tube. The scientists that I trust have dirty hands and well-worn rubber boots; they can fix a tractor with a bent stick and a length of twine—they can tell you which hill gets the best sun for basil and which shallow spot is too wet for garlic. And the science they understand isn’t from a book with pages; it is from an almanac filled with dirt, sun, time and water. These scientists Will Feed Their Family, and then, if there is something left, they will feed some other folks, too. They know that crop diversity will be the best tool to ensure a year of meals because the bugs can’t get everything, and they know that saving seeds is cheaper than buying them and the best way to be sure of what they’re going to get. They know that spraying poison on food is counterintuitive at its best and downright criminal at its worst. And they know that if something doesn’t work, for heaven’s sake, you stop doing it, you don’t keep trying it over and over again, hoping for a different result. They are small enough, smart enough and quick enough that they do not get crushed by the momentum of a bad idea.

These folks are the scientists that I trust. They acknowledge the math and philosophy of the agricultural schools but they also don’t let it interfere with the process of putting food in the pantry or the root cellar. It is a science not simply based on knowledge, but on knowledge tempered with wisdom; science of the mind, but also of the heart. These are the same scientists who carried the world on their backs from the caves right up to the industrial revolution, and when the oil runs out (and it will...), these are the scientists we will all be seeking out, hat in hand, begging them to teach us how to feed ourselves again.

I’m not going to wait.

I didn’t want to write today, I (and lots of other folks) got some bad news yesterday morning, Terry McEvoy, our honey guy, died suddenly, much too suddenly and much, much too young. Our, and many other heavy hearts, are with his family today. Terry was a honey collector and processor, a family man, a birdhouse builder and a pioneer and an activist in many community based, positive world changing groups and projects. And, without question, he was one of those scientists, those men of knowledge, of wisdom, and of heart to whom I referred.

I was remembering that Savour Ottawa summit at the NAC today, because of him. As a fellow member of the advisory committee he was asked, I believe, just to introduce or to give a quick summary of some item at the microphone at some point during the latter half of the event. There was no keynote speaker that day and accurately sensing the spirit of the moment he took it upon himself to say a few things...he noted that this was not what he had been asked to do, but that he felt that when an opportunity presented itself, such as this one had, there must be a reason, and that it was important for someone to say what needed to be said. Then he pulled out a set of notes. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said with a bit of mischief, ‘It won’t take too long.’ It didn’t. He spoke clearly and eloquently for the next several minutes about several topics, but central to his theme was the idea that our collective need to put the idea of ‘culture’ back into ‘agriculture.’ He talked fondly of his forebears and about how crazy they would have found the idea that in our backwards food non-culture of today a farmer could have hundreds of acres and still not be able to feed his or her family. And he spoke about how great it was that we were all there in that room talking about doing something about it, but that all the talk in the world wasn’t going to fix what needed fixing and that we were all going to have roll up our sleeves and get to work if we wanted to see real change.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that his talk that day affected me deeply. On the one hand, my respect for him increased tenfold for his act of courage and will in even taking (and I do mean taking) the chance to speak. In some ways, he helped to wake up that passionate youngster in me who I had suppressed all those years ago for fear of offending; I felt like I was being given permission, even responsibility to take the chance to say what needed to be said when the chance arose, and I’ll admit, I have enjoyed and taken a few opportunities to do exactly that in the months since...much like what you’ve read in the paragraphs here today. And on the other hand, the importance of the specifics of his message have resonated with me; both as a reminder of the importance of what we who are active in the local food culture are doing and also for his call to arms, his recipe for a clear direction forward. His phrase about putting the ‘culture’ back into ‘agriculture’ is now a permanent part of my idiom, as it now is, I’m sure, for every person who heard him speak on that (or any other) day. Terry was a true and good leader. I did not know him well, certainly not nearly as well as I wanted to, and though I had looked forward to getting to know him over years to come, I find that even in 2 short days, I am already getting to know him better as I learn more and more about his incredible legacy.

This community has suffered a blow. Terry McEvoy, a good, good man, was ripped from us too swiftly and much too soon. But if he were here, something tells me that he’d be taking the microphone and telling us that we’ve got to roll up our sleeves, look ahead and get to work.

I didn’t want to write today, but I knew I had to.

--Chef Bruce

Earth Hour

Merely existing is not enough. Thank goodness—what a sad, impersonal world it would be if it were. Humans are social creatures—our need to build communities and work together for the greater good is what defines us as a species and is also the very definition of true joy. Earth Hour is a celebration of that spirit—it is a chance for people to make a statement that is at once personal, spiritual, communal and even, to some degree, political...But not a politics of left, right, green, red or blue; rather, it is a politics of politeness—It is a chance to say ‘I am willing to work for a better world.’ Even if the only act is turning off the light or the TV—turning down the heat or powering down the cell—walking instead of driving—it is a polite political act by being something small that we all do together. For one hour, we all say, ‘Yes, I want a better world, this is my contribution.’ Then, if we are lucky, at the end of that hour, as the lights come back on and the noise comes back up, we will all go forward with a new little spark—a smile, a little taste of truth. We will say, ‘You know what? That wasn’t so hard, in fact, it felt pretty good.’

the branch restaurant will celebrate Earth Hour with a candlelit, unplugged acoustic set featuring Ottawa’s Al Wood and Lindsay Pugh. You can also celebrate Earth Hour every day at the branch with our ongoing commitments to always choosing local foods, organic foods, compostable and recycled paper goods, biodegradable and non-toxic cleaning products and a general true belief in the importance of community. Thanks for being part of the change...

--Chef Bruce

To everything, there is a season...

Back in 2001, Chef Eric (Tucker, from Millennium in San Francisco) and I went to a big food event in the Civic Center plaza; for an hour or so, we wandered around various booths in our chef coats, trying to look important enough to get free stuff. One of our stops was a booth for Ten Speed Press, the publishers of The Millennium Cookbook, Eric’s first book (and later, The Artful Vegan); the folks were friendly and loaded Eric down with cookbooks, ‘Here, you take this one, this guy is good’ he said, handing me a copy of Gordon Ramsay’s A Chef for all Seasons. I devour cookbooks, and was pleased to have this hardcover and artfully designed one to add to my collection. Later, I was also pleased to discover that the format followed a unique pattern, arranging recipes by season instead of by courses. The photography was stunning, the recipes engaging, straightforward, and fairly modern, but, as I recall, it was his near political advocacy for ‘in season’ and local food selection that was the most enticing feature.



Later I heard a story about the character of this chef that took some of the shine off of the jewel, the now famous account of him physically removing food critic A. A. Gill from one of his London restaurants. As a chef, and someone who has lived in fear and awe of critics (the civilian oversight of our profession) for the better part of my career, the symbolism of such an act was powerful. It certainly didn’t mesh with the clean lines and austere presentations that were shown in his book. More stories followed. The temper, the larger than life ego, the passion; the very public character we have all come to know. Ramsay apparently started out as a professional football (or soccer, as we call it here...) player. It would seem that he brought that rough and tumble competitive spirit with him to his new profession; his breakout television series (which I haven’t seen) chronicles his quest to achieve the world cup of fine dining awards, three Michelin stars. Later series have put him in the role of the bully coach, tightening the screws on the underperforming players in an attempt to get a winning game out of them. And finally, in one of his most recent roles, the unfettered hooligan, the armchair quarterback, given control of the entire game. He is, what we in the profession call, ‘a screamer.’



Kitchens are very high stress environments, sometimes, (such as in the case of severe food allergies or in the poor stewardship of chemicals or the potentially poisonous effects of mishandled meats or rotten foods) we are actually holding life and death in our hands. Now, to be fair, we are not doctors, firemen or paramedics, or as one critic put it recently, we are not saving the world (not all of us, anyway). We are not required to earn diplomas to serve our wares, yet the facts remain: if we fail to be careful, sanitary stewards of our duties, we may do harm, even severe harm. That thought terrifies me every time I see a brigade of untrained high school children manning the line at any chain restaurant, even a doughnut shop. When I hear the tales of dangerous and deadly mistakes that occur as a result of our blind acceptance of such a system, I am only surprised that it is only as infrequent a story as it is.



I worked for a screamer once. I’m sure we’ve all had awful bosses at one time or another, if pop culture and the movies are to be believed; a tough boss or drill sergeant (or coach) is not only acceptable, it is of vital and critical importance in our process of becoming good people. But every once in a while, that line is crossed from being tough to being abusive. Kitchens, as I stated, can be very high stress environments, and the farther you move up the food chain, the higher the stress. The screamer I worked for ran a very high end restaurant kitchen. Her tirades were famous within our four walls and unknown outside them. Her ability to berate was legendary—and the terror she invoked in every person within earshot was unmatched. But the fact is, she wasn’t that good. She demanded and commanded respect though her bellicosity, but even the dishwashers knew she was overcompensating. She was good enough; she rigidly maintained the status quo in the kitchen while the executive chef who trained her (and trained her to scream) poked his head in once a week before touring the dining room and taking credit for her (and our) work. But the screaming was a device. In her mind, she was keeping us all on the straight and narrow; she probably even saw herself as a friend and mentor, but she was often guilty of the failings for which she attacked us. To be fair, most of us were ambitious, egotistical shits who had taken the job at this exclusive, well reviewed restaurant to pad our resumes and (hopefully) get a leg up to a better job. We all had nothing to gain from serving anything but the best product we could assemble and it showed. Basic food-handling philosophy, such as the ‘first in, first out’ rule were the ‘first out’ the window as we scrambled over the tired old product to tear into today’s delivery in order to get an edge over our competitor...oops, I mean our co-worker’s presentation. Expensive, rich, and heart-clogging ingredients were crammed onto every plate as a substitute for creative, thoughtful or even skillfully devised ones. In fact, technique was very low on the roster of priorities in that space, edged out by the greater good of guaranteed results. Creativity was suspect, forward thinking was discouraged, and waste was a price paid for elegance. She brought nothing of value to that kitchen other than a semblance of order; she knew this, we knew this, and her terror of anyone else finding out required her to keep the world at arms length. So she screamed.



Whether it is the fact of our duty to handle food safely, or even just to keep a handle on our jobs (or our Zagat ratings, or our Michelin stars...), kitchens can be very stressful places; but even the most jaded restaurant lifer would agree that in few other professions would such bad behaviour as is seen in this one ever be tolerated. Now, in that ever present interest of full disclosure, I have, on (hopefully rare) occasion, fallen prey to the beast within and screamed my way out of a situation I couldn’t earn my way out of. I feel no pride in this. In fact, that dark side is my profession’s (and my own) most disgusting feature. When I scream, I remember that other chef, her tirades, her iron grip, but ultimately, I remember that she was screaming to compensate for her own shortcomings. I repeat, I take no pride in my temper, and no joy; but I do take some comfort in the fact that in my worst moments, I am always careful to not be personal...no such claim could be made about the onscreen antics of chef Ramsay. And when my head cools after such a rough night or shift, my first priority is to seek out anyone who may have gotten in the path of my invective and to clear the air, to breathe deeply, apologize and remove the weight of all that stress. My screaming boss never took these steps, and if Ramsay does, it is certainly excluded from the final cut of his shows, to all of our detriment. And in a perfect world, we never would have been cornered into such a response in the first place.



You see, I have also had the distinct honour of working for seven years with a guy who in all of those high stress, top of the profession, intense moments, never (to my memory) lost his temper or personally berated a member of his staff. Eric Tucker was a hell of a chef and I try my best to pass on the lessons of his even keeled temperament to every crew I’ve worked with since, admittedly, some days more successfully than others...but such is the nature of the beast.



Gordon Ramsay has had a wonderful season. His books top the charts, his numerous restaurants rate quite well, his television series have had a good run. He is even taking over a cooking school. A few years ago there was another successful television star who was raking in the rave reviews, a guy named Dave Chappelle. At the top of his game, his brand of race-based stereotype skewering humour had propelled him to the sort of ‘do no wrong’ kind of popularity that is not unlike Ramsay’s current run at the goal. Then one day he stopped. He is quoted as saying he felt that some of his sketches were ‘socially irresponsible’ that he felt like a prostitute, that people were laughing at him, not with him. As a chef who takes no joy in the dark side of our profession, and as someone who sees and appreciates the deep spirit Ramsay’s written work has evoked; a love for the season, of local foods, and most recently, of a return to the ritual of family dining and togetherness...I can only hope that someday soon, he too will have his own ‘Dave Chappelle moment’ and realize that for all of his good intentions, he is glorifying the worst of who we, the brother/sisterhood of chefs, can hope to be...



Mario Batali, a fine chef who seems quite capable of keeping a cool head has recently banned Ramsay from all his restaurants in response to personal attacks made by Ramsay regarding him in the press, in response, he said, to criticism Mario made about his food. Ironically, when chef Ramsay evicted that critic in the famous story that introduced me to his less than thoughtful nature all those years ago it was, as he said, because criticism of his food was one thing but personal attacks were not acceptable. Batali has turned the mirror to Ramsay, and given him the treatment he has offered others, nothing more and nothing less. It’s time for the rest of us to do the same.

all in a day recipe contest submission...

(eat local, be vocal...here’s how)

The question as asked by Adrian, queries:
‘What should Canada eat?’
But the answer...varies...
The riddle is fair, but not easy to solve,
In a simple reply that absolves us of its far-reaching implications.
Thus, my inclination is to answer in verse.
(rather than being terse.)
(eat local, be vocal...here’s how)
I can’t tell you what Canada should eat, nor can you.
Canada is too big and too wide to eat one food...and too diverse,
Or worse, cursed with a farmer’s worst enemy in the form of a season—
Local farmers are your family & friends; and in hard times,
They need to see our loyalty increasing—
Not outsourced, and increasingly divorced from reason.
(eat local, be vocal...here’s how)
I can’t tell you what Canada should eat, in the general, anyway,
I can only tell you what Canada should eat...today...
And right here. And right now.
(eat local, be vocal...here’s how...)
The meal is unimportant, the recipe can shift—
Look around you, down your road, maybe get a lift to the market.
In summer, mine’s across the street—
In the winter it’s in the city at Bank and Heron.
If you go this Sunday, say hi to Ross and Karl & David,
Maybe even Linda, Chris or even Sharon (if you should meet one...)
(eat local, be vocal...here’s how...)
The meal, well let’s see what we’ve got...
Meat and potatoes would be ok...Tim’s beef...or Dan’s...
Potatoes from Berhanu.
Some greens from Terre á Terre, and a carrot—
(or a pair, if you dare it...)
Apple cider vinaigrette on the greens, with vinegar from local cider,
From Hall’s or make your own from Jasper’s apples or Mountain’s...
Mustard from Janet, and honey from Terry
(come spring, we’ll make it with Aubin’s fresh strawberries)
Brilliant purple radish sprouts from Shelley
Crispy bacon from Aartje’s pork belly—
(Oh, crispy pork, oh crispy pork, we’ll see you again...
perhaps tomorrow with my toast and Linda’s jelly)
And bread. A loaf of comfort, baked by Rob.
With flour from Bob.
And butter, just a little knob, from Andy.
Richard’s cheese, of course, the Tomme...
Sliced thin and served with more of Terry’s honey,
Or an Upper Canada cranberry chutney.
An apple crisp for dessert—served warm,
Apples from Berhanu, again, or from Mary.
With oats and seeds from Bob, maple syrup from Tim and Colleen.
I’ll churn the ice cream—with Cora’s eggs and Harmony’s cream,
(at least until the milk board let’s me buy it up the street)
(eat local, be vocal...here’s how...)
I can’t tell you what Canada will eat. It’s too big a chore,
But as to what it should eat...
Start at your door.

--Bruce Enloe

the slip on the branch...

When we left San Francisco, we had finished writing, but were still waiting to publish, the second Millennium cookbook, The Artful Vegan, on which I had worked very hard and am proud to have received a co-authorship credit. It’s amounted to less than a thousand bucks in my pocket over the course of the several years since we published it, which is hardly a career maker, but I enjoyed the work, and it is cool to google my name and see that I am, technically, a published author. On the jacket cover of that book, I am quoted as saying that we... ‘left the Bay Area in 2003 to travel, with plans of opening an organic foods restaurant in Ontario, Canada.’ It was a dream on paper, sent floating down a stream.



That year we arrived in Canada in June, nearly broke, looking for rest and a bit of work to replenish the coffers for our European leg, for which we had already planned and bought tickets. I wasn’t legal to work in Canada at that time and wasn’t looking forward to sitting on the couch for the couple of months until we were ready to leave while Nicole picked up shifts at one of her old jobs in Ottawa. My birthday in early July was an excuse to get out of the house and visit a local restaurant which our hosts had recommended, Amanda’s Slip. ‘Just be patient,’ they said, ‘the food takes a while, but it’s worth it.’



As we sat down, we drank in the atmosphere. At first glance, the weird hybrid space was part coffee shop, part opium den, and part living room, circa 1975. Or 1935. Or some time in the renaissance. It’s tough to say. On the wainscoting above the well trodden, pale wooden floors, the decorators expressed their love for the waters of the Rideau’s branch with bold trowel effects and gobs of paint ranging from light spring trickle to deep ocean blue, and while other primary colors like bright red appeared in splashes on the door and occasional window frame, the bulk of the room was an ivory, or a smoky white, which had lost its gloss and now served as a polite backdrop for the mismatched pieces of art littered about the tall walls in various states of frame, fabric or papier mache. At the front of the room lurched an old piano with an exposed soundboard which had undergone the same broad strokes of blue and red paint; a shelf unit by the door was groaning under the weight of a community’s thousand wildly divergent flyers; while another by the bar was bursting with a year’s worth of the daily news. Scattered about the room and surrounded by creaky, but comfortable looking antique ladder back chairs, were a collection of round tables that were hand stamped with a textured effect before being painted, and were now beginning to wear in a way that gave them a timeless quality. The tables were topped with wine bottles decorated by a waterfall of wax, crested with tall candles, which were lit this evening in the dim room, to magnificent effect. After a few moments, we began to realize that the long, tall and narrow queenly manor of a room was crowned by a shy masterpiece. A hundred plus year old pressed tin ceiling was lovingly preserved, with only a bit of smoke outlining her delicious curves on the patch over the well used copper topped bar. Cardboard stars hung on string from various points in an effort to draw the eyes up to drink in her beauty. Small plates of an Asian pattern added to the air of mystique and the forks and knives were heavy and long. The bar was cluttered with a treasure trove of mismatched caffeination paraphernalia and the beer taps were of local brews without familiar names. Even the liquor bottles, though some were familiar, shared space with the arcane and unusual. The room echoed and rang with music that seeped out from behind the bar before creeping from Tom Waits to amateurish folk; it was unrecognizable and often weird. Overall the effect was of rebellion; refusal to conform, no concession to the mainstream taste, no attempt to pander. The menu, which arrived with the warm and instantly personable waitress, was a long sheet written in all capitals by a scrawling hand, unabashed in its misspellings and scratched out lines. ‘Amanda’s Slip’, read the oval graphic on the top left of the menu which was rubber stamped in its two tones of blood red and navy blue complete with its iconic riverboat from whose dock this bistro had borrowed its name.



I remember the words ‘house made’ being used more than once; I remember that there were several salads and that several items were described as being ‘Of the Day’ and ‘Market Priced.’ There was a ubiquitous garden salad, a pizza, and a steak of some sort, a mixed grill and a curry; a vegetarian item, an antipasto plate. I remember that the chicken was described as local and grain fed. After delivering the menu, our waitress had the unenviable job of reciting a paragraph of interesting descriptions in order to decode those ‘of the day’ items.



I was enchanted. This ‘little restaurant that could’ seemed instantly like home. I said to Nicole, ‘This is it, this is exactly the kind of place I want to open some day.’ My sister-in-law was right, the service was really slow. In fact, we waited over an hour between our salads and our entrees, and we were, to my memory, the only ones in the place... But even so, the food was, as promised, worth the wait. After dinner, we met A.J. for the first time while he was having a smoke in the alley as we walked back to our car. A.J. stands about six five and is proportional in breadth of shoulder and chest. He is known to wear a variety of interesting mustaches, berets, and occasional ponytails; in his customary chef coat and shorts and with his broad smile under searching eyes, he is at once flamboyant and memorable, yet easily approachable in a way that speaks to his obvious love of fun. Folks who dined or enjoyed an evening of music at ‘the Slip’ inevitably remember this lively character, his lurching, improbable, and joyful dancing, his bear-hugs and generous spirit, so much so that two years into our own venture here, we are still often asked about his whereabouts and activities.



On meeting him, I confessed to my trade and my status and offered him a free set of hands for the duration of my visit. Within the week, I was a happy addition to his kitchen and quite enjoying the freedom and fun and adventure that this exotic little bistro had to offer. Sometimes, I’ll admit, I enjoyed it even more than I should have, but that’s another story. The point is, Amanda’s Slip was a great fit for me. I was coming off 10 years of vegetarian cooking and A.J. was an expert at handling meat. I was a competent self starter who needed little training, and A.J. was tired and needed a break. I was versed in various ethnic and classic techniques, as was AJ, and able to communicate not only about the nuts and bolts of his cuisine, but about the philosophy behind it. A.J. was thoughtful, even spiritual in his reverence for local foods and businesses and building community, and I was in complete alignment (if a bit more geeky about the organic thing) for all of these things. For those reasons and more, I was and am deeply affected by my time with him in that tiny kitchen. When the time came for us to go off to Europe, he pulled out all the stops; he roasted a whole pork shoulder that Nicole and I still talk about, he closed the restaurant to the public, set a long table down the middle of the room for us, our family and our friends we had made in those few short months and gave us a night we will always remember. Or will always remember forgetting, or something like that. I am especially mindful that it was the last night I saw Wayne Grimm, a fixture at ‘the Slip’ and a character rivaling A.J. in his memorability. Before we came back to live in Canada, Wayne died, after a long, strange, and amazing life, and was found, not by his family or by his neighbor, but by his chef. That’s the kind of community that A.J. built; in Wayne’s memory, and to honor that community, his picture still hangs by his favorite seat at the bar.



Nicole and I left for Europe in the fall, then moved on to Texas, to work and to save and to decide where we would settle, and often, we would talk about that little restaurant in Kemptville, with the fun people and the best parties.



Amanda’s Slip had an anniversary in the summer, July, and threw a big blowout every year with bands beginning in the afternoon, piles of food, a truckload of oysters, and all the chairs and tables pushed out of the way for a giant dance floor. We attended our first, which was A.J.’s 4th, the summer that I worked with him. When we returned to Canada, it was just in time for his sixth year, and we timed our arrival in Ottawa to coincide with the unforgettable event. A.J. was characteristically thrilled by our return and greeted us each in turn with one of his signature back stretching bear-hugs. I was not surprised to find out that he was anxious to have Nicole and I come back to work as soon as possible...his mom even helped us find a house, a rental right on the Rideau, with a dock and access to a patch of forest teeming with wild mushrooms and fiddleheads. I felt like we had won the lottery.



Work at ‘the Slip’ had its rewards; the community of friends and artists and musicians which populated its cheery space was always a source of entertainment and stories. But it had its share of difficulties as well. A.J. was a charismatic character, but over time became increasingly harder to work with; I say this not to denigrate him, I love him dearly, but I prefer him as a friend than as a co-worker or boss. I think we both agree that I was also ready, in more ways than one, to have my own kitchen, and shake off the bonds of attempting, night after night, to put forth a version of someone else’s (no matter how philosophically compatible) vision. I left after New Year’s Eve. Nicole, at the time was supporting us both and moved on as well, to work in a busier restaurant in the next town. While I was still waiting for legal work status, I did stints in a couple of other local restaurants, helping friends I had made through Amanda’s Slip and Nicole’s new job when they needed an extra set of hands, but mostly, I stayed home and worked out some ideas, food-wise, music-wise, and in my heart, searching for what I hoped was my calling.



That year we learned that our landlord had decided to sell the idyllic cottage that had become our home. Sad that we would have to move, we were pushed, by friends and family, to see if we could purchase the cottage ourselves. I honestly thought the whole idea was a joke; I was an unemployed, semi-legal new immigrant supported by a waitress, and I was buying a house? Seriously? What bank would look twice at that? Well, (thank you ‘Sub-Prime’ lending...) guess what? We actually found a mortgage. I was stunned. We both were. For about a month, as the gears of the financial apparatus around us began to move, it looked very much like we were going to buy, even in our precarious financial status, a home. But then, at the last minute, our seller wavered. We were sad, as we had come to quite like our riverside home, but we still felt amazed and empowered in knowing that we were apparently more financially flexible than we had previously thought.



Soon after the house deal fell through, we heard that Amanda’s Slip was for sale. My first reaction was no...no way...the challenges were too great, it was too much work...it was too hard a legacy to shake off or to try to follow...it was too weird, scary, whatever. But then, over the course of a couple of weeks, a new idea began to take shape. I realized, slowly, how easy the work at ‘the Slip’ had been for me; I was confident that I could handle the kitchen myself, which had always been a criteria I had set in my hope for a restaurant I would own. I realized that as crazy as the idea of getting financing for our house had been, we had still managed to find a loan. I knew, deep down, that Nicole and I could not only run a small restaurant, but run it well, and that finally, finally, I could do things my way. And I remembered that first night in Amanda’s Slip, when I said ‘this is exactly the kind of restaurant I want to own someday.’ And then, there it was. No matter how I looked at it, it suddenly made perfect sense.



Nicole and I talked, argued, disagreed, and then finally agreed and rolled up our sleeves. I decided that I was going to make this happen, no matter the cost.



For some reason, the mortgage folks we had assembled for the home purchase were not nearly as excited about a 130 year old stone building with a restaurant on the ground floor, a leaky basement and an apartment above, but we were determined. When one person couldn’t help us, we moved on to the next.



Around this time, A.J. was planning Amanda’s Slip’s 7th anniversary party; Nicole and I wouldn’t have missed it, and A.J. welcomed us as though we had never left. We all knew that I was pooling resources to make this purchase, and that as of yet, had not met with success. What I didn’t know was that I was not alone.



After we left A.J.’s employ earlier that year, he had hired a waiter of outstanding caliber. A smart, personable, experienced, and even-keeled guy named Brent Kelaher, who had left behind a career in restaurant management for what he thought was the stability of a corporate job with Bell. By now, we all know how that story goes, even more so now than back then, but suffice it to say that he was lucky to have a trade to fall back on; a trade for which his aptitude was matched only by his passion. He was even more affected by A.J.’s decision to sell, as it would be hitting him closer to home, and had also begun to wonder if this situation was, in fact, an opportunity.



I was first introduced to Brent after a morning of harvesting wild garlic from a neighbor’s back 40; I knew A.J. would appreciate the gift, so I wandered in the kitchen door, wild treasures in hand, bearded, in my grubby boots, flannel and jeans. A.J. had told Brent about the chef who had worked with him the previous year, and there I was, emerging from the woods with nature’s bounty, like a character in a novel. When we were reintroduced at the anniversary party, it was an introduction of intent: ‘This guy also wants to buy the restaurant. You know what, you two should talk.’ Brent and I hit it off from the start. His obvious passion was a mirror of my own and after a brief but serious conversation, we came to realize that our shared vision could actually succeed. I think we also realized right away that our credit pooled together would be more formidable than his and Jenn’s or Nicole’s and mine alone. In July, it will have been three years since that meeting, and I have never had cause to doubt my instincts from that first conversation.



It took a couple of months from there, but with more than a little help from all of our family and friends, we have managed to do what I had hoped, dreamed, and set out to do when I wrote that fanciful bio for the book jacket back in 2003. Very few people get the chance to live their dream and we wake up every day, thankful that we are among the lucky ones. That dream on paper went floating down a stream in California, but found its way to a riverboat’s slip in Kemptville on a branch of the Rideau River, or, the branch, as we call it here.