Why I Am Opening My Own Place...

Reason 1...My Mother Didn't Tell Me Not To

It really came all of the sudden for me, though my mother said that she could see it coming a mile away.  It was the way I would tell her that I was working on a plan to help others with their restaurants.

She said, "mmmm hmmm."

I told her about how simple the plan was and how cool it was going to be work with a bunch of different restaurant owners and industry people.

She said. "Sure dear."

When I found out I was having a baby, I told her about how I was going to work on food systems and health care for people in the industry as well.

She said, "Sounds great, Booba."

I can hear her voice in my head all day, as I am going about my business.  It has been that way since I was a toddler and now, well into my thirties the voice has gotten louder and louder but it is more what she does not say than what she does say.  Her comments leave a lot of things out, a lot of words not said, a void of commentary.

My mother is a font of patience.  She knows that I am going to go headlong into whatever I am going to go into and that when I come out the other side, she will in the nicest and least condescending tone possible tell me what I should have done and what I should do next.  So, when I tell her these things, I wait to hear what she has to say.  It is when she is not forthcoming with information that I tend to worry.

So when I told my mother about the troubles that I was having doing all of the things that I wanted to do and how I thought the best thing to do was open my own place I expected her to say, "Sounds great, Booba." and proceed to ask me about the baby or my fiance.

It was heartening to me that I could not shut her up when I told her.  Her tone seemed to indicate that it was about time that I stopped screwing around and that she had wanted to tell me to do that in the beginning.  When I told her my plan, such as it is, she did not stop offering advice.  She had been running her own place since before I was born and so I gladly took it.  My mother always felt that experience is the best teacher and loves to watch me make my own mistakes with the idea that I will learn much more from the experience than I will from her simply telling me what to do.

Reason 2...Because The Idiots Are Taking Over

We had been leaning towards the idea for some time but with a baby on the way, our feet got colder every minute.  Anger, however warmed them right up.  See, there is a chef, who shall go unnamed mainly because I do not know him personally, who is leading the charge in fucking it up for the rest of us.

Months ago, we had heard about this chef out of Chicago who was doing amazing things.  He was going to start a small restaurant not in the middle of nowhere, but on the cusp of farmland in the Chicago area.  We followed his progress and made attempts to contact him as he worked on his vision with no response.  When he opened, he was promptly closed.  Now a couple of weeks later, he is selling off what he can and making a run for it.

From what we understood he did not even have a business license when he opened.  Months of work and hundreds of thousands of dollars of investment later, the owner is left looking for new tenants and everyone is able to throw their hands in the air and walk away.  No harm, no foul, right?  Wrong.

I was irate at the idea that a movement is taken and turned into catch phrases and profit centers.  There is a scramble nowadays to make the idea of sustainability and environmental responsibility a  money maker and nothing more. Ventures like his, giant flops that are conceived with very little forethought and backed by people with faith in the figurehead person taking the lead, rather than the idea itself are black marks on the rest of our ledgers.  Meanwhile, this particular chef gets to trot off into the sunset.  He may or may not return to the spotlight again, but I don't doubt that he will get hired somewhere and someone will pay him to do whatever it is that he does.  He is one of the Lindsay Lohans of the culinary world and he will be fine.

On some level, we are happy to have people like him around so that we can see the mistakes before hand.  We can see what people are doing wrong, learn from it, and do it correctly the first time.  The trick is going to be doing it right before so many people do it wrong that it ruins it for everyone.

There are many reasons why I am opening my own place, these are just a couple.  A lot of the things I am going to post in the coming weeks and months are going to piss some people off and I think that is a good thing.  There is a lot that needs to be said and much of it, will not be comfortable to hear or read.

We are going to open a place that is the direct result of problems that I have witnessed.