Excerpts, outtakes and commentary on life as we know it...

First, a disclaimer: This is an unedited, uncensored accounting of the often funny, sometimes wildly enraging, and always true stories of our lives right now. This is personal, not professional, and as such, it is a thoroughly opinionated take on the conversations we have — and the ones we overhear — the situations we encounter, and the ones we try to avoid. The amazing and wonderful, and the annoying and the horrifying. 

September 5, 2017
I used to think old people were nice until I started working here. All the mean ones like to eat here, huh?

August 29, 2017
Hey guys...who served Anthony? Old, white Anthony. Whoever it was, props. He left you a dollar. He NEVER does that! 

July 19, 2017
Is this one of those times about which I'll look back on in a few years and laugh?
Hahahaha!!!!
Remember that time we were so broke that we had to decide between paying the electric bill to keep the lights on in the restaurant and letting the payroll checks bounce?
Hahahaha!!!!
Ah! Those were the days, weren't they? Good times.
I don't know about all that though. Not today. From where we're sitting, the days of heckling our hardship seem so far off that chances are, we'll never get there. But what I wouldn't give to just get there already. 

June 5, 2017
Like most kids, I wanted to be everything when I grew up. Photographer, interior designer, criminologist, pediatric surgeon, anthropologist...the list of possible careers was long, and in most cases, ridiculous.
There was a commercial circulating when I was in the 6th grade advertising a local bartending academy. It usually came on at prime time, probably during the Cosby Show (do we still mention the Cosby show fondly?) or Growing Pains. The woman in the commercial stood smiling behind her shiny bar. Stirring, smiling, shaking, smiling, blending, smiling. Such flair! I wanted to be her. I announced to my parents that I had finally narrowed it down. I knew my calling. There was no doubt in my mind: I was going to be a bartender!
I had anticipated a much more enthusiastic response: Their only child, their pride and joy, their baby was going to grow up to be that lady on the commercial! Raise a glass, Mom! Let’s do this! My mom glanced at my dad (who I’m sure was hiding his laughter behind his book), turned to me, and with the decorum and diplomacy of a Christian Montessori teacher, she said: I can understand why that looks appealing to you. She does look like she’s having fun. If it’s the mixing and the concocting that you like, maybe you actually want to be a pharmacist. They mix, and shake and stir...you would make a great pharmacist one day.
Today, I own a pharmacy. Most people call it a bar—tomato/tomahto.
Most days, while we stir and shake and blend and concoct, we smile. A lot. The food and hospitality industry is fun. Any industry pro (that’s what we call ourselves — like ours is the only “industry” out there) will tell you, without hesitation, that this is a lifestyle choice. Like eating healthy. We do it because it makes us feel good. The chaos of a busy kitchen, the thrill of serving your fourth round of Jame-O shots to a full bar, the satisfaction of seating a customer and then watching them savor their food and sip their hand-crafted cocktails — it just makes us feel good. Because we’re not merely in the restaurant and bar business. We’re in the business of hospitality. And for hospitalitarians, the joy of service really is a joy. Good chefs love to cook for others. Good servers love to welcome you into their space and make you feel like family. Good bartenders love to listen to your stories.
One of my partners in the bar, and our lead bartender, who works tirelessly from opening to closing on most days, told me the other day that he thinks he might need some relief behind the bar. I nodded in understanding. Being on your feet for 15 hours a day gets exhausting. I get it. Let’s start looking for someone who can pinch hit for you a few times a week, I told him.
Oh no, no, he said, it’s not the work, or being overworked or the exhaustion or the sore feet or the piles of laundry that never get done because we live in our bar. He downed his beer and told me: It’s just that sometimes, it gets emotionally draining.
I laughed. (Being jaded is one of my weaker attributes.) Emotionally draining, huh? OK. Convince me.
Yeah, he said, you know, it’s the empathizing that takes it out me. When he said that, he moved his hand to his heart and sort of pressed it against his chest, like you might do if you were massaging away pain. He was telling me that it isn’t the lack of sleep or the sore feet.
It isn’t that he works too hard, it’s that he feels too hard.
Last week, industry data tracker TDn2K released a report saying that 2016 was the worst year for the restaurant industry since the recession. We have great timing, I thought. We bought a bar-restaurant in a year that saw the industry's biggest decline in five years. Perfect. If there’s one thing my partners and I know how to do well, it’s to voluntarily throw ourselves into ultra challenging situations that most sane people would run away from. Not only did we buy a restaurant in a really bad year for restaurants, we bought a restaurant with a bad reputation, a staff operating on incredibly low morale, a bar that couldn’t afford to buy liquor, a kitchen that couldn’t care less that customers were waiting 45 minutes for a burger.
But it can’t be the statistics that drive us. We wouldn’t be doing this if we made our business choices based only on numbers. In this business, our motivation has to come from the people and the relationships we build through our service to them. It has to. From my vantage point, if it’s not about the people, then never mind. Because in this game, the cards are almost always stacked against you. But we play anyway.
The bar-restaurant business is volatile and very, very difficult. But for some of us — the bartenders who empathize as well as they cocktail, the chefs who modify their signature burger to feed a hungry vegetarian, the servers who call their customers by name — the motivation to spend our days and nights serving others comes not from how much money we make or don’t make, but rather from how many people we successfully welcome into our ’ohana, our family. That’s when the magic happens. That’s why the bartender in the commercial smiled so much. That’s what I like to think, anyway.

February 2, 2017
"Sheldon, when we open  care home, you should be our bartender."