Here are a few sentences you will never hear in a French restaurant: “Hi, my name is Emile and I will be your waiter for this evening.” “Have you dined with us before? “May I explain our menu to you?” “How are you guys doing?” “Are you still enjoying that?” “Is there anything else I […]

I didn’t know exactly where I was, somewhere between Agen and Perigueux  and I was enjoying not knowing. I was meandering the little roads back and forth between Dordogne and Cahors, avoiding the “N” roads staying on “D” roads, passing fields of sunflowers bending in union away from the hot sun as if in prayer. […]

Years ago when I first got interested in cooking, food was for eating. No one thought about food as art. I had five siblings all of whom shared my enthusiasm for food and our breakfasts and dinners were at home. Each morning at the breakfast table when my father finished reading the morning newspaper (there […]

I have a few friends who quality for that title: Aglaia Kremezi whose newest cookbook Mediterranean Vegetarian Feasts I am looking at more than any other right now when, at the height of the summer, we are getting the best fruits and vegetables available in the mid-Atlantic. Aglaia lives on the island of Kia, an […]

I flew to San Francisco again on Saturday and write this as I fly back after a two-day stay. I didn’t see much of that wonderful city I love so much as I spent much of my time in the kitchen of my hosts. Dave McElroy and Kathryn Morrison are people of enormous enthusiasm and […]

Some people in the food business (although not nearly enough) read The Art of Eating, an erudite quarterly periodical available also at very few newsstands. It carries stories on bay leaves and on pork in Southwest France, about bread, about butter, articles that go deeply into food. It has about 10,000 subscribers and is produced […]

I don’t read Yelp; the very word puts me off. Many people including my best sons think I should do that and many of my colleagues do so. But if you have been reading these essays for a while you know that I encourage customers to complain directly to me. And you do:             “…at […]

“You have a problem and it’s up to you to figure it out,” a customer said to me. She’s right and I am trying. She was sitting at one of our tables on a Saturday morning, the busiest single time of the week for us and she had two computers open in front of her. […]

I was a management consultant many years ago, a partner in a firm that specialized in data processing consultation.   I learned nothing from my partners about their specialty but I did like how they responded (privately) to the complaints of their clients. GIGO. Garbage in; Garbage out. I have thought about GIGO frequently over the […]

I was a new and passionate baseball fan in 1949 and fell in love with a movie called It Happens Every Spring, Ray Milland, Jean Peters, and Paul Douglas. It was the story of a professor who accidentally invents a potion that repels wood and becomes a pitching phenomenon for the St. Louis Browns baseball […]