I’ve got to write a better forward/introduction for my cocktail book, so figured I’d work on it and put it here. That way I can kill two birds with one stone. The blog is fun but it takes time, precious time, away from other writing endeavors in the morning. I give myself two hours from 8-10 every day but a hell of a lot gets in the way of that (on cue, as I wrote this my son came up on my lap and wanted to “help” me type). As the author of The War of Art, Steven Pressfield, will tell you, the world doesn’t want you to write. The term he uses is resistance. This is your wife, your girlfriend, your kids, the phone ringing, etc. but it’s mostly yourself. The things you say and do to not get the work done. Call it procrastination, self sabotage, whatever you want. It exists. The world doesn’t care about our collective writing projects and everything around us seeks to prevent it from happening.

Anyway, I’m just going to free write it all down and take out the good parts for later. It’ll sound muddled at first, but that’s how is is with rough drafts, so bear with me.

First up, the strawberry. I’m pretty sure I’ve written about it in this blog before. To me, for many personal reasons, it’s infused into my spirit and for me, represents resilience, courage, and rebirth. Hey, people have spirit animals, why can’t I have a spirit fruit? I’ll expound on it later, maybe tomorrow.

It was slow last night and so I reread Chef Fox’s introduction to On Vegetables. It’s one of my favorites in all of the cooking world. It’s so brutally honest and presented with enough wit and humor to bring it out of the dark parts. I too experienced a similar type of resurrection when I started at Rustic Canyon. I was down on my luck. I had no idea how the hell I ended up in Los Angeles. I came out thinking I’d be a screenwriter but had no formal training. Delusional to say the least. Also, for the first time in my life, I was almost completely broke. I wanted to work but couldn’t convince anyone to hire me. No one cared about my Boston resume.

Back then, in 2015, Rustic Canyon was way up on Jonathon Gold’s 101 Best Restaurants in LA list. Number 5 to be exact. Not only that, it was one of the best restaurants in the U.S. So yeah, I got very lucky. Shit. I had just been canned over at the sister restaurant, Cassia, and had worked long enough to be able to collect some unemployment. I was sitting around on my ass one day and got a call from the current director of operations who told me Rustic needed a bartender. All of a sudden, my luck kicked back in.

It was also the first time I saw, Jo, my beautiful wife to be, the shining star of my life, the mother of my son. She was the first person I saw when I walked in. She unlocked the door for me. A total knockout. The whole package, the smell, the hair, the legs, the twinkling green eyes, the charm, the sass, the melodic laugh, the smolder. The first though that came into my head when I saw her was, “This one is going to be trouble.” I focused myself, came in and sat down in front of the four person interview committee consisting of the first of two current bar managers, the GM, the AGM, and Chef Fox himself.

I’ve always had a little luck on my side. It does come and go. It’s seasonal. Some say we make our own luck, but I don’t believe that at all. I think some are just born luckier than others.

There was some real weird shit going on the restaurant at the time, a big management transition, but the spirit of Chef Fox’s mantras were present everywhere, even behind the bar. It went like this: local produce, almost nothing from outside California, and respect your ingredients (and food cost) by using everything. Yes, we had some necessary components from outside the state, like limes, but everything else came from within a 50 mile radius. The bar manager at the time, Aaron Ranf, created cocktails unlike anything I had ever experienced. Lots of muddling done with fresh ingredients which created ultra crisp tasting, but simple drinks. In terms of bottle selection, we had a mixture of normal stuff combined with small batch in order to give the smaller producers some attention. I had never seen another bar doing something like this. Weekly trips to the farmer’s market combined with an attention to what was going on in the kitchen. Focusing on less waste or no waste at all.

At the time I didn’t give a rat’s sweet ass about cocktails. I didn’t drink them. I barely even drank at all. If I did, I stayed with a beer and a shot of bourbon. Cocktails, to me, were excessive, even sort of silly. Damn, things have changed.

There was a kid working in the kitchen at the time. Andy Doubrava had travelled all the way from New York just to work with Jeremy. He wasn’t fully formed yet. Quiet and contemplative just like Mr. Fox. Talented and ambitious. A wunderkind I would later give the nickname, the Koji Kid.

When Jeremy left to begin his Birdie G’s journey, Andy came aboard as our new executive chef. Big shoes to fill. Big dip down in business. Word got out that although Chef Fox was still the head honcho and owner of Rustic, he was headed to greener pastures. The spring and early summer of 2019 was a tough one and then, in June of that year, we received a Michelin star and everything changed. Just like that, we were super busy again, just like the old days.