“I’m like King Midas in reverse. Everything I touch turns to shit.”

–Tony Soprano

Yesterday, I came in from my two days off. Let’s recap. I’m moving to another part of the city, it was my son’s birthday, the restaurant is a little slow, I sent out another book proposal and am waiting to hear back, there’s lots of things making my head spin, but the big kicker, I determined after some thought, is that I was really bummed out after analyzing Austin’s drinks over at Kato. His stuff is so well thought out and beautiful and, goddamit, I want nice things too. The kitchen got a bunch of new equipment, but we’re sitting on the same old shit. Allow me to whine for a moment, ok? Ok. We have rocks glasses, small coupes, big coupes, and Collin’s glasses. We don’t have those cool fluted thingamajiggies, or the mini snifters, or anything with etching, or gorgeous, handcrafted coasters. We don’t have a pebble icer or a Kold draft. Yeah. Ok, I know you have the world’s smallest violin playing just for the Rustic Canyon Bar Program. Ok, ok. We do have really nice BFRs from West Coast Ice and a great, very cold freezer to put them into. I guess the key here is not to think about what I don’t have. I know that’s the road to oblivion. You’ve got to think about what you do have.

I was expecting to come in and start to mess around with the corn scrap amazake I made on Saturday. I pulled the top off and took a whiff. Oh boy. Nope. Something was off. I strained it anyway, still in total denial, and put the scraps from all this into three pint delis. I had almost two quarts of what should have been sour amazake. I poured a bit and tasted it. Seemed fine to the palate, but the nose knows, you know? This happened to me a few months back at home when I made some lacto-cauliflower pickles. Same thing, I opened the lid and it smelled like someone had wedged a dead cat in there (this actually happened to me once…Uh, I was renting a house in Vermont, Crombie Street in Burlington, there was an old fifty gallon drum barrel in the backyard wedged behind the garage. I opened it and there was a putrefied dead cat floating in water. The second worst smell I’ve ever encountered other than the time I left ground beef in a cooler, in my car trunk after a big Phish camp out called the Clifford Ball).

I’m really careful when I ferment anything. I double scrub and use a combination of chemical sanitizer and boiling hot water. Despite all this, yes, this will happen from time to time, but here’s what I realized, any ingredient with nooks and crannies such as cauliflower and corn, may have bacteria hidden and necessitate different procedures. There’s a reason why the common lacto pickle is made from a cucumber, also why ingredients like blueberries are super easy to lacto ferment. Anything smooth has less crevasses for bacteria to hide. With something like kimchi and even sauerkraut there’s an involved process of getting rid of the shitty outer leaves and dousing everything with salt. You can’t really do this effectively with cauliflower or corn.

Anyway, huge bummer. Mistakes happen for a reason and by the end of the night I already had another round of fresh corn amazake going. This time I preboiled the shit. We’ll see what happens when I arrive today.

So what do I have? Well, I have a Denise and an Angel. Each of them, to me, are worth more than some bullshit fancy glasses. If I make a shitty cocktail, I’ll get pure honesty from them. It’s hard to find people who don’t sugar coat. They’re also both great at analyzing what makes something good and often will change a cocktail by suggesting or tweaking an ingredient to make it better. So if I have these two, I think we’ll be just fine. The hard part is that the bulk of the work is still up to me which it should be anyway. I’m talking about all the behind the scenes stuff, ordering, making sure I don’t go too crazy, going to the farmer’s market, trying to keep up with social media, and being charming as shit for the regulars.

I also have an amazing team on the floor who think I’m some sort of cocktail guru. Ha! I’ve fooled them all. On the financial and more managerial-ish side of things, our executive team is 100% behind me. I’m allowed to do whatever the hell I want and no one is ever breathing down my neck. This, my friends, is fucking amazing. How many people have a job like this? Chef Fox trusts me to do my job and as long as I’m not naming the cocktails anything weird or offensive, he supports the bar program.

In life, I have an amazing partner who gives me time in the morning to write this crappy blog for two hours. She makes sure our crazy toddler son is entertained (this is while she’s getting ready for work, mind you) as I’m trying to get this whole writing thing under wraps. I write every damn day. That’s not easy if you have a family and an unsupportive spouse, so thank you, baby.

Before this post veers too far off I’ve also got to say that maybe fancy glassware doesn’t matter. After all it’s just a damn vessel. Yes, you drink it with your eyes first, you can’t have a turd floating in your martini, but when it comes down to brass tacks, the drink, at the end of the day, still has to taste good. I have a lot of people who have travelled the world who still come back to our tiny, dingy, little bar and say our cocktails are some of the best they’re ever had. That means something. It also makes me hard on myself. Part of this is because I think that charging $18 for a cocktail is outrageous, so I try to put as much thought into each one. I can say our seasonal selection always uses organic, in season fruit that is locally sourced from a California farm. Our well spirits and are actual bottles I would choose to drink at home, and do. Rittenhouse, Granddad Bonded, Ford’s, etc. We pay attention to keeping our side liqueurs as high quality and small batch as possible. Brovo’s curaçao, Leopold’s maraschino, Bruto Americano instead of Campari, etc. If you drink at our bar you’ll experience the best we can possibly. No cutting corners, even if you’re a vodka drinker.