Life lessons. I had to make a return to the Home Depot in Playa del Rey at some point this Sunday so of course it plagued my sleep. I looked online yesterday to see what time they opened. 6:00 a.m. What time did I wake up this morning? 6:00 a.m. Some serious tossing and turning for another hour and fifteen minutes and then I was jetting down the 405 in my trusty steed. Of course, they couldn’t refund the whole damn thing due to some kind of red tape which means I’ll have to go back again for the remainder, probably next Sunday. “Just call, you know you can just call right?” the person told me. “I called yesterday, the phone just rang and rang.” She shrugged and gave me that “Tough shit, what do you want me to do about it?” look.

Anyway, Home Depot at 7:30 a.m. Patting myself on the back for getting up early and making the whole damn procedure easy on myself, roaming around Home Depot for no particular reason. Wait a minute. We need a fridge for the new place. I’ll go check it out. Should have had a coffee before coming in. What a strange and wonderful life this is. In a fugue on a misty Sunday morning in Playa del Rey. More people here than I thought there would be. At least there was no line for the returns. I got 80% of it back and what else do I have to do besides come here again next week? Yeah, coming here on a weekday would take hours. Oh hey, what a beautiful refrigerator this is, I wonder if it’ll fit? I wonder if they have free delivery? I’ll go ask the person I saw.

I approached. “Pardon,” I said, “Do you guys have free delivery for the refrigerators?”

“You mean good morning?” she said to me.

I chuckled. She was right.

“Good morning,” I said.

“Good morning,” she said. “Yes, we do have free delivery, it usually takes three to four days.”

“Thank you.”

I walked away thinking of two separate things. 1. I want my son to see his father be a better human being in general and say “good morning” to people, to treat everyone with consideration despite not having any caffeine pumping through my veins to make me normal. No excuses. 2. A similar scenario which happened to me the first week I worked at the New England Culinary Institute (NECI) a million years ago as a pizza cook.

I had taken the stairs up to the third floor where I had seen a bunch of the bowls in the back of the pastry classroom. I realized quickly this was one of the many drawbacks of working there, that most of what I needed throughout the day was far from my grasp and necessitated some sort of major effort. I went up through the catacombs of the restaurant and saw that a class was in session in the pastry room so, as quiet as possible, I snuck in while the chef taught, and grabbed a bowl.

The instant I went to grab the bowl I needed, however, a voice with a thick French accent boomed behind me.

“STOP RIGHT THERE!”

At first, I didn’t think the voice was directed toward me, so I took the bowl.

“DROP THE BOWL!”

Huh? I turned around to see the chef pointing at me, a dozen pairs of eyes all looked in my direction. I didn’t drop the bowl.

“COME OVER HERE RIGHT NOW!” He said.

I walked over to him, holding the bowl. What the hell was this guys problem?

“Dude, what the hell?” I said.

“YOU WILL ADDRESS ME AS CHEF!”

“Chef, what the hell?”

“THIS IS MY KITCHEN AND YOU WILL RESPECT ME!”

“Uh, I just needed a bowl, dude, relax.”

“THE FIRST THING YOU DO WHEN YOU WALK INTO MY KITCHEN IS YOU SAY TO ME ‘GOOD MORNING, CHEF, HOW ARE YOU DOING TODAY?’ THEN I SAY TO YOU, ‘I AM WELL, HOW ARE YOU?’” he smiled at me and lowered his voice, “Then everything in my kitchen is yours.” He finished this sentence with a sweep of his hand. All the students continued to watch what I thought of at the time as a grotesque display of douchbaggery. “Now, go put the bowl back and let me hear you.”

I didn’t put the bowl back.

“Hello, chef, how are you doing today?”

No response.

“Hello, chef, how are you doing today?”

Total silence. He looked me in the eyes. I looked at his pristine, white chef coat, NECI stenciled into the left breast in red thread. Underneath the red, Chef Andre in black. The students all stood and watched. I could only hear my own breath in the room. Now, I could have simply walked out with the bowl, and I wanted to, but something in me broke. I walked back to the shelf and put the bowl in with the others, then walked back over to the chef.

“Hello, chef, how are you doing today?”

“I am well, how about you?”

“I’m so great.”

“I am glad to hear that.”

“Is it ok if I use a bowl?”

“Yes, everything in my kitchen is yours.”

“Thank you, chef.”

“Have a great day.”

I went over, tail between my legs, and grabbed the bowl I needed.

Now, through the lens of decades, I can say that yes, I still think that Chef Andre was a tremendous douchebag but also, there is a common decency in this world (maybe just in L.A.) that has completely disappeared and it hurts no one to be a bit polite. There’s no harm in allowing someone into your lane on the freeway, or letting an older person ahead of you in line at the grocery store. The world would literally be a better place if we just gave up a small amount of our own angst and self-isolation to be more cordial to one another. Yes, I still think humanity is a stain upon this beautiful planet but the day to day person who is sitting at Home Depot doesn’t deserve some guys’ abrupt blurt on an early Sunday morning.

Oh crap, wait. This post is about Angel’s new cocktail, not a lecture on humanity and its foibles.

Anything is Fine

1 oz. Mezcal/Weiser Canary Melon Milk Punch

1 oz. Verjus

.5 oz. Cachaça

.25 oz. Lime Sherbet

.25 oz. Fresh Lime Juice

Shake and double strain into a small coupe, garnish with a pickled mouse melon.

This one is sour and weird. It’s one of those that reads odd on paper but tastes exceptionally good in real life. I made what I thought was a so-so mez punch in an attempt to capture the magic of a similar punch I made last year about this time but forgot the recipe and didn’t think the result was so great. Anyway, Angel turned it around and he got it on the first try. The whiz kid strikes again. Sometimes I think about what I was doing at his age and how I had no idea what a cocktail even was and even more to the point, how good cocktails actually didn’t even exist at that time. Yeah, that’s how old I am. 20 years ago was right before the revolution when people were still drinking crappy, sugar bomb drinks with stupid names like the Alabama Slammer and ordering Kamikaze shots. Dark days indeed. But also better days before smart phones and then Instagram ruined the world. Yeah, I’m old. You can’t have one without the other can you? Would you trade shitty, ultra sweet cocktails for a time when people actually spoke to one another instead of zoning out into their screens?