All the great fighters make a return and most of them go for one final run before they call it all in. The old adage goes like this: Power is the last thing to go. Everything else can fall to the wayside, but power is the great equalizer. There have been many greats who have pulled this off in the past. George Foreman comes to my mind. Yeah, the grill guy. The former champ started his comeback in 1987, 10 years after he retired, due to a near death experience in the ring. Although his first few years of this relaunch were spotted by losses and wins, he ended up securing gold at the age of 45 against a legit champion, Michael Moorer, who had beaten Evander Holyfield.

I remember the fight clearly. Moorer had stolen the show for the first ten rounds with his boxing skills, dancing around the older Foreman who seemed slow and sluggish compared to his opponent who was 19 years his junior. But like I said, power is the last thing to go. In the tenth round, Foreman was still there and seemed to summon something from deep within. It should be said here that Foreman wore the same trunks he wore in his loss to the great Muhammad Ali. Foreman was much larger than Moorer, slower, more ponderous in his approach but in the tenth he caught Moorer with a series of right hands that eventually had the champ on the canvas looking at the lights, struggling to make the ten count. In interviews later, Foreman said he intentionally pulled his punches throughout the fight so Moorer would think his power was waning, then he turned it up in the tenth to get the big win.

The lesson here is: don’t fuck with the old crafty veterans. We’ve got the experience, grit, and like I said earlier, power.

In martial arts there is a lineage going straight back through to the originals. For example, my jiu jitsu coach, Scott Epstein, received his black belt from Eddie Bravo, who received his from Jean Jacques Machado, who received his from Carlos Gracie Jr….Carlos Gracie Sr….Mitsuyo Maeda…Jigoro Kano. Kano is the father of judo who first separated the early jiu jitsu from judo. He taught the art to Maeda who came to Brazil and eventually taught it to the Gracie family, Carlos and Helio who then took it to a whole crazy level, and made it more ground based.

What’s the point? Well, I’m turning it all to chefs.

Chefs, the good ones, have this same type of lineage that goes all the way back to the masters like Escoffier. Let’s see if we can do it with our own culinary black belt, Chef Fox. Jeremy Fox–David Kinch–Mark Chevillot–Fernand Point–M. Foyot–Then? Who knows? It continues. The point I’m trying to make is that chefs are much like martial artists in their own right. Modern jedis. Think about it. The fancy Japanese knives are their lightsabers. The chef coats and aprons their robes. They pass down their knowledge to the padawans, the cooks, the budding youngsters who one day dream of becoming a chef and owning their own place. They’ve got tricks up their sleeve.

This is fresh on my mind because at Rustic, Chef Jeremy Fox has come back to the kitchen full time and it’s nice to see a chef at work in his element. For reference, he owns Birdie G’s which is a big place with new construction, a big ol’ kitchen, and lots of bells and whistles like one of those wood fired grills with the wheel to make it go up and down. Rustic, on the other hand is a cramped, archaic space in an older building that always seems to have some sort of problem to fix.

Chef has been on the warpath, pumping out dish after quality dish. Check his instagram. It’s harkening back to when I first started at Rustic still wet behind the ears in L.A. I’ve got to say, it’s a pleasure to see him work. Some of the newer cooks and FOH people didn’t even know who he was. Mind blowing, right? He’s one of the juggernauts, the old dogs. Like Big George Foreman, he’s still got the stuff, the knockout power that sticks around until the end. And, to loop it all back to a nerdy Star Wars reference, he’s got the wisdom to teach the newbies, like Obi Wan in A New Hope.