The cooks didn't show up.
Not one of them. Not the prep cook, not the dishwasher, not the line cook who was supposed to be loading in the food delivery by eight. It was 1989. The restaurant was barely two years old. We had a full lunch on the books at eleven and nobody to cook it.
Except me.
By ten-thirty one other cook had shown up. We looked at each other over a stainless steel table that should've had four bodies around it. He shrugged. I shrugged back. Then we started cooking.
That morning humbled me, and I needed it. Up until then the restaurant and I had been getting a lot of positive press. People were starting to talk. Reviews were good. The focus was on me. And like a lot of young guys who get early attention, it all went to my head. I'd started believing the whole thing depended on me.
If you'd asked me then who made that place run, I'd have pointed at myself without blinking. I thought the line was lucky to have me in the building. I barely knew them. That empty kitchen settled the argument before lunch.
My late friend Bill Latham used to say the most important person in a restaurant is the dishwasher. The first time he said it, I half-laughed. He looked at me the way he looked at anybody who half-laughed at him, and said, "Try to run a Friday night without one. Let me know how it goes."
He was right. What he was really saying is that a restaurant is a team or it isn't anything at all.
Thirty-seven years later, the lesson has only gotten clearer. New South Restaurant Group employs four hundred and fifty people across eight concepts, and not one of those concepts exists because of me. Jarred Patterson runs the company day to day better than I ever have. Chef Nevil Barr can run circles around me in the kitchen. Chad Carmichael and Maria Keyes keep the numbers honest and the budgets tight. And 447 more people whose names won't fit in this column show up before the sun does and stay long after the dining rooms go dark.
While I'm sitting here typing this column, six kitchens are prepping lunch without me. Somebody is stocking a walk-in. A manager is sorting out a vendor who showed up with the wrong invoice. None of it depends on me being in the building. All of it depends on the people who are.
The public doesn't see any of that. They see a plate of food, a server smiling, a clean table. They don't see the line cook who got there at nine, the prep cook who's been there since six, or the dish team closing the building at midnight after everybody else has gone home. The whole operation runs on people who show up before anyone notices and stay long after anybody thanks them.
Some of them have been with me twenty years. A few have been with me thirty. One has been there since 1987. They were here before my daughter was born and before my son took his first steps. They were here through the years I don't talk about much, back when I was still learning I couldn't carry it all by myself, no matter how badly I wanted to believe I could. They stayed anyway.
My face is the one out front. The real work happens behind me.
A paycheck doesn't settle that kind of debt. Every column I get to write on a Tuesday morning is one somebody else made possible by opening a building for me. The speeches , the TV, the books, and the trips overseas don't happen without the people back home holding the restaurants together while I'm off chasing the next thing.
My wife Jill remembers that empty kitchen in 1989. She was there through the lean years that followed, and she's beside me on most every trip we host because the people who travel with us aren't customers to her. They're company. Our daughter Holleman designs the rooms our guests sit in now, and our son Harrison comes home to the kitchen in January. Neither of them is joining something I built alone. They know better. They grew up watching who really built it.
The same lesson found me again on the other side of the Atlantic, and I'm a little embarrassed it took twice.
In 2011 my family and I packed up and spent six months in Europe. Seventeen countries. Seventy-two cities. Four people in one car for an unholy amount of mileage. A book came out of that trip. So did Yonderlust Travel.
It started with a few friends asking us to take them to Italy. After Tuscany they wanted to know where to go next, and before long there was a travel business where a vacation used to be. I never planned it. It just kept happening.
And here's where I caught my ego doing the very same thing it did in 1989. People kept coming back, and I let myself believe they came back for me. But the demand outgrew me a long time ago. The young man I used to be would've kept it small enough to keep his hands on all of it, his face on every trip. The man typing this made a different call. We grew it past me.
The hosting itself hasn't changed. I still lead five trips in the spring and five in the fall, same as always. What changed is everything around those ten. We brought on a full-time director, added new trips closer to home, and handed the new European trips to people who live there.
All I had to do was find people good enough that the trips never missed me.
Marina has hosted Tuscany beside me for years, and she leads her own trips there now, in the valley she's called home for decades. Jesse takes guests through Spain and Sicily, and there's not a more curious or well-traveled person alive. Bill leads Scotland, where he was born and can find a story and a single malt down any road. I trust the three of them with people who trusted me first, the highest thing I know how to say about anybody in this business.
All I had to do over there was find people good enough to run it without me in the room.
The kitchen taught me that in 1989. The day a man starts believing he's doing it alone is the day the cooks don't show up.
The word for it is gratitude. The real kind, the kind you sit with at four in the morning when you get honest about who actually got you here. It was never me. It was all of them. It still is.
The cooks didn't show up that morning. They've shown up every morning since. So has everybody else.
Onward.
Corn Pudding
3 cups
2 cups Heavy cream
1 cup Half and Half
1 1 /2 Tbl Sugar
2 tsp Salt
3 Eggs + 3 yolks
1 1 /2 tsp Black pepper, freshly ground
1 tsp Hot Sauce
2 tsp Onion, minced
Preheat oven to 300 degrees.
Combine all ingredients and mix well. Place in two-quart baking dish. Place two-quart dish into a larger dish and place in oven. Pour hot water into the larger dish so water comes up halfway on the sides of the corn pudding dish. Bake 40 minutes. Remove from oven and allow pudding to cool 10-15 minutes before serving. Yield: 10-12 servings
