Why Is It That John Bishop Never Opened A Second Restaurant?

by Sean Sherwood - When I was a kid, romancing the foolish notion to one day open my own restaurant, I spent a lot of thought on who would be the best to learn from. At the time, I’d washed some dishes, bussed some tables, cooked and served. It was a simple craft that demanded hard work, personality, and a strong enough liver to survive a late night game of ‘I never’. Damn, I miss those days sometimes. If you don’t know the game, don’t ask, but rest assured it was the only way a young punk like me was going to see some alcohol induced random nudity. Either way, the restaurant business seemed simple, honest and completely straightforward. Read more

Industry Reflections: Poor, Poor, Lucky Bastard

I had a beer with former Aurora Bistro owner/chef Jeff Van Geest the other night. We discussed bigger things than food and wine in a cramped corner of a bustling bar filled with industry off-shifters getting their drink on. We talked about happiness, family, the big picture and new directions. We reminisced about our naiveté and blind idealism when we opened our first restaurants, and laughed at how we thought we’d change the world, or at least the little neighbourhoods surrounding our little dreams and money pits. We compared scars of battles won and lost, with city hall, drug addicted ex-employees, food writers and even the odd customer. We even looked ahead, and asked each other, “what’s next for you?”.

There we were, two men facing divorce from the life we love. Looking back we knew that restaurants had shaped us, made us who we are. They had also beat on us, challenged us, forced us to break the mould of who we thought we were, and drove us to dig down and find more strength, a more obstinate stubbornness, and a deeper passion for a craft that seemed to reward us only with stress and insecurity. The passion that had allowed us to overlook the flaws and rough times had faded, and we were both staring at starting all over again.

But despite it all, we both were smiling. Not wistful smiles of remembrance, but Cheshire cat grins. Shit eating grins like a teenager having sex grin, a prison break convict digging under the wall grin, the kind of grin that you can’t hide the true meaning of. The best years so far we’d seen, and we were running fast and hard from them, fast like we stole something.

I left that great conversation with more questions than answers. With so many of us looking for our passion, our calling, our life’s purpose, and so many of us finding it in this great craft, why does it chase so many great people away? Why are the Jeff Van Geest’s of the world happy to leave the life of the restaurateur, even when they know it’s their passion and that the world appreciates their talent? How many other great people do we lose, from aspiring cooks with Michelin star dreams to the hundreds of servers drinking their way to their sommelier’s designation, when the real kick in the junk reality kicks in on how hard the industry really is?

I remember asking one local restaurateur about his staffing and management headaches, and he said it best. “It’s like herding cats. Most of these people have no sense of professionalism, leave on a whim, have the highest ideals on what a work environment should be, and then promptly ask for a 2 week vacation, bang a hostess and miss a shift because they were so high on coke the night before”. Contrast that with an employee’s rant of another well known operation. “He pays minimum wage, no benefits, no stats, no overtime. He asks us to work doubles, Valentines day, New Years Eve, and I’m not allowed to date the staff. Besides all this I’m pretty sure he’s banging the hostess. What does he expect from me?”

It begs the question, what’s this monster we’ve created? Is it such a bad thing? I mean, it’s just like sex, drugs and rock n’ roll right? And they do fine, so why can’t we?

So can a professional like Jeff thrive in this environment? He has a beautiful wife and son, a sense of purpose, a set of ideals and a staunch refusal to compromise on his principles. I’d like to say yes, but I started to realize what his grin was about. All that he loved and cherished was being put to the test, facing compromise, for an industry which doesn’t. Finally, there was no question, only answers. He’d picked his team, and he’d picked the right one.

The beer tasted great that night. Served by a former cook, tending bar at his own establishment now, that same shit eating grin on his face. I imagined the road ahead for him, hoping it was slightly less rocky, slightly more profitable and only a tad less liquid, and I imagined the day he sat in my chair looking at some young punk with a shit eating grin and thought the same. Poor poor lucky bastard.

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Sean Sherwood, an accomplished classical, jazz and blues pianist, worked in all aspects of the restaurant industry over two decades and spent 3 years as an operational consultant. He owned three dynamic restaurants in Vancouver: Fiction, Lucy Mae Brown, and Century. After 9 years, he sold his businesses to pursue other ventures.

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I Dare You To Eat That

Beating a dead horse and then eating it. So would ya? It’s a consummate question for those with a serious affectation towards adventurous dining.

Now we all had friends who’d do anything on a dare. I even remember getting Brad Holmes (a cook for us at the time) to make out with a salmon head for ten bucks. I’d pay triple to get that visual out of my brain now: it’s haunting and creepy and wrong in every way imaginable. Brad, for the love of God, seek psychological counselling please. It was only ten bucks.

My own demons aside, now that www.New-Harvest.org is producing cultured meat, farm free, pesticide and hormone free, you’ve got to ask yourself the question (see my earlier post here). I’m struggling, to be honest, and I can’t figure out why. I love eating cows, pigs, chickens and fish, and all the parts they come with. I delight in the enjoyment of said delicious creatures from different places and regions, and I have more than a passing curiosity in the constant conflict that arises when the moral and ethical implications of raising any cattle for consumption is raised. And yet never has there been so clear a choice as this.

So clean and perfect an answer, no animals get hurt. Ever. No hormones or steroids needed, and no slaughterhouse or immoral living conditions. Imagine, right beside the basil plant and salt shaker, a lobe of delicious foie gras growing in the windowsill. You might even toss out the bread-maker you never use and replace it with the bacon-maker (TM patent pending).

Lets face it, we’ve eaten everything else. I for one can count eyeballs, guts, brains, hearts, and testicles (cooked, you perves) on my list of oddities, and I enjoyed most of them. I just don’t know if I love animals enough to leave them off the E-list entirely (the E-list is everyone’s subconscious list of things they would eat.  Try imagining anything in the world, and instantly you’ll know whether you’ll eat it or not. Strange, but true).

So the dilemma exists, for me anyway.  Am I just too far removed from the process, with no blood on my hands, enjoying bacon wrapped tenderloin with foie gras toppers in guilt-free, blissful ignorance? Or does the answer lie with science, and the vegans were right all along?

It should get interesting as the restaurateurs bring their ever expanding moral codes into this one, as they toss out Oceanwise, organics, and free range foods and move into ‘animal free’ and ‘Certified 100% lab grown’. The global economies will shift away from agriculture and we can feed the world with Chinese ‘meat factories’ (some melamine included). We’ll be chastised for keeping cows and chickens as anything but frisky pets/deities to be coddled/worshipped, and we’ll finally be able to reclaim that ranch land for sport hunting buffalo again.

This time around, we can kill for fun and no one can tell us its wrong, cause like, what else are we going to do with them?

The Guiltless T-Bones of 2022

Tired of angry hippies accosting you when you go into your favourite dining establishment? Sick of hearing about how delicious animals had to die just so you could feed yourself? Frustrated that despite your best efforts you can’t make everything you eat taste like bacon?

The time has come, people, and the revolution is starting.

New Harvest, an organization devoted to the creation of cultured meat products, has been formed to rescue all of us who just can’t bear to eat anything that ‘has a face’. The group’s founder, Jason Methany, a biologist at Johns Hopkins University, has been following in the footsteps of NASA and the Dutch government who’ve have been working on bringing us our favourite meats without the messy cleanup and moral hang-ups.

Leaving all the science to the geeks, I skimmed the website and besides all the mumbo jumbo on building a better planet the only real hangup was that it uses stem cells. Which is good, because if they ever decided to make cultured “people meat” it would be illegal. But imagine if they did, and it was really good?

Soylent Green, baby. Soylent Green!