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.

Back in that day, ‘concept’ restaurants were rolling out 18 different kinds of hamburger or nautical themes with fishnets on the walls and waiters doing pirate talk (wouldn’t we kill to work there now?). I couldn’t see any mentors out there, except for two. John Bishop and Bruno Marti.

Seeing as drunken ‘I never’ games weren’t currently en vogue at Bishops at the time, and Bruno’s place was almost a plane ride away from the Shore, I took the next best thing and joined up with a couple of young punks who were trying to start up the next big chain. Turns out I got lucky, and learned a tonne about restaurants and the mechanics of them, as I spent the next few years with Scotty and Ritchie (Cactus Club), and then later with Jeff Fuller at Earls. These young and fresh groups were aggressive, quality minded, and ran their operations like a stopwatch. I learned numbers, systems and controls, I watched them roll out new restaurant after new restaurant, promoting from within, empowering and motivating otherwise directionless people like myself.

At that point I think John Bishop had been in business for around 15 years. He had one restaurant, in the same location, of the same size. The quality, consistency and success he enjoyed had been unprecedented in a city that demanded a hamburger on every menu. I’m sure he had multiple people offering bags of money to open a second, or a third, or to start a chain. He never did, and that always baffled me.

I was going the other way, becoming a chain guy, moving around to learn every bit I could. I worked in wineries, breweries, did a stint with Starbucks, pretty much any chain in pretty much any position. I even fancied myself a bit of an expert, as I helped independents sort out their costs, operations and systems using all the things I’d learned from my Earls indoctrination. I started studying design, concepts and layouts. My mentors became food magazines, design books, cookbooks, really anything I could get my hands on.

I remember the day I opened my first restaurant, knowing Bishops was just a few blocks away. I remember feeling the rush, the joy, the exhaustion, and thinking, I wonder if John Bishop felt these things too, I wonder if I’m on his path, following his footsteps now.

I wasn’t.

The truth was, I hadn’t learned the secret, the answer to the riddle which had always bothered me. Why did John bishop, 20 years successful, never open a second venue, or expand, or anything? I hadn’t learned what he, almost alone among Vancouver restaurateurs, knew all along.

I’ve never regretted opening the second or the third restaurant, but I’ll always regret the compromises that were made to do it. Thoughts of the city’s greats started to permeate my thoughts more and more. How were they doing it? What tricks did they have that I hadn’t figured out yet? But people like Michel Jacob, John Bihop and Vikram Vij started fading from my mind while I focused instead on what Emad (Global Group), Gord (The Bins) and Jack (Top Table) were doing.

I don’t know whether it’s ego, ambition or just plain blind optimism, but a whole new generation of restaurateurs seems to be caught in the excitement of fresh success. And like a bunch of ADD-addled toddlers, we’re off to the next sandbox leaving our toys in a pile at the last.

Bishop has tried to teach us. He’s been here the whole time, like Ghandi, who said famously “I have nothing to say, my life is my message”. We’ve been chasing every new concept, new room, new neighbourhood. Hell, we’re so out of new ideas that the newest thing is to put the oldest concept in existence (meats, cheese and wine) into the oldest neighbourhood (Gastown). We’re actually running out of envelope to push so we’re recycling the old ones.

I have a friend, an unforgivable wine snob with the wherewithal to shamelessly build a cellar to make me drool. One day after we’d polished a bottle of Bordeaux, he pulled out a pen and wrote our names and the date on it, and put the empty in a cupboard, where many other similarly treated bottles sat. Obviously perplexed at the practice, and expecting some ridiculous wine geek answer about cataloguing the aging characteristics, I asked him what this was about. His reply changed the way I’ve looked at dining henceforth. “When I drink wine,” he said, “it isn’t for the wine or the winemaker or the region, but for the company. When I remember those powerful smell and taste memories, I’m taken back to our great conversations, the real life memories attached to them. So I keep these bottles like an album, and every now and then I’ll browse them to reflect on some of the great people and memories in my life.”

It made me realize that food and wine aren’t there for us cork dorks and food nazis to analyze and critique, but rather to serve as foils for our conversations, signposts for memories and excuses, sometimes, to change the venue and gain new experiences to share. Restaurants have become shrines to food and wine, and we’ve forgotten about the people. Perhaps this was Bishop’s secret?

So who is the next John Bishop, Vikram Vij, or Michel Jacob? Who is the city’s next great restaurateur, the next icon and leader for future generations? Has someone out there learned from my mistakes? Is the next one slaving away in Durbach’s kitchen, schlepping wine for Jack, or maybe even now, operating quietly, honestly and consistently with a resolute focus on sophisticated service, disarming charm and a timeless approach to cooking?

We don’t need them just yet, with some of the city’s greats clearly still setting fine examples to follow, but one worries if their’s is a lost breed, and wonders what would be lost without them.

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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 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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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 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!