What Does Quentin Crisp Know About Cooking?- Fashion Vs. Style in the Food World

August 20, 2021August 21, 2021 / The Black Hat Baker / Leave a comment

I am not now, nor would I have ever called myself at any point in my life, fashionable. Not even in college when I started wearing those enormous pants with all the unnecessary straps and half-heartedly dyed my hair blue.

I might have been trend-chasing, and I’m sure I thought I was cool at the time, but I was never fashionable- and likely never will be as I slouch gracefully toward early middle age.

Instead, when people see the effort I do put into looking put together, they say I’m “stylish.” That is a lesson I learned from Quentin Crisp, and I think we as an industry will be happier when we learn to apply it to our food.

Color photo of Quentin Crisp with the text “Fashion is a way of not having to decide what you are. Style is deciding who you are and being able to perrpetuate it.” — Quentin Crisp pulled off a scarf and eyeliner way better than I pulled off those pants from Hot Topic.

Continue reading →

Review #19- The Bellwether Bar

August 13, 2021August 13, 2021 / The Black Hat Baker / Leave a comment

WHERE: 6031 SE Stark St.

By all accounts, Caldera Public House should have been my preferred local bar.

It was walking distance from my house in a historic building, had an eccentric vibe, a beautiful back patio, decent food, and hosted live Celtic music? I have even have an amusing memory about the place. Before we got married, I came home from work one day and heard Emily in the bedroom. I said “hello,” and she called out “Oh… you’re home already? Um… I’m trying on the wedding dress.”

“Ah… gotcha.” I promptly walked down to the Caldera and got a seat because, before our marriage even began, I’d been kicked out of the house and sent down to the pub for an hour.

All the same, I rarely went to Caldera Public House, and chose other bars that were closer to work or run by friends. The food at Caldera was good, but never very good. The beer list was underwhelming, and I’m rarely a “fancy cocktails” guy. Above all else, the place was just not comfortable for very long. The live bands were good, but loud. You couldn’t sit at the actual bar because there were tables in the middle of the main room, and a small reading nook in the middle of the building had the most comfortable seats, but it was frustrating to read, eat, and drink there at the same time.

When Caldera closed up even before the pandemic, I was sad but not surprised. Then, when a new sign was hung outside the door about a month ago, I wondered if someone was trying to be the neighborhood bar Caldera struggled to be.

They were, and they are.

Continue reading →

Learning to Lead by Letting Go

August 7, 2021 / The Black Hat Baker / Leave a comment

Managing is a full-time job in itself, and going from being a cook or baker to a managing is more than a promotion. It’s a shift in mentality. After years of needing to be “hands-on,” I will no longer have the time, energy or focus to give every task personal attention. Ironically, one of the hardest lessons I will have to learn as a chef is how not to be in control.

"Leadership" written in chalk on a black background. — Photo by Anna Tarazevich on Pexels.com

Continue reading →

Shadow Work- Doing Your Side Work in the Dark

August 1, 2021August 2, 2021 / The Black Hat Baker / Leave a comment

Therapy has a bit of a misnomer in people’s minds. We tend to go to therapists and psychologists looking for “cures.” That’s how it works with other health fields, right? If I have a toothache and go to the dentist, I expect the dentist to drill, clean, fill, or whatever else is needed so that I no longer have a toothache at the end.

Therapists don’t work like that though. There is no “curing” mental illness. Instead, care and therapy is directed toward pathology- figuring out how and why a person becomes ill- and managing it to make the experience of that illness less disruptive to daily life. Medication and psychopharmacology is one option where the illness is severe enough that the pathology indicates a chemical imbalance in the brain. “Talk therapy,” what most of us think of when it comes to sitting down with a psychologist, is more like giving people the tools they need in order to piece together their own problems.

Therapists act more like a trail guide than a doctor, giving us the tools and advice we need to face our challenges- but we still need to face them ourselves. Carl Jung called two parts of this practice “Light” and “Shadow work-” and just like skipping Leg Day at the gym, you don’t want to skip on the Shadow work.

But the shadow is merely somewhat inferior, primitive, unadapted, and awkward; not wholly bad. It even contains childish or primitive qualities which would in a way vitalize and embellish human existence, but

Continue reading →

What’s Another Eulogy? My Non-Review of Roadrunner

July 24, 2021July 26, 2021 / The Black Hat Baker / Leave a comment

Until about 5AM this morning, this week’s blog post was going to be about something completely different. I was going to write about taste, snobbishness, and keeping it in check.

But last night, Em and I decided to go to our first movie in a theater in over a year. It was a toss-up between Black Widow and Roadrunner, and Em decided she could see Black Widow another time. She wanted to see Roadrunner with me. We were both glad for that because in the back of the Laurelhurst Theater, over pizza, popcorn, and spilled beer, we both cried our eyes out.

I came home with mixed emotions and tried to write that blog post about snobbishness… but as of 5 am, aware of the discourse and controversies surrounding the movie, I knew I need to write this all out while it was still fresh in my mind. One of the problems with being a writer is that words vanish from your mind faster than feelings in your heart, so here we go.

One last story from my beloved doomed bastard of a hero, Uncle Tony.