The right food at the right time can give you nearly everything you need. In my case, I was back at the Beer Bus and had just pounded a tuna burrito from Saint Burrito. The balled-up tinfoil and a stained napkin were being held down by what remains of my beer.
I had just come out of the gym and needed a late lunch/ refuel. Protein, carbs, a bit less fat than your normal burrito, and 5% alcohol to help soothe the muscles. Beer doesn’t get enough credit as a post-workout beverage if it’s consumed within reason. John L. Sullivan, the legendary “knock out king” of 19th Century Boston, had an equally legendary drinking problem. All his work and fighting couldn’t keep his daily Kidney Pickling from turning his muscles slack and flabby. “Moderation in everything, including Moderation,” says verbal knock-out king Oscar Wilde.
When you work in a restaurant, experiencing growth in your skills or knowledge is often a humbling but pretty neat experience.
Imagine for a minute you are a capable chef. You’ve been at it for awhile and a couple cooks reporting to you. You’re not in charge of the restaurant, but the executive chef trusts you to work their will and keep the team performing. You’ve got techniques in your hands and recipes/formulas you trust to get the job done.
One day, one of your cooks- younger or maybe just newer- looks at a method and recipe you just handed them and says, “Hey, why do we do it this way?”
In a moment, a wave of responses flash through your mind: “That’s my method. Who does this little shit think they are? Kids these days are so fucking lazy…that’s the way we’ve always done it…”
You might feel enraged, exasperated, or at the very least annoyed… but there’s something else behind it all. We don’t wanna look at it. We can’t always afford to honor or accept it, so we spend a lot of time pushing it down or numbing it.
Doubt.Doubt and Questions.
It can seriously suck to feel Doubt when you are so used to the meritocracy of the kitchen. Doubt is the mind killer. Doubt is the little death that brings total clusterfuckery. You can’t afford the time or space to doubt.
But, in a moment, you realize “I never asked that question… I just did as I was told.” You look at the cook and finally say “That’s the way we do it here… why? Do you know another way?”
Maybe that cook suggests a method you know (from your knowledge and experience) won’t get the result you need. “We roast the squash rather than steaming because we don’t want the added moisture in the recipe.” “We coddle the eggs so they won’t be so cold the butter seizes when we add them to the batter.”
Maybe they don’t and it’s an honest question. It seems like a wasted step. It seems redundant. In all your knowledge and experience, you can’t explain why that method is so important. “It’s the way we’ve always done it…” it made sense to someone some time ago and no one’s ever been bothered to check their work.
That’s where the growth happens. You either figure out the reason, or you figure out it HAS no reason and it’s a waste. In a meritocracy, you are judged by what you accomplish and are capable of- not what you were, who you know, or how long something as been done your way.
By choosing Curiosity and Humility over Hubris, the answer is found. Dispassionate and clear as a failed sauce or a botched bake. It’s either “this is why’ or “this is a waste.”
Curiosity weaponizes Doubt against itself.Curiosity is powered by Humility. We can’t know everything, or everyone’s experiences.
For me, Curiosity and Humilty are crucial to leading well. If my staff are watching me and hoping to see their future in the field, I need to show them that asking questions and having doubts are good.
They need to see that even the pastry chef, with knowledge and experience, still has a lot to learn and can even learn from them. It’s been a tenet of mine for a long time that if one of my apprentices comes up with a new way to do something that renders a better product, does a job more efficiently, or both, that’s how we do itnow.My ego takes a backseat, and if it turns out there’s a problem with that new method, we all learn why.
Imagine what you will learn when you admit you don’t know everything.
Baking and pastry, I’ve often noticed, gets treated with a mixture of awe, admiration, and contempt among kitchen workers. On one hand, we’re often the guys that have easy-to-grab snacks on hand. “Hey Matt… um… any of these cookies happen to ‘fall on the floor?’” Our weighing of everything, our techniques, and (frequently) the vision of us patiently stirring pots of bubbling stuff that smells amazing makes what bakers do look like alchemy or wizardry. Occasionally, there are some cooks with chips on their shoulder that insist we’re “useless” and “can’t do anything without a recipe book.” (Yes, I actually had someone say that to me once. To my knowledge they still have all their teeth, God knows how.)
Somewhere along the way, though, I’ve managed to cultivate an image out here that compels this question from my coworkers: “Dude, how old ARE you?”
My mannerisms aside, I don’t think I look a day over “ageless.”
I was sitting in the break room at the winery, having just finished my lunch. It was a chilly, sunny day, and the break room has a really nice window that looks out on the terrace, the waterfall feature on the grounds, and beyond that over the valley.
I was debating how to best pull off the rest of the week, crank out a new bread recipe for my chef’s latest special, and what kind of desserts I should do for the seasonal menu change. I was grateful for the distraction. The toxicity of social media around the Israel-Hamas War was still trickling through despite me pulling back. When that many lives and that much culture is on the line and the generational trauma of two entire peoples is simultaneously triggered, there’s too much at stake for it to be managed through TikTok videos, memes, and idiotic flame wars- but here we are.
It made my heart hurt, and my mental health required me backing off, so I’d resolved to do what I’d always done when feeling pained and powerless- feed people, and put good things into the world that weren’t there before.
Then my phone rang. It was my wife, nearly in tears. Life was about to provide an object lesson in Pain, Powerlessness, what we do in the face of it, and the things that mean more than posting “the right things” on social media.
He’s the admiral of the ocean the lone eagle in the sky. He gave me my first sextant and he taught me how to fly I saw him through my telescope on a cloudless night in June as he rested between voyages at his Beach House on the Moon
– Jimmy Buffett, “Beach House on the Moon”
There is no internship for becoming a writer. All we have is the writers and creators we love, their body of work, the will to dive into it voraciously and- ideally- add our own selves to the mix. Back in high school, one of my teachers encouraged all of us to find our literary “genealogies.” We should pick our favorite writers, find their favorite writers and read all their work, then find their favorite writers, and so dive deep into the sources of our own styles.
At the time Mr. Murphy charged us with this task, the majority of my literary heroes were long dead and their heroes were Early Modern or even antiquity. The only remotely contemporary writers I enjoyed at the time were Kerouac and Langston Hughes.
As I sit in a thankfully unfamiliar dive bar patio sipping a memorial margarita, I know that one of my influences has passed on and, in a strange way, I’m glad I never got to meet him.
The Black Hat Baker 