When Last We Left Off…

October 12, 2025 / The Black Hat Baker / Leave a comment

Hello everyone!

My six-month hiatus did bear some fruit, as the book is at least two chapters closer to being done, but mostly it took some pressure off of me to write every week during a particularly nightmarish wedding season at the winery.

There’s been at least one wedding every single week since May, and it still hasn’t stopped, but the restaurant is winding down a bit with the end of summer and even though our fall offerings and harvest season vibes are on point (if I do say so myself,) autumn in Portland means the rainy season. That means losing a quarter of our dining space- and our diners.

Every weekend of the last six months, I’ve been hoarding every moment I didn’t need to work or think about working like they were the last roll of toilet paper in a bomb shelter, ready to go for the throat of anyone who suggested they might need a few squares because they’re running out of pages in the Twilight series. I made time to write for sure, but energy reserves was another story entirely.

A typewritten page with a poem by Charles Bukowski. It reads:
“air and light and time and space

"–you know, I’ve either had a family, a job,
something has always been in the
way
but now
I’ve sold my house, I’ve found this
place, a large studio, you should see the space and
the light.
for the first time in my life I’m going to have
a place and the time to
create."

no baby, if you’re going to create
you’re going to create whether you work
16 hours a day in a coal mine
or
you’re going to create in a small room with 3 children
while you’re on
welfare,
you’re going to create with part of your mind and your body blown
away,
you’re going to create blind
crippled
demented,
you’re going to create with a cat crawling up your
back while
the whole city trembles in earthquake, bombardment,
flood and fire.

baby, air and light and time and space
have nothing to do with it
and don’t create anything
except maybe a longer life to find
new excuses
for.

- Charles Bukowski” — “Excuses, excuses…”
Yeah, I know.

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“Lord of Yourself I Crown and Mitre You”

April 6, 2025 / The Black Hat Baker / Leave a comment

“It’s goddamned exhausting. I’m so tired all the time.”

I’m in one of my favorite coffeehouses in Southeast, having just had a light lunch after my workout. A woman sitting across from me is generously sharing her table and its electric plug ins until a friend of hers is meant to arrive. We’re not talking, but I gather she’s a teacher- she’s in a hoodie in a coffee shop on a Sunday afternoon, flipping through resumes, books on pedagogy, and Classroom Safety manuals. I can only imagine what’s going on in her world at this moment, but I recognize the beleaguered groan as she clicks through her laptop.

When school children learn about this moment in American history, I wonder what the textbooks will call it. I personally vote for The Great Exhaustion- a moment in history where the only things there were plenty of were arrogance and opinions.

Photo by Photo By: Kaboompics.com on Pexels.com

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The Bookworms

April 3, 2025 / The Black Hat Baker / Leave a comment

“Think not of the books you’ve bought as a ‘to be read’ pile. Instead, think of your bookcase as a wine cellar. You collect books to be read at the right time, the right place, and the right mood.”
– Luc van Donkersgoed

Years ago, one of my relatives indicated the piles of books in his house and told me “Booksellers love Jews, because Jews buy books. Why? Because we’re always the ones that have to remember.” It could also be that we’re historically not that great at sports and needed something to do on the playground.

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Breaking The Habit

March 15, 2025 / The Black Hat Baker / Leave a comment

Old habits die hard. I wake up in the morning, and my gut instinct is to scroll.

America is back to being weird and scary as fuck and the urge to preserve my mental health is in constant tension with my wish to stay “informed.” I thought that getting rid of the social media apps on my phone would mitigate this- you can’t obsess over what isn’t there. The muscle memory remains, though. The habit. The “wake and bake” of the 21rst Century where our first instinct on resuming consciousness is “Shit, better fix that” and roasting our minds to a blackened husk on information before we go about our day.

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The Cult of Pastry

February 23, 2025 / The Black Hat Baker / Leave a comment

“Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.”
– A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V Scene I

At the end of his own weird and raunchy comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare lets us in on his own thoughts regarding passion and madness. Passion, Creativity, and Insanity are the coin of the realm in culinary arts. The work of food writers, celebrity cooks, and media like The Bear parade our damage for the public and make us heroes, horror stories, characters, and even martyrs when we die.

I don’t think for a second it’s somehow undeserved. That’s the part of our lives that kitchen veterans miss and swap stories about. What some people think needs to be done about- or with- that passion, however, has me wondering. How to do you temper, train, guide, and coordinate that kind of raw passion and madness? History would tell us we need to be like the military. Owners and executives who spend more time owning and eating in restaurants than actually making them work tell us we need to lead and manage like a business or a factory- possibly one that turns Dirt into Diabetes.

Personally, I think that the answer to leading and managing cooks is to stop seeking “employees” as much as finding acolytes.