verbose vina

I'll be able to spend the rest of my life on this crazy journey of rediscovering Southern food and what it can be. And there's no way to know what's going to happen a year from now. There's just no way, but today is today and today is a good day.

I think we have to have dreams. We need a little Carmen Miranda with all her tutti frutti hats. And we need some Fred and Ginger dancing. We need Gene Kelly hanging off that lamppost. We need to be taken into a fantasy world, and not be afraid to go there occasionally.

Never give up, never give in, and when the upper hand is ours, may we have the ability to handle the win with the dignity that we absorbed the loss.

There’s definitely times where I still think, “Let’s go open a restaurant.” Then I remember on Saturday night, while I’m sitting in a restaurant, that I wouldn’t be sitting there if I did. I’d be working. But what I miss the most is the camaraderie. That working relationship is so much like a second family. Unless you’ve been in the business, most people don’t understand that. It’s very intense, it’s very long hours, and there’s always something going wrong. Things that happen in the [film production] field that happen and people go, “Oh my God, I can’t handle this,” I’m like, “This is nothing. Imagine a Saturday night, 400 reservations, and someone breaks a glass over your sauce station. That’s an issue.” I miss that really intense busyness of fast-moving evenings when everything’s gotta work in sync. And then you just have a beautiful night. The customers are having a good time, the staff feels great. You sit down at the end of the night with the staff and have a glass of wine. Let’s go do it again tomorrow. Any chef can relate to that intensity of feeling.

It was my life, I lived and breathed cooking. It was my passion. And I was always excited by the exploration of food. Cooking was like a passport for me to see the world.