DESTIN— The kids are at camp so the wife and I headed to the beach. In another life, this was my playground. I lived down here during two brief stints of my misspent youth in the 1980s. I worked in restaurants and lived the life of a single guy in a beach town. During the [...]

Being a food writer is a pretty sweet gig if you can get it. I fell backwards into food writing over a decade ago. My early stuff was bad, really bad; some might take the stance that the new writing is not all that great either. Nevertheless, it’s where my passion lies— or is it [...]

Over the course of my 30 years in the restaurant business, I have seen many trends come and go. In the early 1980s, I remember reading a trade magazine article about how computers were going to play a major role in the restaurant business. At the time, I was working as a server in a [...]

I planted an organic two-acre garden a few months ago to raise fresh fruits and vegetables for our restaurants. Several weeks after the plants began sprouting, I started looking for beehives. Truthfully, I wasn’t sure why I needed a beehive beside the fact that bees pollinate plants, and I had heard a few old-timers at [...]

My daughter turned 13 on Memorial Day. On their birthdays, my wife and I let each of the kids choose their three meals for the day. My daughter, the most devout carnivore in our house, wanted steak and biscuits for breakfast. Steak and biscuits has long been one of the favorite special-occasion breakfasts in our [...]

A friend of mine dreamt that she could plug an Ethernet cable into a chocolate chip cookie and hear what was going on inside of the cookie’s mind. What a great dream. I’d love to dive inside the mind of a chocolate chip cookie. I wonder if there is a caste system among cookies? Are [...]

Several weeks ago I wrote the first in a series of columns that will chronicle the progress of our two-acre organic restaurant garden. Today’s update is brought to you by the Roma Tomato Growers Cooperative. There is a strong possibility I might have gotten carried away while planting our Roma tomatoes. A year ago we [...]

The two longest-running loves of my life have been food and music. Fads, trends, and people have come and gone, but my love for food and music are constants that have never changed. I spent countless hours of my youth in record stores looking at albums and listening to music. We didn’t have much money [...]

In the upcoming days you are going to read a lot about offshore drilling, oil slicks, and preventative measures that can be taken to prevent future spills. Do we need to drill offshore? If not, what do we do with the 3,500 oilrigs off of our nation’s coasts? If we take away that production (about [...]