I had breakfast in bed this morning. I’m 64 years old and I’m not sure that’s ever happened.
Maybe once, back in elementary school, if I was home sick and my mother brought some Campbell’s chicken noodle soup to me on a tray. But I don’t remember it clearly enough to count it. So, let’s call this the first time.
Here’s the thing‚ I don’t know how to do nothing.
I’ve been running hard for six years straight. Covid hit and we opened a restaurant in the middle of it, still needing 25 positions filled the day we opened the doors. Not one of my better business decisions. Then came a string of years, operating five restaurants and two bars in the Hub City, writing a weekly column, hosting culinary tours overseas, and publishing books. This fall alone I hosted nine consecutive weeks of tours in Europe, came home, and left the next day on a book tour for the new one. Then Christmas business. Then king cake season at the bakery. I haven’t come up for air since roughly 2019.
I’m not complaining. I need to be clear about that. I love every bit of it, and business today is better than ever.
There were years, dark ones, early ones, when I was counting-change-in-the-sofa-cushions broke. So, when the sun is shining, I bail hay as fast as I can. The sun has been shining bright, and I am grateful for every bale.
But even a man who doesn’t rest well knows when a recharge is needed.
My 33rd wedding anniversary came up and we decided to get away. Houston. Two nights. No itinerary, no research agenda, no obligations beyond a couple of restaurant reservations. Super Bowl weekend, which worked fine for us since I could not have cared less about the Seahawks or the Patriots. It was going to be an actual weekend of calm.
I don’t have those. Ever.
So, there I was, propped up against hotel pillows at 6 a.m., the time I would normally be in the gym at home, or— if on the road— grabbing an Uber to some local breakfast spot to do reconnaissance. I haven’t missed a breakfast since the late 1980s. I don’t know the exact day, but I know the exact era because it was during those 90-hour weeks in the restaurant’s early days when I probably slept until noon after a late-night closing shift and blew right past a morning meal. Since then, breakfast has been non-negotiable.
For ten years before I opened the breakfast restaurant, I ate breakfast everywhere I traveled‚ London, Tuscany, Chicago, Barcelona studying menus, swiping ideas for decor and dishes. Once the restaurant opened, I was either working the breakfast shift or still researching on the road. Same story when we launched the bakery. Every morning in every city‚ find the best bakery, taste the pastries, bring ideas home, work with the crew to develop them.
But this morning in Houston, I didn’t go to the gym. I didn’t grab a cab. I didn’t scout a single restaurant.
I picked up the phone and ordered room service.
And for about 45 minutes, I didn’t feel guilty about it. I sat in that bed with a plate of eggs and bacon and I thought‚ I can probably do this once or twice in a lifetime.
Then I started going stir crazy. Fifty-three minutes, to be exact, before I was pacing the hotel room like a golden retriever who just heard someone say the word “walk” in a whisper from three rooms away.
So, I lied. I went to the gym in the hotel.
By noon we were out the door. Tex-Mex. Our second in two days. I spent six years doing deep research on Tex-Mex restaurants across Texas before opening one of my own‚ ten months into a pandemic, during a labor shortage. This is what’s known in the restaurant industry as “a business plan developed by a man who also once got remarried by an Elvis impersonator.” But I love Tex-Mex cuisine with my whole heart.
We had a Nobu reservation for brunch, and I cancelled it from the back of the Uber on the way there because we passed Ninfa’s‚ which, for those of you unfamiliar with Houston dining protocol, is roughly the equivalent of driving past a burning building. You don’t just keep going. You stop. There are fajitas at stake.
I’ve always loved Houston. Spent a lot of time there in the 1990s and during my years of Tex-Mex research. Plus, Hattiesburg has a nonstop flight direct into Bush, which makes it almost too easy.
That evening I ended up watching the Super Bowl. It wasn’t much of a game, as I suspected. The old adage that defense wins championships came true for the Seahawks as they schooled the Patriots who have enough rings, anyway.
But the weekend wasn’t really about restaurants or football. It was about 33 years.
A little over three decades ago, my Uncle Hugh White‚ an Episcopal priest‚ married us in the sanctuary of Main Street United Methodist Church in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. My family has been in that church for four generations. The next day we flew to Las Vegas and got remarried by Norm, the Elvis impersonator, at the Graceland Wedding Chapel. Anglican, Wesleyan, and Presleyan‚ all in 24 hours. Then on to Aspen for the official honeymoon.
I think about the man who stood in that sanctuary 33 years ago. Young. Bulletproof. No clue. Not about the failures or the restaurants or the books or the 90-hour weeks or the thousands of meals with thousands of people. He couldn’t have imagined being 64, sitting in a Houston hotel room in his bathrobe, eating eggs off a rolling cart, and not wanting to be anywhere else.
I’m probably not built for breakfast in bed. I lasted less than an hour before the golden retriever in me needed to be somewhere, doing something, tasting something. Always has been. But I’m glad I did it once. Turns out if you sit still long enough, gratitude catches up with you.
Happy 33rd anniversary, Jill St. John.
Onward.
