STOCKHOLM—A restaurateur has no business leading tours through the frozen tundra of Scandinavia. Then again, a restaurateur has no business leading tours through Tuscany, either, and that was over 70 trips and 1,500 people ago.
The 2026 Yonderlust Travel season officially kicked off this week, and for the first time in almost 10 years of doing this, we’re starting in the land of the midnight sun instead of the rolling hills of central Italy. This is the trip I’ve been wanting to host since the beginning— a bucket-list run through Sweden, Denmark, and Norway that ends north of Tromsø, roughly 217 miles above the Arctic Circle. A perfectly logical destination for a man who has spent 45 years sweating in the commercial kitchens and dining rooms of south Mississippi. If the skies cooperate, we’ll witness the aurora borealis in one of the few places on earth dark enough and far enough north to see it at full power.
That’s the plan, anyway. The northern lights don’t punch a clock.
From here I’ll head down to Tuscany for three groups, then on to Portugal to close out the spring season. This fall brings 25 guests to Greece, a return trip to Rome, the Amalfi Coast, and Naples—the fourth time I’ve hosted that tour—and three more Tuscany groups to wrap up the year. Ten trips total. Six of them in Tuscany. Three in the spring and three in the fall, because that part of Italy never gets old. Not to me. Not to the people who go.
By the end of this year, those numbers will reach 80 trips and around 1,700 guests since I started.
None of this was the plan.
My profession is restaurants. Has been since I was 19 years old. All I ever wanted at the beginning was to own one restaurant so I could wear T-shirts and shorts every day. One restaurant. No more. This, it turns out, is not a viable business strategy. One became two, and two became five, and five became seven, and before I knew it, we were running a multiunit operation with the mindset—and the infrastructure—of a mom-and-pop, one-store shop.
About four years ago we started making real changes. We a C-suite—Jarred Patterson as chief operations officer, Chad Carmichael as chief information officer, Nevil Barr as chief culinary officer, and Maria Keyes as chief financial officer—brought in executive coaches, reworked our entire financial structure, added systems throughout, and started treating the business the way I should have a couple of decades earlier. Today at 64, I am more engaged in our restaurants than I have been at any point in 38 years of ownership. More engaged, truthfully, than I ever was. Covid rattled us. The years before it weren’t my best, either. But we came through that and built something stronger on the other side.
The leadership team we have today is the best we’ve ever had. Not just in the executive offices but in every restaurant. And the bench—the people ready to step in and lead as we grow—is deeper than it’s ever been. Four years ago, we committed resources to building that bench, knowing we’d run a little top-heavy for a while. The payoff is a team that’s ready. My son will be joining us soon, which makes all this feel like it’s coming full circle in ways I didn’t expect.
Restaurants are my first love. If I’ve learned anything over 45 years in this business, it’s that you take care of your first love first and foremost.
The travel business grew up alongside the restaurants almost by accident. Back in 2011, my family and I took a six-month trip through Europe. When we came home, people started asking me to take them over there—show them the people, the places, the food I’d found. I figured I’d do it once. Take a few friends to Tuscany, eat some pasta, see some sights, come home, and go back to running restaurants like a normal person. That one trip turned into a full-scale business we now call Yonderlust Travel.
For years, Simeon Williford—my former executive assistant who also runs the publishing company—handled the travel side as part of her other duties. But we’ve reached the point where that’s not enough. I hired Brittany Nicholson as the operations director for Yonderlust Travel, because if the business is going to grow, it has to be able to operate without me on the ground for every tour.
Over the past two years the requests have expanded. People want to travel in the winter to warmer climates and in the summer to cooler ones. This past year alone I hosted tours in England, Scotland, northern Italy, Spain, Ireland, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Tuscany. The relationships I’ve built with people overseas—colleagues who have become genuine friends—will allow us to offer curated tours and experiences I’ve created, run by people I trust, even when I’m not there.
At the center of almost every tour outside of Tuscany is Jesse Marinus. Jesse is Dutch, lives in Rome, and has been my boots-on-the-ground partner for seven years now. He handles the logistics, co-hosts tours with me, and works with a professionalism and eye for detail that I haven’t seen often in 45 years of the hospitality business. He’s like a son, a friend, a brother, and a teammate all in one person—and I don’t say that about many people. The fact that every woman on every tour thinks he looks like he stepped off the cover of a European travel magazine is, I’m told, purely coincidental to our repeat-booking rate.
I’ll still host five tours in the spring and five in the fall. But the only way to scale this thing is to do it without me being at every activity and at every dinner table.
We’re also getting ready to announce something I’ve been asked about for a long time—deep-dive tours right here at home. Yonderlust Mississippi. And a New Orleans tour. Because the best food and hospitality in America has always been in our own backyard.
Here’s what connects all of it—the restaurants, the travel, the tours at home and overseas. Hospitality. That one word. Creating an experience for someone, whether it’s a Tuesday night dinner at the Crescent City Grill or a week chasing the northern lights above the Arctic Circle. Making people feel taken care of. Making them feel like they matter. That’s the job. Always has been.
We are, after all, the Hospitality State. Though I’m fairly certain the tourism board didn’t have fjords in mind when they put that on the license plate.
What I didn’t see coming—what nobody could have predicted when I started leading a handful of friends through the Tuscan countryside—is that the people I meet at the restaurants become friends and then guests on the tours. And the people I meet on the tours become friends. Real friends. Lasting ones. Over 38 years, people have trusted us with their dining experiences. Over the past decade, 1,500 of them have trusted me with their vacation time. That’s not something I take lightly. Not for one second.
A restaurateur has no business leading tours through Scandinavia. But hospitality is hospitality, whether the table is set in Hattiesburg or on a fjord in northern Norway. The table just keeps getting bigger. And for that, I am grateful.
Onward.
