Author Archives: paul

The cooks didn’t show up. Not one of them. Not the prep cook, not the dishwasher, not the line cook who was supposed to be loading in the food delivery by eight. It was 1989. The restaurant was barely two years old. We had a full lunch on the books at eleven and nobody toContinue reading “The Real Work”

He was sticking needles in his arms at 19 because he couldn’t get the cocaine into his system fast enough through his nasal passages. He’d been fired from every job he ever had. He’d been fired by his own brother. Twice. This kid grew up in a good home. Loving family. Hometown that knew hisContinue reading “FORTY-THREE”

CHICAGO—The first restaurant show I ever attended we still wrote guest checks by hand. You took the order on a paper ticket, you carried it back, and you clipped it to a stainless steel wheel in the kitchen window. The cook spun the wheel. That was the system. That was the technology. I have comeContinue reading “Sunday Supper, a Thousand Miles North”

I had to drive five thousand miles from home to figure out what was sitting in my own front yard. It happened in 2011, at a bed and breakfast outside San Donato in the Tuscan countryside. A British cover band was playing American rock and roll in Italian. We sat at a communal table withContinue reading “The Forest and the Pine Trees”

There is a hamburger in Stone County better than 90% of the hamburgers being served in this country, and it is being cooked roughly 200 feet from the cattle that died to make it. On the back of my flagship restaurant, in letters 20 feet tall, are two words: EAT LOCAL. They have been upContinue reading “A Cow in Wiggins Is Better at Her Job Than I Am”

Bacon is one of the few things on earth that a man can use to measure whether he’s home or not. After eight weeks of European breakfasts, I needed three mornings in a row at table 19 in the Midtowner before the question got settled. The bacon here is cooked the way bacon was meantContinue reading “Table 19”

“Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before.” — Dalai Lama LISBON—Seven weeks ago, I stood in snow 200 miles above the Arctic Circle in Tromso, Norway watching the sky turn green. Tomorrow I will stand on a cliff in the Algarve 200 miles above Africa, looking at the last stretch of the AtlanticContinue reading “Between the Arctic and Africa”

The whole thing started with restaurants. In 1999, when this column was young, the job was simple — eat somewhere, write about it, help the reader find something worth finding. That was it. That’s still it. Though somewhere along the way, the restaurant became a Tuscan villa. The villa became hotels in Spain, then aContinue reading “The Yonderlust Twenty”

Before the restaurants, before the trips, before any of it — there was my grandmother’s table. She had two of them that mattered. The one in the breakfast room, where we’d share Saturday morning pancake breakfasts and casual fried chicken lunches — nothing fancy, just food and family. And then the dining room table, formalContinue reading “A Life at the Table”