79 words

So esquire has this short story competition. Write a 79 word short story. I submitted one. This isn't it, but I am enjoying the challenge:

A 30-block radius was choked with National Guard. Inside the apartment, Brian sat down on Rocky’s couch.

“Can we talk about it?” he asked, gesturing towards the doomsday device.

“No. Would you like a brownie?” Rocky pushed the plate of brownies towards Brian.

“Very cake-like.” Brian mused.

“Exactly. That’s why I’m going to set the whole world on fire.”

“You’re going to end the world over brownies?”

“They were supposed to be fudge-like.”

He sighed and pushed the button.

A Zoo with No Tigers

Once upon a time there was a young man who loved animals.

He liked how different they were. They were different sizes, different shapes. They had different colors, and different textures. Some had scales and some had fur. Some could fly and some could swim. Some were fast and some were slow. He didn’t care- he loved them all. The Texarakana Tigerbat. The Arctic Lemonchad. The Peruvian Riverbear. They were so neat.

So he studied to be a zookeeper, like all animal lovers did. He got a job at a zoo. His job was to watch after the animals with the other zookeepers.

...

After a short amount of time, he noticed the tigers. You see, everyone loved tigers. People came to zoos for the tigers, mostly. Tigers are great, the young zookeeper reasoned. They’re big, fast, and colorful. What’s not to like? What he didn’t understand was how people fixated only on tigers.

The older more experienced zookeepers said “Kid, tigers are where the money is. People love them, and our job is to give the people what they want.”

He understood that supply had to meet demand. But his heart broke in half when he saw the sad, lonely animals that everyone rushed past to see the tigers. The neon flamingos. The waltzing sandpiper. The old tigerbats stared back at him through the glass with hopeless eyes, and it destroyed the young man inside. He would beg people to look at the jeweled spidersnakes in the reptile exhibit. “Please, they need love too!” he would say it as nicely as he could. But they came for one reason: tigers.

A long time ago someone decided tigers were the best animal, and enough people agreed with them that all the zoos decided that they needed to have as many tigers as possible. They would pay mountains of money to get the best tigers. They would charge more to see the really good, expensive tigers. The zoos that couldn’t afford nice tigers just tried to get as many as possible. The young zookeeper went to another zoo where they painted a donkey the same colors as a tiger. People were satisfied. “Close enough” they said.

It made him sad, and it made him angry. He wished he could meet whoever arbitrarily decided tigers were the best. He would punch them right in their stupid face. 

...

The other animals would die of loneliness. They would stare out of their crudely constructed habitats at a sea of people walking past to see tigers in their big beautiful habitats. “I promise I’ll change this.” He said to the nine-toed watersloth. He would lie awake at night, frustrated with his fellow zookeepers who supported the tyranny of tigers. “Why rock the boat?” they said.

Tigers paid the bills. They kept the lights on. “Tigers are what give us the ability to have any other animals at all.”

The young zookeeper was depressed. Every once in a while, there was a breakthrough: a little girl with a book on rainbow lemurs. A young couple that wanted to see the Chinese rocket squid. They were the exception to the rule. The zoos were groaning with tigers- fat, stupid, lazy tigers. They knew they weren’t going anywhere. They waited for the zookeepers to bring them steaks.

...

One day, when the zookeeper had almost given up, he got a call from another zookeeper friend. He wanted to start a zoo of his own, and he needed help. The young zookeeper didn’t feel young anymore. He looked tired and haggard. He was beaten down by a world run by tigers. He got offered another job as well- at Mega Zoo, making lots of money feeding tigers. He was going to do what he saw everyone else doing. But he waited. His friend didn’t have much money. The proposed site was tiny. It would be one of the smallest zoos. It obviously wouldn’t work, the young zookeeper told himself.

But then he thought about the tigerbats. He thought about how happy the different animals made him. What if he could find an audience for the thousands of animals that the world had ignored? He started asking his friend questions. Did he have a plan? How would they make money? Who would the other zookeepers be?

He had a plan. So the young zookeeper wrote a letter to Mega Zoo, “Sorry,” it said. “I’m going to help my friends open a Little Zoo instead. I’m sure someone else can feed your tigers.”

Building the little zoo was hard. It tested the resolve of all of the zookeepers. But they thought about the animals. They built a zoo they wanted to visit, a zoo they had only seen in their dreams.

“Nobody’s asked me about tigerbats for a long time, young man.” The animal salesman said. “How many do you need?”

“All of them.” On the other end, the phone clattered to the ground.

…

On opening day, they braced themselves. People flooded in. The question was coming. And then suddenly a young woman asked it and the hall fell silent: “Where are the tigers?”

The zookeeper paused and collected himself.

“We don’t have any tigers. Our zoo is small so we focus on stranger, undervalued animals. I would love to show you our Peruvian riverbear. They can hold their breath for ten months. Our bear, Zanzibear, has been holding his breath since we got him two months ago.”

The zookeeper had known only disappointment for so long. He was ready for the young woman to go crazy. A zoo without tigers? What was he thinking? He should have signed with megazoo.

Then something remarkable happened. Without missing a beat the young woman said “I’ve never heard of anything so strange! We would love to see him!”

The young zookeeper was stunned. Was it really that simple all along? He didn’t have time to figure out why, because the moment had arrived where someone wanted to see the riverbear. He could barely contain his excitement. “Right this way!”

…

At another zoo, the zookeeper eavesdropped on visitors at the tiger exhibit, which was ten stories tall. “I don’t understand, Little Zoo was cool I guess, but why don’t they have tigers? That’s a no-brainer.” Another person chimed in “A zoo without tigers won’t last long. They’ll be out of business by this time next year." They smirked, "Serves them right. ”

The zookeeper almost said something, but before he could a little kid exploded out of nowhere, dressed in a neon razorcrab costume.

“Tigers are everywhere! You can see tigers ANYWHERE else!” he said, pointing a neon green claw at the tiger palace. Everyone was staring now “It is OK if ONE ZOO doesn’t have tigers!” His fuzzy crab antennae were quivering with anger.

The world was hostile to the notion of a zoo without tigers. But the little kid in the crab suit gave the young zookeeper hope. Everyone laughed. “Get this idiot kid out of here.”

The tigers slowly turned their heads to see the spectacle. They blinked, tired from eating so much steak.

“Hey kid.” The kid wheeled around, his face bright red, tears welling up in his eyes. The young zookeeper raised his hand to solicit a high five. “Sweet costume.” 

"Thanks! I bought after I saw one at Little Zoo!"

…

The group of young zookeepers never got rich, and they never got famous- but they were happy, and the animals were happy too.

The electric flamingos glowed brighter than ever.

The riverbear chased the rocketsquid endlessly, to the delight of every onlooker.

The tigerbats were allowed out of their habitats, to fly around the zoo. They shot through the sky faster than the speed of sound. “I never knew they could do that!” people would say.

The zookeeper watched the tiny crowds oooh and aaah with a sense of satisfaction. This was his mission: to give all the weird little forgotten animals the audience they rightly deserved. He fought for the animals, and for the people that wanted to see them. As the tigerbats raced into the sunset, he promised himself he would try to create a world where people appreciated all animals equally for how weird and awesome they are.

Everyone still loved tigers. They would love tigers forever. To this day, tigers are the lifeblood of the zoo business. But that was ok, because the young zookeeper had finally found happiness by showing people something different.

In a zoo with no tigers.

The Battlesong of Christie Rafanan

I have been trying write about my experiences at Oxheart unsuccessfully for months now. This is because I don’t ever feel like I can do it justice. The experience is mind altering. Earth shattering. Life changing. I have written and deleted over 20 pages. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to fully articulate it. There is one thing I can say though: Christie Rafanan deserves more recognition. While Justin and Karen were cooking in fancy kitchens in Napa and abroad, Christie was honing her skills in a similar fashion in the front of many great front-of-houses. She’s a complete goofball. She replaces the lyrics of songs with “meows” and slaps my hand when I’m trying to use the calculator at work, which makes me insane. But when we hear the doorknob turn at 5:30 PM every night, the goofball melts away to reveal one of the most fiercely intense service people I have ever worked alongside.

Oxheart is a chef driven restaurant: the ratio of cooks to servers is 2 to 1. To this day, I am still right there with you, staring into the kitchen, bewildered at the complexity and efficiency of that machine. I hope that everybody in that kitchen is feeling the love, as they work freakishly long hours, and are generally pushing themselves full blast both physically and mentally. That being said, I wanted to take a second to talk about the other side of the equation: the dining room.

Service is an often-undervalued area of expertise in this town, and I think it is of the utmost importance that we celebrate great managers and service in general. It’s easy to overlook, because the best service is the kind that isn’t in your face. You’re never for want of anything, but you don’t feel smothered. Your needs are anticipated. It is profoundly difficult to strike the balanced between a relaxed atmosphere but also build a system that is military-precise.

Even more overlooked is the importance of setting up the dining room before service. Mapping out the evenings reservations intelligently is a goddamn art form. You never see this part of the process, but it has unquestionably affected your dining experience both positively when done well, and jacked it up when done poorly.

Moreover, all of us in the front of house need to constantly be looking at the systems we put in place and saying “How can I make this better (or cleaner, or faster)?

In these regards I am personally capable of doing an ok job. An adequate job. But that really isn’t why any of us signed up for Oxheart. We signed up to break our fists on the face of destiny and pour every ounce of our hearts and souls into that building. We have the right people for the job on food, and presumably I’m a decent beverage director. But we needed a similar level of intensity devoted to service. The answer was meowing at us the whole time.

Christie is the front of house manager for Oxheart. Formally she is a manager, but even before that was her title, she has been the vanguard of service in the building since day one. It takes a special person to be truly great at service, namely an obsessive attention to detail. As Justin and Karen tweeze the final garnishes onto plates of expertly roasted potatoes and flawlessly executed tarts, Christie is writing a floor map that is not only near perfection, but has contingency plans for when things go awry like tables changing in size or coming in late. She is hitting the ground running well before service, and then driving service like she stole it at gunpoint. When I get tired I move slower. When Christie gets tired she actually moves faster. She notices the tiny details that I overlook, and puts together systems to deal with them.  I am continually flabbergasted by her skill as a serviceperson before, during, and after service.

I am devoting so many words to this because people will tell *me* they really enjoyed the service after their dinner. Don’t get me wrong, I had something to do with it as one of only three people in the front of house. But do me this favor, if you’re walking out of Oxheart and you feel that warm glow of hospitality in your heart, take a moment to realize that Christie Rafanan played the major role in refining that part of the experience to what it is now.

Now I have to go be a jerk to her to balance out all this nice stuff I'm saying.

Santorini

Santorini was the one that got away.

Santorini stuck out like a sore thumb in the crowd. She dressed like a bug in the amazon trying to indicate to predators that she was poisonous. Hair was always messy. But she spoke like someone who knew what was going on. She was just as bored as you at that bar. She handed you a drink she didn’t like (a Stinger), ordered a Tom Collins, and started asking you questions that she already knew the answer to. She was testing you. And for some reason that you still can’t fathom to this day you made the cut. So you became friends.

You didn’t think much of it at first, but after a while, you knew this was more than a casual acquaintance when your text conversations went till 4 in the morning. When you noticed your heart sinking as the phone beeped with a text from someone who wasn’t Santorini.

You went to that party at the thunderdome warehouse, where you puked in the garbage disposal in that gross kitchen (she held your hair for you, very nice of her since you smelled like a compost heap). She walked you back to her place. All you remember saying was “they had scary paintings” and sitting down on the floor. Next you woke up with a blanket on top of you and a pillow under your head. You sat up and your whole body hurt. You smelled lemons and pancakes for the first time together. She made those puffy german pancakes. Your mysterious new friend could cook.

Do you remember those motherfucking lemon pancakes? Of course you do. Because that was the exact moment that you fell madly in love with her.

Who was she? Where did she come from? As best you could tell she was like, half Samoan, half Israeli. At least half Israeli would explain how she had what one that FBI agent on the news dubbed “an expert-level understanding of Krav Maga.” You never got around to discussing things like where you both came from. The phone lit up with assignments:

“Let’s get wasted at the zoo and scream at the animals. I hate giraffes.”

“How many pickles do you think we can eat at once?”

“Let’s just settle this with a kite battle in the park. I think I have enough powdered glass left for two kites.”

“I think my purse is big enough to sneak this leftover chili into a movie theater. Want to join?”

Sometimes you would just blather on and on about the most inane things. Sometimes you would just get in the car together and drive in silence. For hours. After a while, it became clear that you were both hanging out with each other as a form of escapism. What is she trying to escape from? You caught yourself wondering on multiple occasions. Then it started coming together.

The first time you found a gun in her apartment she played it off. “Self defense.” It had a silencer. An extended magazine. A custom trigger. It was loaded with black talon rounds. They say the police reports catalogued over 30 controlled weapons in her apartment. Guns. Explosives. One of the lawyers even insinuated she had chemical weapons. All you ever got were the rumors.

The more questions you asked the more distant she became. It was awful. The spontaneous riot of fun you used to have was blunted by the knowledge that she had something to hide.

You remember her meeting you at the dandelion fountain with gelato. Of course she made it. Lemon gelato. She sprinkled sea salt on hers. You will remember that gelato for the rest of your life. She said she wasn’t sure how long she could be friends with you. You fought back tears and said, “This is the best gelato I’ve ever had in my life.”

“Kid, you’re telling me you found a silenced sub machinegun under this girl’s futon and you didn’t think that maybe something was up? Is your sense of self-preservation that fucked? Or are you keeping something from us?” 18 hours of interrogation. You were delirious. At one point they threw coffee on you. It stained the funny t-shirt she bought you.

You never got that moment. You never got to tell her how much she meant to you. Maybe it was because you were scared you’d drive her away. It was enough to be friends with her you said. You only got to say it once, under the wrong circumstances.

It all happened in an instant. They say traumatic moments get blurry easily. She was the most visibly upset you’d ever seen her. She was packing her bags. Going somewhere for good. You caught a glimpse of a passport. “You aren’t supposed to be here. I said if you came here I’d kill you.” She snarled. You started following her into the next room. She pulled a shotgun out from under the bed and slung it on top of a duffel bag, reiterating:

“I said I’d kill you.”

You heard car doors slam outside. The lights cut off. “Get on the ground.” In monotone. Something crashed through the outside gate door. You couldn’t see anything, but you heard the che-chack of the shotgun. “Are the cops coming for you?” Your voice was shaking.

“Not cops. Cops have sirens. Flashing lights. You have to get out of here. You can’t hold your own like this.”

“I want to stay. I love you and I want to stay. Give me a gun.”

“You wouldn’t know what to do with it.”

Her hand reached out from the darkness and touched your face.

“If you love me, you’ll run. Out the back door. You have maybe 15 seconds before they close that exit off. Go. Please.”

The police found you passed out in a ditch 5 miles away. They sat you down for 18 hours and asked you if you knew who Santorini was. If you knew she worked with multiple terrorist organizations. If you knew what the pages and pages of code in her apartment went to. You didn’t know the answer to anything. That one detective almost punched you in the face when you said she made good pancakes. They said she was number 9 on “the list” for a while. That the reward for turning her in would have been astronomical. They wouldn’t tell you what happened to Santorini.

“He was probably just an insurance policy. Like a potential hostage or something.” They rationalized, laughing.

Nothing hurt as bad as the knowledge that she was gone. Sometimes you go back to the fountain. You learned how to make lemon gelato, though you never got it to be quite as good as her recipe. You were grateful you knew her. And you will spend the rest of your life wondering who she really was, if she was a villain or a hero. If she loved you back.

If you’d like to know what I’m talking about, go buy yourself a bottle of Domaine Sigalas Santorini. It’s made on the island of Santorini in Greece. Made from the Assyrtiko grape, Santorini is grown on volcanic soils. The vines are woven into baskets to protect the grapes from the powerful winds that blow through the vineyards.

It tastes like lemons, with a bitter finish.

Tokaji

 Currently the only dessert wine on our wine list at Oxheart is Tokaji. Recently, I was pouring a guest a glass of Tokaji, and they looked up at me and asked, “So you like Tokaji? How would you describe the taste?”

I paused for a very, very long time. And I think my actual answer was “Yes, I like it.” I ignored the second question, which I wanted to answer very badly.

Here is what I wanted to say, but didn’t have time to fully articulate:

What does Tokaji taste like? It tastes like a late harvest white wine and a tawny port got together. Perfectly ripened peaches and nectarines, caramel, burnt sugar, vanilla and honey. It’s nice.

Tokaji is complex. It is made primarily from the Furmint grape, in Hungary. It is made by masterminds who could be building spaceships or curing cancer. Instead they make something much more important: one of the best wines in the whole damn world. It is a perfectly executed and timed series of kicks to guide your subconscious mind through ten layers of dream worlds so that it might explode into full consciousness. It is the fourth unsolved panel of the Cryptos statue at the CIA headquarters in Langley. Tokaji is a mystery, wrapped in a riddle, deep-fried in suspense.

Tokaji is balanced. It is perfectly balanced on the edge of a razor. Not only is it unctuously sweet, but it has laserlike acid to level out all that delicious sugar. It is balanced like the madness and evil that drive the human condition are counterbalanced against the joy of a meaningful life with people you care about. Somewhere in the world an orphan is adopted into a loving family, while a mercenary wipes blood off a well-worn machete elsewhere. So too is Tokaji balanced.

Tokaji is intense. How intense? Imagine staring into the sun. You stare at it for hours. You’re blind. You’re sweating. And you can’t look away, because it’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen. Then the sun blows up. The entire solar system is engulfed in white-hot fire. Everything that you thought mattered: your car payments, your herb garden outside your apartment, your pet- they’re gone. Reduced to elemental carbon. You float through outer space for a billion years. Later, the atoms that made you form another planet, in a different solar system in a different galaxy. That hypothetical experience is almost as intense and profound as the flavor of Tokaji.

Tokaji is historically significant. Tokaji beat other sweet wines to the punch on the delicious possibilities created by Botyrtis. The vineyards were the first to ever be formally demarcated, round about 1700. Catherine the Great regularly employed military force to obtain and protect obscene amounts of it. The Czars got drunk as hell on it. Thomas Jefferson poured it up all throughout his career, and died penniless in the pursuit of more Tokaji, amongst other wines.

I like Tokaji a lot. How much do I like it? I will make you this promise: if for some ridiculous reason I am elected president of the United States, I will plunge America into the greatest depression it has ever seen and declare war on everyone in pursuit of more Tokaji. I will spend every red US cent that I have legal authority over to obtain every bottle in existence. I will invade Hungary. As the A-10 Warthogs scream overhead and the M1 Abrams tanks roll through the streets of Budapest, I will land Marine Force One in the center of Mézes Mály, the great first growth of Tokaji. I will be like, “Sorry, this belongs to America now.” I will draft every man, woman, and child into military service to achieve this insane and wasteful goal of seizing the vineyards of Tokaji. If elected, I will probably not remain president very long. I like to think Catherine and TJ would approve.

When I taste Tokaji, I feel like my mind is being torn apart by a truth that I am not ready to comprehend. Tokaji is the reason the world turns, and it is the reason I get up in the morning. It is an ancient battlesong that gives me the strength to fight another day when my body is broken and my resolve has been tested too thoroughly.

I would highly recommend you try it. It is one of the most fascinating beverages on the planet, and it is readily available by the glass at Oxheart.

Since this is the first time I have ever mentioned my current job in blog form, I should probably just go ahead and say that in case you are offended or weirded out, these opinions are exclusively mine.

What I've trained for

I have rewritten and deleted this overdue blog post about 4 times. I wanted to talk about the genesis of my decision to work with Justin and Karen at Oxheart in some epic sweeping fashion. But honestly, it doesn't matter.

How I got where I am is a way less exciting story than where I'm about to be.

In exactly ten days, I will leave Central Market. For a restaurant.

For the first time in my life, I get to write a wine list from scratch. I have been "taking over" wine lists and beverage programs my whole career. Now, the controls are entirely in my hands, and I'm more than a little bit intimidated.

I wish these prices weren't over 100 years old.

I've been packing up my apartment for the past few days, and I keep finding study materials. Practice tests. Flash cards. Tasting notes. Dictionary sized books. It has dawned on me that this is the moment I've been training for for the past six years. One could make the argument that for a while, I was so busy learning the rules of the game that I forgot how much fun it is to play.

The chance to start my own beverage program really isn't enough though. It needs an actual restaurant attached to it. The only way I could justify the kind of list I want is if I had a kitchen that was driven by people determined to blow minds. To show people something different and fundamentally delicious.

That's how I view Justin's food. Pairing beverages with it is like clinging to a bullet train for dear life. It moves so fast and changes so rapidly that it requires every ounce of my brainpower to keep up with it. It is the ultimate challenge for a sommelier, the kind that I would argue comes along only once in a lifetime.

Yes I have action movie references for everything.

Houston is the city that taught me everything I know about wine and service. I suppose I could have taken that experience to San Francisco or Chicago or New York and done ok. However, I am beaming with pride to say that I am helping open a restaurant in my hometown. I would rather fight for the future of Houston than join the already established culture of SF or NY. We are teeming with brilliant minds that are producing work that is already rivaling the more established restaurant cities. When a bunch of us get together for a pop-up it feels like my own personal rat pack.

This is how cool I felt during The Money Cat.

More than anything, everything has been so much goddamn fun. I cannot wipe the grin off my face.

Joining Oxheart is unquestionably the most weapons grade thing I have ever done, ever. Justin and Karen are an amazing team, and I am exhilarated to work with them. It will be the adventure of a lifetime. I cannot wait, and I hope to see all of you there.

#TEXSOM 2011

Getting to volunteer at TEXSOM, for some of us, is like a holiday we look forward to all year long. I often underestimate how completely awesome it is to be in a room of hundreds of people who are all focused on exactly the same thing I am. In the real world you have to watch out for going way too far into why you wish more people would drink Huet Vouvrays and putting your friends to sleep. At TEXSOM you're drinking Huet, talking about Huet, and geeking out in a way that you only get to do very rarely.

One of the wines I was most excited about.

If the wines of Huet made noise, they would go "BIEW BIEW BIEW"

In the case of Chateau Musar, we talked about it, we drank it, and we met Serge Hochar. Every year, as the quality of the program gets better and better, so too does the brutal transition to reality get harder. The only solution I find is to try and reorganize the world around me to look more like TEXSOM, even if it's only a little bit at a time.

I was responsible for #5 of each tasting. It ended with me getting to pour 1969 Musar Blanc, I still don't know what I did to deserve that. Photo by Alfonso Cervola.

The speakers are amazing, and when we have time to listen to them, we sit and do just that. But more than once we had to miss out on full lectures, because we were in the back, popping foils and pulling corks a dozen at a time. I suppose someone could call that a bummer, but one of my favorite parts of TEXSOM is sitting in the back with the wines before the lecture. My little wine-nerd heart still goes pitter-patter when I'm sitting in front of an open case of Comte George de Vogue, or when I'm oogling a 40 year old selection of Musar:

OHMYGODOHMYGOD

I like those little private moments we get with the wines. When I get to handle and pour this much good wine in one sitting, all I can speak is whispered expletives. I think that's kind of what The Chairman was talking about when he talked about having a personal conversation with the wines.

A really nice new feature was the hospitality suites. Because after you spend the whole day drinking earth shattering wine, you really need a drink.

Nothing helps settle your stomach like a gallon of Amaro.

I saw this, and wondered if perhaps there was a bathtub full of wine at a beer conference somewhere else in the world.

The one thing that I think can't be said enough about TEXSOM, is that everyone eligible to compete should be competing. I am so disheartened by people who say things like "I don't want to embarrass myself" or "its too hard". Trust me, nobody is "ready" for TEXSOM. I got my ass handed to me the one year I competed, and it was instrumental in motivating me to study for my advanced exam. That's basically what the TEXSOM competition is: a free practice session for the advanced exam. NOT ONLY is it free, but you are allowed to attend the lectures for free. Lectures where they pour George Comte de Vogue 1er Cru, Sparkling Huet, 1975 Musar Rouge, and other power ballads. Oh, and if you place, you get at least a 1000 dollar scholarship. How is there not a waiting list of competitors?

Don't be scared of defeat of embarrassment. Moving forward will inevitably subject you to both. I am proud of the folks that have the guts to subject themselves to so much scrutiny, both in competitions and in the regular court tests. My policy has always been sign up first, figure out how I'm going to pull it off later.

Big congrats to Bill, Nathan, and Houston's own David Keck. I shameless root for Houston every time.

Stepping off the soapbox now, and telling you to get your ass to TEXSOM 2012. I'll see you there!