This blog has been started to communicate with others about the restaurant. At this stage, it is only a dream with about two more years of preparation needed, so it will tell the story from the very beginning. With that, let me tell you a little about how this idea came in to existence.

My parents had a large garden (100 feet x 100 feet) and a few farm animals (pigs, goats, rabbits, and such) when I was young in Oregon. They grew, processed, and cooked some of our food entirely on our land. Later, in high school, I spent three years working at Little Caesar's Pizza, which is an extraordinarily fast paced kitchen! When I was in college, I got a job at a supermarket in Belgium as a way to learn French. I made friends with the supermarket manager who was later a buyer for the supermarket chain. He took me along to see some of the vendors and I learned quite a bit about the food distribution business through him. During college I lived with a family in Brussels that was passionate about food. They made dinner each evening and ate together as a family. Philippe, the father of the family, later open a small organic supermarket and restaurant within walking distance of the house.

After college, I moved back to the U.S. and made San Diego my home. My goal was to work in international business, not necessarily in the food industry, and I got a job at Mail Boxes Etc.'s headquarters. Part of my job was to talk to the most successful franchisees and find out about how they ran their stores. After four years of this, I desperately wanted to run my own store and was able to get a loan to do this.

There are a lot of wonderful things about The UPS Store. (Mail Boxes Etc. is now called The UPS Store.) They are a wonderful training ground for small business ownership, but with the safety of a brand name behind you. The business concept is well defined and can be quickly put in to place for a reasonable cost. Operationally, they can be moderately complex if you are properly promote the business, making the work varied and challenging.

After the first store was running well, I started looking for what would be my next passion and I had a lot of trouble finding it. I tried all sorts of recreational things, which were all fun, but only a few of them actually stuck with me (those being biking, camping, and cooking). Looking for the next passion, I bought a second and then a third UPS Store. Each store gave me a spark of passion, but then I started looking for something else.

What fascinated me about cooking was discovering how the foods I ate were made. It's the journey from the plate, back through the cooking process, to the stores, to the farms, and finally back to the earth and nature. I had spent years uncovering the secrets behind how companies run and now was discovering the secrets behind how good food came to be. I grew a few plants on my balcony just to see what it was like and briefly fantasized about selling everything, buying my childhood home in Oregon, and living off the land like my parents had done. But I think my interests are more in the cooking of food at this moment, although it could someday be in the actual growing of the food, so I nixed the plan to uproot and become a hermit.

A restaurant allows you to express your personality and beliefs through things like where the foods comes from, the design of the restaurant, the recipes, the mood of the staff and the restaurant, the operational procedures, the ways the restaurant is promoted, the pricing of menu items, the accuracy of your bookkeeping, and so on. If each of these things is done with enthusiasm, care, and skill, the result may be a work of art.