Top quality restaurants don't resemble 'The Bear'

   

Leidy's Duroc pork chop with cheddar grits soufflé and bacon-braised swiss chard.

     Chefs are rock stars. Waitstaff are coveted. You know who never gets their due? Even though they're the key to restaurant excellence, as important as food or service?

     Management.
     "I think you might have something there," said Rich Melman, founder of Lettuce Entertain You Restaurants, the wildly popular family of eateries. Most new restaurants fail, but Lettuce has been in business over half a century and owns, manages and licenses more than 130 restaurants in a dozen states. They know what they're doing.
     This epiphany struck me this way: my wife and I recently helped our son, his wife and new baby move from Jersey City to D.C. I must have really stuck my landing, because toward the end of our two, count 'em — two weeks — helping, my wife announced that she would take me out to a celebratory lunch at the venerable Old Ebbitt Grill.
     Reservations proved impossible. So we just showed up, and were told the wait was 45 minutes. Parking ourselves at the bar, we ordered drinks. My wife requested an ice tea.
     "I'll get it," said a manager at the end of the bar who overheard the order. That struck me as unusual, like a company vice president stepping out of his office to mop the floor.
     "Let me comment on that," said Melman, when I described the scene. "I think very small. And that's how we got big. You're probably dealing with the manager in charge of the bar. In busy times, they have key people watching over whatever is going on. There might be another manager watching the dining room. Another manager watching over the kitchen. It's like a great shortstop/second base combination. You know what to expect. You know each other's moves."
     Why do some restaurants work and others don't?
     "I think it would be called restaurant leadership," Melman said. "There's got to be somebody who has the passion and the knowledge and the stick-to-it-ness to make something work. That becomes the culture of the organization. What impressed you is how the team works. There is a lot of teamwork in a good restaurant. Covering for one another."
     Speaking of teams, I haven't mentioned the astounding part. I order the Leidy's Duroc pork chop with cheddar grits soufflé and bacon-braised swiss chard.
     The chop shows up, a thick, 16-ouncer. A thing of beauty. I reach for my phone — dead after a morning snapping photos. Sure, I could have used my wife's phone. But I had more pressing things to do, like digging into that pork chop.
     Regret came later. How could I write about this spectacular pork chop and the organization serving it up without a photo of the pork chop in question? I considered going back the next day and ordering the chop again. But that's seemed nuts.
     So I did a Hail Mary, and called Clyde's Restaurant Group, which runs Old Ebbitt. Did they happen to have a photo of their pork chop?

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'The busy bee hath no time for sorrow'

Bob Israel

     We are the architects of our own happiness. Or sorrow. I think we forget that. It's too easy to offload responsibility for our lives onto fate, circumstance, others. To sit on your hands and complain. If you don't like what's going on right now, get busy and change it.
     I'm thinking of Monday morning. I'd been working for a couple hours, but hit a wall. It was about 9:45 a.m. I looked up, a little stunned, to find myself sitting at a desk, writing stuff. How did this happen? This is where working in a place with other people would be helpful. You could get up, get coffee, wander over and talk to one of those other people.
     But I work alone. I groped to think of someone to call, but came up empty.
     Drifting over to Facebook — which gets a bad reputation, but definitely has its uses — I noticed Bob Israel, a Northbrook trustee I'd met once after a recent village board meeting. He'd posted a photo of himself in a beekeeper's mask. Plus a trio of honey jars with homemade labels.

     "I have honey — I’m home today," he wrote. "Does anyone want to stop by and pick up a jar (or three)?"
     Posted 11 minutes earlier.
     Why the heck not?

     I grabbed $15 and the car keys. Google Maps told me Bob and his hives were a five minute drive or ... a 10 minute bike ride. I hopped on the old Schwinn. Always choose the more strenuous option. Riding a bike helps.
     Bob has several hives and about 125,000 bees in his back yard. He's been keeping bees for about five years.
     "The neighbors were initially freaked out," he said. "But then they realized their gardens have been better than ever. One of my neighbors took out all his grass and put in flowers."
     That's true — he'd replaced a section of back lawn with bee balm, daisies and other bee friendly flowers, a gorgeous tableau.

     "I started keeping bees because of my concerns about the environment and desire to be more restorative than destructive," he said. "As I took classes and started to learn more about the bee's social structures and began working with the bees, I found it to be both mind-calming and to benefit the flora in my neighborhood — so, effectively my reward is found in a bit of clearing of my mind and a multitude of blooming flowers.

     I stood before the hives, admiring them, and Bob directed me off to the right, "out of their flight path." There being nothing flowery about myself, the bees ignored me entirely, as they did Layla, Bob's dog, who practically was jamming her nose into the swarm.

     My admiration for bees was sparked in part by Virgil's Georgics, which includes a parody of battles in Iliad, fought by bees, whom he calls "stout warriors in their waxen kingdoms."

     Bob refers to his bees as "the girls," which I liked very much. I told him I knew this is correct gendering, as most bees in a hive are female.

     "There's some drones," he said.

     After 10 or 15 minutes I paid $15 for a pound of honey — the money goes to a worthy charity. Bob wrapped it carefully in a sheet of styrofoam, I put it in my bike basket and donned my helmet. A car pulled into the driveway and a man stepped out.

     "If you're here for honey, you've come to the right place," I said, and rode away.

     The sunny, summery morning certainly looked better than it had less than an hour earlier. I got back to the house, broke out the honey and dipped a spoon in. It tasted excellent: fresh and light. A reminder: the sweetness is always out there, waiting. Sometimes you have to get off your duff and go find it, that's all.

     If you too are in bicycle distance, and want to arrange a honey pick up, you can contact Beekeeper Bob at bobisrael@sbcglobal.net

"Stout warriors in their waxen kingdoms."

If you don't get this app, this dog might die

Kitty

     A dog cannot clear its throat, exactly. What Kitty, our little 15-year-old Shichon, does each morning is appear at my bedside about 6 a.m. and emit a low grumbling sound. My cue to get up, get dressed, pop in earbuds and take her for a walk.
     Center Avenue is empty at that hour. Tree-lined, nice houses. You'd think the pleasant vista of leafy suburban comfort, set to my favorite tunes, would put me in maximum good spirits.

      And it does, to the degree that anything can. Yet, after we return home, the first thing I do is fill her water bowl to the brim, thinking, "I want her to have plenty to drink in case we drop dead and nobody notices for days."
     A grim thought. And a rather improbable one — I mean, yes, people our age, mid-60s, do die abruptly. But the odds of both my wife and me  expiring at the same moment are slim. How would that even happen? An awful coincidence, perhaps. She steps in front of some idiot on an electric scooter blasting down a Loop sidewalk at the same moment I stumble headlong down the stairs at home.
     Morbid stuff. Where did that dog-dying-neglected thought even come from? I'd like to blame Gene Hackman — he and his wife died in February, unnoticed for over a week, and one of their dogs perished in a crate, horribly. But I was having this thought long before.
     Looking for relief, I wondered if there might not be some internet gizmo that will sound the alarm if you don't check in.
     Snug Safety is a cheerful, well-designed little app that sends a text every day at a set time with a big green button to tap. Fail to tap, and it alerts an emergency contact. Hit the button, and you're rewarded with an affirmative little quote.
     You can pay — $199.99 for a year, $19.99 for a month — for access to a human dispatcher. But the basic service is free.
      Every day, a big green button. Then the quote. First day:
     "We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men." — Herman Melville

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If the headline rings a bell, yes, it is
an homage to this classic National 
Lampoon cover.

Nothing here to see

U.S.A. Flag, by Claes Oldenburg (National Gallery of Art)

     Once we get into the practice of ignoring reality, the exact nature of the reality being ignored hardly matters.
     I've said that before. But it bears repeating.
    Donald Trump's mind is a guarded by a kind of mental gate where praise is welcomed with wild cries of delight and criticism is loudly rejected. Real, unreal, is not an issue. He has created his own reality where glory — whether true or not — is greedily accepted, assuming it wasn't generated himself, while criticism is dismissed as fantasy.  Those are the rules.
    Somehow, this mindset of delusion and self-puffery was embraced by half the country, and tens of millions live by it still. Our nation spent a decade, more or less, sprawled before one deeply unfit man, serving his ego. With no end in sight.
     So when this sordid Epstein saga — which clearly Trump has always been a part of, because that's who he is — flared up again, I was sincerely bewildered. What's new here? The only thing different is that some of Trump's followers have had their faces to the ground for so long they don't seem to realize that a frank assessment of the Epstein crimes would tar their guy even more than he already is. More slime on a man dripping with it. 
    Or would tar him, if they cared about that kind of thing. Which they don't. On this Donald Trump and I seem to agree. We both don't think it matters — except, in his case, he believes that's a good thing.

You never actually own a City Council seat, you merely look after it for the next generation

 

Created with ChatGPT

   The bad news is that I'm stepping down. The good news is that my son, Neil Steinberg Jr., will be taking over this space. So it'll still be Neil Steinberg writing this. It just won't be me.
     I know what you're thinking: "But this Neil Junior" — I call him Sport — "is he any good?' Will he similarly hold us captive with his biting wit and hard-hitting journalism? It isn't as if writing well is a heritable trait, like my green eyes or wide feet.
     OK, OK ... the above is untrue, mostly, except for the lack of a column-writing chromosome. I'm sticking around. And as pompous as I can be, I didn't name either of my sons after myself — Jews don't generally do that. Neither of my boys feels it worth his super-valuable, billable-by-the-1/10th-hour time to regularly read my column, never mind consider taking a pay cut to write it.
     What inspired the above is Fran Spielman's Friday article on Ald. Walter Burnett (27th) wanting to bestow his City Council seat upon his 29-year-old namesake.
     "Don't judge him based on him being my son," said Burnett, pere, as if there were any other reason the lad is being finessed into City Hall. "Judge him based on what he can bring to the table ..."
     He went on at length to extol his son's many excellent qualities. I don't fault him for that. I'm a big fan of my kids, too. I just wouldn't have the chutzpah to try to hand one my job as if it were my wedding china. Not that he'd want that either.
     You know who never says a peep in Fran's story? Despite being invited to do so by the dean of City Hall reporters.
     That's right, Walter Redmond Burnett, the alderperson-in-waiting. The man can speak, correct?
     I know he can because Block Club recently cornered him at a coffee shop, where he addressed such crucial matters as what he likes to be called — "Red" — and why this isn't yet another case of, in Block Club's words, "classic Chicago nepotism." The story also mentions, in the 14th paragraph, that Burnett the Younger spent "almost a decade in New York" as an investment banker.

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Judgment call

Mrs. George Swinton,by John Singer Sargent
(Art Institute of Chicago)

     My wife works in the Loop on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and usually comes down to the kitchen to get her lunch together about 7:30 a.m., while I'm sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and scanning the papers — okay, pretending to read the paper and drink coffee, actually just lingering, there simply to enjoy the pleasure of her company before she vanishes for the next 10 and a half hours.
    On this particular day, this past week, she was wearing white linen pants, a robin's egg blue knit top, and a sort of a shirt-jacket that brought the blue and the white together. A very soigné ensemble. I thought of taking a photo; then thought better, and didn't. A private person, she.
    As much as I like to use the word soigné — French, for "elegant, put together" — I did not say that. What I did say was, "You look very summery ..."
      The next thought came to me, and I manfully resisted it for a fraction of a second, then gave in to the inevitable, adding, "...if you will forgive a summery judgment."

      We both froze a moment. 
     A pun, for you non-lawyers, on "summary judgment," when a party asks the judge to, in essence, decide a case before it goes to trial, based on some aspect of the facts and the law. 
     Yes, she groaned. But it was a good groan. A groan of appreciation. Or so I tell myself. 

'Why would you want to write about things that hardly anybody cares about over and over again?'

The Vent Haven Museum in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky, a haven for ventriloquist dummies, is one of the countless subject that nobody gives a shit about, at least until I write about them. Then they tend to.

      As a rule, I try to let the commenters on my blog post comment, and not get involved in the discussion unless there is some question I'm in a position to answer. I've had my say; now the readers get theirs.
      But sometimes questions are raised that merit my involvement. Such as this, after Friday's post on museums, from Bill:

Question,

There's two different kinds of people which one are you?

When you go to a place That's open to the public say a restaurant or a museum for instance and there's almost nobody else there do you say to yourself I'm so lucky I'm so smart nobody else came here out of the 7 billion people on earth I'm the only one here lucky me or do you realize that no one else gives a s*** and that's why you're in there alone because it's of no interest to anyone else?

You are a very fine writer most of the time you write about things that a fair number of people care about why on earth would you want to write about things that hardly anybody cares about over and over again?
Are you writing for you or are you writing for us?

I know that's more than one question but I figured you got to write about something

     In another mood, I might not have even posted that — the "I'm so lucky I'm so smart" is nearly an accusation — I'm an arrogant bastard — the standard MAGA mind trick of imagining something stupid and then projecting the thought into the mind of people they hate. "I'm lucky I'm so smart" is not a thought I have often, certainly not compared to, "I'm lucky I blundered here through blind fate, despite the fact that I didn't want to come here because I never want to go anywhere."
    But he said something complimentary. And that "Write about things that hardly anybody cares about over and over again" is fairly accurate. 
     I considered, and answered on the blog this way:

That's a valid question. The short answer is: I'm writing for me, absolutely, 100 percent. The fact that other people who aren't myself want to read it is a continuing marvel. As far as the nobody gives a shit aspect, I would reply with a question: 1) "Who appointed you their spokesman?" and then make an observation: "And yet you're here." But this seems a topic worthy of expansion, so I'll write tomorrow's blog post about it. Thanks for asking.

     The reader preference feedback loop is the bedrock of much social media — you click on a video of a turtle being cut out of a net by a diver, and suddenly your feed is inundated with aquatic animal rescue, Artificial Intelligence thinking, "More animal rescue!" 

      And we worry AI is going to take over the world.

      "Give the lady what she wants," was the slogan for Marshal Field's. Instead, I see myself as a sifter. I go to these very dull and ignored subjects that for some reason catch my attention, dig up handfuls of facts regarding them and toss them onto my fine-mesh sieve of a mind. Then begin to shake. Out drops the parts that not only aren't dull, but interesting. Those, I share.

    I'm the guy who, 30 years ago, wrote a chapter in my book on the National Spelling Bee. This was before all the novels and plays — in fact, I like to think I had a small hand in creating the literary bee genre. The spelling bee was an obscure and strange American institution that got grudgingly reported on and generally ridiculed at the end of May. I followed a girl through a year of the bee, beginning in her middle school, then proceeding to  state, and ending at the national bee in Washington, D.C.

     The chapter, called "Shiver Like Rhesus Monkeys" is one of my favorite pieces. It gives every word my champion, Sruti Nadimpalli, received in a year of the bee, but is never dull, and others joined me in that estimation.  Granta, the esteemed London literary quarterly, republished it on their cover.

    Returning to Bill's question, my writing about things nobody cares about is not an accident. I set out to do that. Because the things people do care about — sports, celebrities, today's political crisis — are already covered like a damp shirt by a thousand other writers. Why join the scrum?    To me, the greatest accolade is to walk an untrodden path. And while people don't care about the topics before I address them, by the time I'm done, they care more than they did before. Sometimes a lot more.

     I loved visiting Neenah Foundry to watch manhole covers being made because it was a dream of mine, and took me about five years of badgering to get them to agree, and because what I found there was gold, well, okay, iron, but you get my point. Before the story ran, I took the time to check the Sun-Times, Tribune and Daily News files, and found that, in the 100 years Neenah has been making manhole covers for the city, nobody from the Chicago press had ever found a way to drive up there and write about the process. Not once. I was the first. That, to me, is something to be proud of, to be that guy, the guy who asked Cologuard, "Who opens the jar?" For many subjects, I'm the only one who wrote a particular story in the Chicago press over the past 40 years — the social lives of transvestites. A factory making table pads. What it's like to visit a dominatrix. The fact that nobody has written before, or since, and no reader was waiting for the answer, isn't a reason to pause. It's a reason to hurry forward. A plaudit. Icing on the cake.

    Does that help, Bill? Because if you don't find this stuff interesting, nobody is putting a gun to your heads. As I sometimes tell people who complain: But I don't write this for people who don't like it. There must be stuff you like. Go find that. Because I'm certainly not changing to suit the displeased.