Travelling

About a year ago, Alex and I committed to trying to travel more. As young folk, we were very poor (can we buy a ladle this week? No? Ok, the coffee cup will work for another week... ) We had lots of fun and had dinner parties and went camping a lot. Then we bought a house at 23 and poured all our energy and spare money into renovating it. After that, we had kids. No time, no money, no energy.

So, here we are. We work like crazed people at the Bistro all the time. Most people don't know that we start dealing with stuff from home by about 9 am and usually don't leave work until midnight. I stay home with the kids during the day and we have our adventures in homeschooling. Generally life is very full and we really felt it was time to start travelling. It seems like a good way to unplug and recharge our batteries. Also, about two years ago, we figured out that our kids are fantastic travellers and they are all game for an adventure.

In the past year, we've been to Montreal, Toronto with the kids, Toronto without the kids, Vancouver with the kids (we are avid air miles collectors now!) This week, Alex and I are in Napa Valley and San Francisco. This trip was a gift from both our families to Alex for his fortieth birthday. We have talked about this trip, fantasized about this trip, since we were 18 years old. And now we are here!

Of course, all trips come with hiccups: our flight was delayed out of Calgary so we missed a bunch of stuff that we wanted to do in San Francisco yesterday. And, they lost my luggage. Which has meant not only am I without my things, we had to waste valuable time yesterday shopping for socks and underwear and a toothbrush for me. But we are here! And today we are going to go on 3 VIP wine tours that TIna Jones from Banville & Jones organized for us. I am just in awe of this whole experience. I plan to try to chronicle it as we go. But, who knows, I may just be eaten up by the moment.

I am very grateful that Alex and I have shifted away from buying things for each other and toward creating experiences. It also seems to be rubbing off on our kids: our son asked that no one give him any gifts for his birthday or Christmas. He asked for people to donate money instead. As a family, we decided to also pool our resources to send him on a trip to Vancouver to see his cousin and his buddy. I hope he has the adventure of a life time.

Still alive

We survived the Folk Fest!!! I believe that I felt at 3 am on Saturday morning wandering around Festival Camping that my survival may in fact have been in doubt. Fatigue had set in. I was surrounded by mayhem. Delightful mayhem but mayhem nonetheless. People dressed up as teddy bears, minstrels of varying quality, a giant sphinx and multiple pyramids, one of my staff in a housecoat wandering around muttering and gesturing to himself, a LOT of glowy stick people and one Christmas light guy, mussels being cooked, lasers being shone into the sky, the smell of pot and booze and cigarettes, seas of tents, and a giant lit up roving dragon. Oh yeah, and we were sleep deprived in a way I haven't been since having a newborn baby.

I loved it, tho. Love the festival, love festival camping. We are now plotting on how to get to Burning Man to cook. I love the idea of bringing fabulous food to fantastic places and being part of this enormous creative energy. We cooked and cooked and cooked. I'm sure that over the next few weeks I will continue to process this whole time in my life because it was so full and amazing.

We moved into our new digs which I have to say I was very worried about. I was not wanting a building, I was happy with my cooking tent and outdoor dishpit and cajoling the health inspector into our perspective: grass if fine flooring. However, change comes and you have move with it or get knocked over. I'm more of a move with it and see where it takes me kind of person. The building is phenomenal! It's huge and airy and bright and has the potential to be enormously efficient. It is cavernous so I had almost no voice by Monday. It was the place everyone wanted to hang out! We had musicians come and play for us and busses drop off folks right at our porch. We have a porch! it is really a beautiful space.

The food was good, too. There were some hiccups: chicken on the bone is tricky but extra tricky when there is no prep time and you have to make it on the fly! Potatoes (most starches, really) for 5000 are just challenging. But there were some highlights: bison short ribs falling off the bone, 3-bean salad out of this world!, grilled cheese sandwiches, and some crazy apple pancake thing that Alex said, "It worked!!" when he saw it (I sense he may have had some fears on its viability). We also cooked in "guerilla tents", setting up tables and burners wherever we could find a bit of space, on the folk fest site and the camp site, we simply started cooking and people would come to get food. When we ran out of food, we shut it down. It was so great! It also has opened up ideas for me around travelling food and bringing food to places.

I have left this festival with many great ideas rattling around in my head and we'll see what they lead to.

Delightful Bedlam

Oh, it's been a whirlwind. Every year around this time I think to myself: Why? Why in the world did you think this was a good idea? Surprisingly I am not talking about a) being married b) having children c) owning a restaurant. In fact, I am talking about running the backstage kitchen at the Winnipeg Folk Festival.

When I was eight years old, in 1978 (gasp, I know I don't look it, do i?!), my dad's best friend was on the board of the folk festival and invited my dad to come. My dad and I have similar senses of adventure so he brought me along and we both fell in love with it. We volunteered the following year (this is before people worried about age restrictions, seat belts, smoking while pregnant, general safety, etc.) and were put in the kitchen. I was given jobs to do and started a life long love affair with the place. My dad still volunteers (somehow he got the 30-year volunteer jacket and I didn't?) but he has defected from the kitchen and is now a schlepper. They drive golf carts and look pretty.

When Alex and I were 23, we were asked to take over running the kitchen. At the time, there were about 100 kitchen volunteers and we fed about 1200 people 2 meals/day for 3 1/2 days. Today, there are 3600 volunteers and probably 1500 assorted other people, including performers. This year, our crew has 250 people on it and we will be feeding everyone for seven days. It's a mammoth task.

And, though I ask myself, why in the world did you think this was a good idea?, better than ever before, I know the answer. Three years ago, we were not "hired back" (fired, I do believe) and we had to sit out two festivals. We were given other tasks but truly it was painful. I was so sad I took up running and shed 50 lbs. It was a terrible period of feeling like I didn't control anything and like I didn't know where I belonged. The best part was running. I still love it and I have learned to be somewhat more accepting of the path I find. A smidgen more zen than I once was.

Last year, a new Executive Director landed at the festival and very graciously asked us back. I leapt at the opportunity (Alex did chide me a bit for not at least pretending to think about it for a bit) I have felt completely invigorated by the experience. I am back with my peeps! I love this work more than I can say. Building a kitchen where there was bush, watching cooks become chefs, deciding what song to have the two thousand people lined up for dinner sing for their supper, sharing a glass of wine with an old friend: it is truly magical.

I am currently buried under emails, logistical problems (how to get food to one place from another, how to deal with black pepper sensitivities and vegans with soy allergies, getting people on site when I need them, making sure everyone's ordered their food, do I have enough reefer space?!), personality conflicts (it'll all be FINE, I'm sure), and lost things (I don't even know what those are yet) but I am relishing it. *sigh* I love this time of year.

Now I run to make sure I have my ducks in a row.

3 most common questions

There are three questions I commonly get asked:

Where do you get your hair done? Buck at Hive Hair Co. I've been going to him for 12 years. I am very attached to him and he is very sweet.

Where do you get your jewellery? Predominantly at bijou on Provencher. I also have a fondness for Hilary Druxman. And, I have been known to get stuff at Zellers (yep) and H&M.

Finally, the one I find hardest to answer: How can you work with your husband?

I am stumped by that one. It's complicated.

It has not always been easy. Last year, we went through a business and relationship crisis. Now the thing about a crisis is that it clears away the clutter and your vision becomes laser sharp. We both needed that. It seems to me that you can bumble along living life without being mindful and the whole thing gets muddy. What is important? It was a process and it took about six months to begin to come to a better place and now, a year later, we are on much firmer ground. I think for me the most interesting part is that the crisis confirmed for both of us that we really love working together. In fact, I would be surprised if we ever worked apart again.

Alex and I push each other to be better, stronger, harder working, more creative, more responsible, more capable, and more fun. We can call each other on our shit or we can turn a blind eye. We know how to make something hum. We both love what we do and love it ten times more when we are sharing it. Wild, huh?

Finally, the most important thing for both of us is that we make each other laugh. Even when it's all a mess, we can find a way to laugh! Makes for a pretty great work day.

May I?

Over the course of the past couple of months, there has been a bit of a spotlight shining on to the restaurant worker community. Essentially, a Red River student created a book for a project that asked some local chefs to tell her "uncensored" tales of working in a kitchen. One local chef wound up in a jam about what he spoke about. I'm not interested in getting into that - not my business. However, I do want to talk about behaviour by restaurant workers.

Let me preface this discussion by saying I grew up in a feminist workplace. For ten years, I worked in a unionized, left-wing, feminist, health care facility. Loved it! Loved my co-workers. Loved working in this very safe, highly protected work environment. There were days of dark humour born out of the life and death situations we found ourselves processing but there certainly was always very respectful behaviour amongst staff and clients.

Then I came to work at a restaurant. Wow. I'm not in Kansas anymore. First of all, we are in a tiny workspace. I have to say that the amount of bodily contact in a night would make anyone blush. What can you do? Sometimes you can't get pass another person or reach for a bottle without some inappropriate touching! And, the language! I have become the queen of the f-bomb. I talk like I was raised by sailors! And then there are the jokes and put-downs. Got to have tough skin and be able to laugh at yourself or you'll never survive. I always use to admire that Alex can so easily laugh at himself but now I get it: he grew up in a restaurant. Now, I too have that skill. Essentially, it's a brutal environment: you are hot, tired, and inevitably someone has treated you like something they found on the bottom of their shoe, running for about 10 hours at a go. And, SMILE! (Not every day is like this but every day has at least one of those elements.) Add into all of this, the predominantly 15 year old boy support staff and you have a recipe for some very basic humour.

I have to admit, I was shocked by it all at first. I am now acclimatized.

Here's the interesting thing, tho. The piece that hasn't been talked about in the FreeP or the Guardian. During service, restaurants work on an age-old system of basic respect. Everyone says, "May I?" before speaking to you. Servers run each others' food, bussers hustle to clear tables, cooks make beautiful meals for their co-workers, shifts are covered, cooks call each other 'brother' and when they are in the shit, they mean it. Sometimes people comment on how long we keep staff. And we really do. We've had people with us since the beginning. We're small and started with no money so they haven't been staying for their stellar salaries. The environment at Bistro is very familial. We are there to take care of each other. It is amazing how sweet and kind we can be to each other and to the customers. That's very important to me. But just like siblings on the playground, when we play it can be ugly!

So, yes, restaurants breed rude and inappropriate behaviour in their staff. And, yes, restaurant workers are some of the sweetest, hardest-working, most respectful people I have ever met.

beer

The other day, I had a talk with myself. This is, fortunately or unfortunately, not a rare event. On this particular occasion, I was giving myself a talking to.

Here's the thing: I like to be helpful. I like to have a purpose. I like to aid the project along. And so, when things are jumping at the bistro, I will sidle up to people and offer to get them a drink. Most of the time, this is not a problem. They say, "Sure, I'll have a caesar or a vodka martini extra dry," and I toddle off to create it.

However, sometimes, people say, "Sure, what kind of beer do you have?" Now, at that moment, I panic. Complete despair. 'I don't know' I whine in my head. And then I rattle off a few different beers that I know we carry: Fort Garry Pale, Fort Gary Dark, Stella, and then on into others like Half Pints, Leffe, Heineken. Of course, the person responds with: "Great, I'll have a St. James Half-Pint" And off I go to the beer fridge, muttering a prayer of hope that we actually have the beer that I have suggested we might. More often than not, Murphy's Law kicks in and we don't have the beer they order from me and I have to go back and try again. Including trying really, really hard to memorize what beers we actually DO have.

There are three things: One is I don't drink beer. I really love beer but I cannot drink it as I'm allergic to tyramines which are found in beer. This means that I can't remember the names of the beer beyond a very few specific ones. If I don't drink them, I can't remember their names (a learning style issue, I'm sure.) Second, I don't stock the beer fridge so I have no idea what we have and what we are out of. Third, we are a tiny restaurant and don't have a ton of storage space so if a party of 10 people focus on one beer, they will blow through the two cases we started the night with and I won't necessarily know.

All of this translates into my knowledge of the state of beer at the bistro at any given moment being pretty dismal. And yet, I keep pretending like I know. Hence, the talking to. And the fessing up: I will no longer pretend to know what beer we have even though I feel like a spaced out goof when I say to a customer that I will have to get a server to list them. The price of being honest.

significant moments

There are moments in time that feel significant. Moments where you think to yourself: Well, that's going to change my life. Tonight, I had such a moment.

Five years ago, I had such a moment. I should preface this by saying that I am an intuitive gal (and I believe that this is an important part of people - yeah, I know, it can flaky and weird but it works for me). I rely on my gut, a lot! So, five years ago I was sitting in my tent trailer at my uncle's property near Clear Lake reading the newspaper and I saw a pencil drawing of the building at 725 Osborne St. and I knew that this moment was a biggie. I called Alex on his cell (he was still at work and going to join us later in the week) and said, "I found it." He knew what I meant. He called the landlord and the rest is Bistro 7 1/4 history.

Tonight, I had a moment. I sat in a meeting with two chefs and a friend and thought, "Well, there you go." Many of you know that Alex and I are constantly curious and working on multiple projects at a time but tonight was a meeting with a significant weight.

We'll see what happens but I am excited to be on yet another adventure!