Journalist's holiday

TV shows and movies about restaurants and chefs--Chef; No Reservations; Restaurant Impossible; Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives; Kitchen Nightmares; even a cartoon, Ratatouille--are popular for a reason. Every last restaurant owner and chef is completely out of his or her mind, which is great fun to watch. These lunatics eagerly take on an eighteen-hour-a-day, six- or seven-day-a-week marathon that few can imagine attempting. You've got to admire this. Such passion! Such unbridled creativity! Such inspired madness!

One chef-owner friend, who, with his Indonesian wife,  runs a brilliantly innovative American-Indonesian restaurant (currycreekcafe.com) in Nokomis, Florida, describes the fascination with restaurateury more eloquently than I can:

When people come in, they go—"I want to open a restaurant!  It’d be fun.  I love food!  I got some great dishes." 

I go— "Let me ask you some questions:  Are you willing to be here from 7 in the morning until 10 at night, holidays, six or seven days a week? Are you willing to fill in when the dishwasher goes home because he’s drunk?  Are you willing to smell like garlic and shrimp the rest of your life? Are you willing to make no money and have no social life?  Hey, why not, man!!" 

They don’t invite me to career day at the high school, ‘cause I’m the guy who’s gonna say: DON’T!  Do NOT do this!

This man is obviously a confirmed foodie with a passion for his crazy life. Yet he claims that he can't wait to retire, move to Bali, and chill on the beach full time. He swears he will truly retire then.  I wonder about this. The food business is in his blood. And I've met some restaurateurs here who thought that they, too, would just retire and chill on the beach in Bali.

In a sideline gig as a restaurant profiler for our local paper, I've met many owners. Many have never run a restaurant before, but it's their dream, or their family's dream; they can afford it in Florida; and they blissfully work themselves ragged to make it happen. 

There was the Rhode Island family whose paterfamilias announced one day, out of the blue, "We’re buying a restaurant, and we can all work at it! I’m gonna make a reservation, and we’ll all sit there and see what happens." For a month after their grand opening, there were no customers, but a year later they had risen to the top of the TripAdvisor heap in their town. 

There were the Italian/Argentinian couple who drove past a tiny vacant cafe out on a two-lane highway near their home. She pleaded, "I want it, Robert! I want a restaurant there right now!" To her amazement, the good man said okay, simply because cooking in her own restaurant was her dream. Now the whole family works there, and their tiny Italian bistro, Piccolo, is near the top of TripAdvisor as well, with reservations required during season.

There are, of course, sadder tales, of couples following their dream but tripped up by bad zoning and unscrupulous landlords. For every runaway success there are a dozen heartbreaks.

So, when I come to a new town, even in a new country, I warm to these stories, even though I'm not working toward that weekly newspaper deadline while I'm there. 

Here in Kuta, the owners are, almost without exception, Aussies. The rent and upkeep here are so seductively low that they have almost no choice but to open a bar or restaurant.

Grant has spent much of his working life on or near the sea, first transporting boats, by water and tow, down from Baltimore to the Florida Keys. Now he spends alternate four-month shifts as a cook on an oceangoing ship and as proprietor of one of the top new restaurants in Kuta. He started the restaurant because he became bored with four months off simply chilling on the beach in Bali.

Grant, of Bene Lane Cafe

Only a year old, Bene Lane Cafe occupies a space once barely held down by an owner who was so into magic mushrooms that he insisted the wall paint must remain untouched because it spoke to him. Grant paid no heed. Instead, he transformed the place into a bright, cheery space with a full magazine rack and the best coffee in Bali, set on a quiet side alley removed from the motorbike mania of the rest of town. Unlike the former owner, Grant eschews excessive drink, tattoos, and mushrooms that aren't on burgers. We met him after he had just finished a rare day indulging his other passion--surfing--and was hydrating and becoming reacquainted with ribs that he hadn't recalled he had.

One of his early challenges was making the frivolous TripAdvisor put his restaurant in the right spot on a Google map. When he saw that it had been pinned blocks away, he bickered for some time with them about it, but now contents himself with a map that places him at least in the general area, if a bit farther up the alley. He suspects this happened because the address on his lease is also a bit farther up the alley, rather than where the cafe actually sits. Those mushrooms may have influenced matters after all.

But Grant is not alone. Other Kuta restaurants, such as the equally popular Dog Dragon Grill, run by Yorkshiremen "D" and Steve, have taken to printing intricate little maps on their business cards, as well as using them as Facebook page backgrounds, to ensure that customers can find them despite the vagaries of TripAdvisor and Google Maps for Kuta.

Bar manager David in Hua Hin (The Travelers: Irishman walks into a Thai bar), whose chef has a regular habit of quitting and then mending fences again, says there are always issues. In the short time we spent with Grant, for example, he generously released a key employee for the holiday of Galungan and continually fiddled with an uncooperative ceiling fan--much like Paul Werner's ongoing battle with a temperamental surveillance camera.

You may remember Paul and Daniel, co-owners of The Pad Bar & Grill, from the previous post, The Travelers: The Aussies of Kuta. They, too, have issues. To increase seating capacity, they recently ordered several more ponderous wooden tables and chairs. The furniture arrived raw and unfinished, and had to be hauled to the second floor for the work to be completed, then carried back down again. I hear that there is also an Indonesian mob to contend with and slide rupiah to. Perhaps David in Hua Hin has the same issue with Thai baht, but he didn't mention it.

We are at The Pad so often, and so willing to chat, that Paul often plops down next to us. Not only does he chat; he also cares so deeply when one of us looks a bit peckish that he will diagnose and recommend such cure-alls as charcoal tablets. That he also does so with many other customers is what will surely make his place a success. Of course, I don't know if he also dashes off down the street to purchase charcoal tablets for them, as he did for us. I hear that he calls us "that lovely American couple," so perhaps we're special. On the other hand, there aren't that many Americans around here.

Paul's bartender Aris is an asset for many reasons: he arranges tours, speaks excellent English, and can
perform this astonishing trick that one oughtn't to try at home. 

Paul's staff tipped us off to a shortcut from the back door of The Pad almost directly
to our hotel--bypassing a particularly hazardous and busy corner. During the day, the shortcut is lovely.

It even features a picturesque trash heap that sometimes smoulders harmlessly.

But at night, my hand tends to shake a bit as we traverse it in the dark.