Publication Rights. Search OAC. What is OAC? Collection Title:. Goldstein Joyce Papers on California Cuisine. View entire collection guide. PDF Entire Collection Guide. Online Items. Collection Details. November 18, — 4 mins read.
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We will have a guide for a few days so that all the art history that I have forgotten will be told to Adam by our guide. Then one day we are going on a street food crawl with Istanbul Eats. We will be dining at Ciya twice, thank goodness, as chef Musa is an inspiration. Alway a show stopper. Our dinner reservations have been arranged by Cenk Sonmenzsoy Cenk is a talented food blogger based in Istanbul His site is www.
I mean how can I claim to have a blog if I am not blogging. It is that I have been writing, full time. That big manuscript that I handed in was too big, too unwieldy and in need of editing and reorganizatiion. So back to the writing desk After 6 months of working with a special editor, the manuscript is now, finally, with my editor at UC Press for the next go around. After a bit more work. Hopefully for some words of praise too.
If all goes as planned, the book will be out in a year. That is right. A year. It is like giving birth to a whale. As you know, I have written 26 cookbooks BUT writing a history for an academic press is a whole other ballgame. I have learned a great deal in the process. And I hope that after all this very heard brain breaking work, we will all think this has been worth it. So I apoligize for my seeming silence. I have not really been silent but these days it is books before blogs.
I wrote this piece for the Sommelier Journal. A Grown up Restaurant and a Restaurant for Grownups. About a month ago I went with friends to a hot new restaurant. It opened to great press and good word of mouth on the blogosphere. The place is in a rather off the beaten track neighborhood and run by a young and energetic staff. After reading all those glowing reviews, we were looking forward to our dinner. I arrived five minutes early and they would not seat me until my party was complete, which is sort of inhospitable.
The bar was full so I waited in the doorway. The room was a bit noisy but it was not impossible to hear ourselves talk during dinner. Service was very casual. Although the pizza was a bit flabby, the pastas and salads were excellent. We enjoyed our dinner and said we would return. A month later a dear mutual friend came to town. He is hard of hearing, so for ease of conversation, I cooked dinner the first night of his visit. The second night we decided to take him to this restaurant as our meal had been very tasty and he is a discerning diner and very good cook.
We remembered the place as being a bit noisy but as we had been able to converse, we figured that the good food would outweigh some hearing difficulties. Besides it is almost impossible to find a really quiet place these days. We were seated when only two of the four of us were there, some progress on that front. The restaurant is very dimly lit and the menu is printed on brown paper in a small font. The room was even noisier than the first time because the music was blasting.
Not just loud, ear splitting loud. We asked our waiter if they could please turn it down a bit as our guest was hard of hearing. He said, no, that the sound level was set by a manager. Fortunately a manager stopped by our table to say hello. She had waited on our table the first time and at a cook book signing event where I was a panelist, introduced herself to me as a manager and said to call her if I needed to get in. So I asked her to please lower the music. She did, but ten minutes later the staff had cranked it up to the maximum.
It felt like a pretty hostile response. So we got the message. You older folks are not really welcome here. This place is just not for you and we will not go out of our way to make it comfortable or easy for you.
They want us to lower our hip music. And they even want us to pour their wine. Hey, no great loss. In other words it is not a grown up restaurant, nor is it a restaurant for grownups. However, the restaurant staff is misguided. Many older people dine out often and have more disposable income than twenty somethings. Even more important, once older diners bond with a place, they are very loyal, and will show up with regularity as long as they are recognized and treated with some modicum of manners and warmth.
These mature diners do not feel the need to try every hot new place in town. They find a place they like and keep coming back. So if they are treated with disdain, they will not return. What this new establishment does not realize is that they will not always be the brightest star in the local restaurant firmament.
After a year or so, when the next round of hot new places opens, and the fickle food groupies move on, the staff may be sorry they did not build a more mature and experienced clientele. Those loyal diners would still be filling the seats if they had not been treated like excess baggage. I have been silent here for too long but have been buried in my book project.
It is a history of California cuisine for the University of California Press, due to be published in Spring of It has taken me a long time to complete this project as it was massive. The interviews had to be transcribed and then I had to organize all of the material into the proper chapters. Now the manuscript is with my editors who will probably have to do some cutting as it is too long.
But I did not want to leave any major gaps in this complicated story. I pray that they do not shrink it too much. So I hope to have more time to keep up with this blog. Enjoy the summer produce. This weekend I am putting up preserves with ym grandkids. What fun! The Power of Change. Joyce is the author of many cookbooks. Mediterranean Cooking and Soup for Supper.
Savoring Spain and Portugal will be published in , also for Williams Sonoma.
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