Restaurant Dreams

I’ve always wanted to have a restaurant, but I’m too chicken (well, maybe that should be rephrased since I became a vegetable).

The setting it all up, the headaches, the long hours, the administration, the bankruptcy . . . no thank you. My temperament is just not there for a restaurant. I get rattled making hamburgers for four. Imagine eight different menu choices for 40!

Nah, I’d always be hanging out in the cooler with a martini.

But what would I want if I did have a restaurant? It would be spicy. That would be the theme. But what cuisine? I’d head for Asian. I dunno, but most of the West has no tradition of spicy cuisine, with the possible exception of Mexico and South America, but we want focus here.

So it would be the cooking of Asia, in all its forms, just reinterepreted by me.

There would just be about 6 items on the menu, but those six items would change, possibly weekly, à-la Chez Panisse.

There would always be a vegetarian choice. There would always be a “picky-eater” choice. There would always be leeway where kids could request something totally off the menu, say mac and cheese, that Chef would make on the fly.

We’d take requests. Reminds me of the restaurant on St. Laurent (I’ll get the name) that was empty and I was with my son, but Chef literally took requests, using the pasta rosé sauce meant for, well, pasta, and putting it on rice instead, with spectacular results.

We’d be that sort of restaurant.

And another innovation: cunningly, we’d serve all our dishes on banana leaves whenever possible, which seems impossibly exotic, but saves in Palmolive for the dishwasher.

Environmentally friendly, too!

Question: what would tonight’s menu be? Back to you on that.