Michael’s assertion is that with a few twenties crumpled up in your pocket and a genuine interest, you can transform a local hangout into your very own yacht. By getting to know the staff on a personal level, tipping a little extra, and showing some care, you can forge your own yacht on dry land.

We have a regular that we’ll call Nicole who owns Pasadena Wine Shop. Nicole turns up for dinner with beers for the kitchen. She brings epic wines that I might see only once in my life, and she pours it for everyone. Do you think Nicole will ever have trouble getting a table? I don’t know if she tips or even pays, honestly. Betsy is her yacht. She gets Gin palace privileges because she opted into something unspoken. Nicole doesn’t work for us and we don’t work for her—we’re in a relationship.

This might sound hyperbolic, but we’re in a pivotal moment with the broader restaurant-guest relationship. It’s no secret that restaurant workers face a lot of abuse. Wearing face shields and masks during the pandemic caused us to slide deeper into the submissive position of “the help.” One of the best decisions we made back at All Time was to wait until we could all see each others’ faces to reopen for in-person dining. I will always protect our crew from becoming the help with everything I have.

Why? Because this is a relationship. We’re equal partners in your dining experience, though like any healthy relationship, sometimes it’s more like 90/10. We love to pick you up when you’re down, but often, you do the same for us. Kind words, a genuine interest in our lives, these things mean more to us than most restaurant guests realize. The only thing we want is to show you a great time, but the relationship is better when you opt in. We thrive on turning a frustrating 20 minute wait for your reservation into a memorable night. We’ll do the lifting—physically, emotionally, spiritually—we just need you to meet us anywhere on the path and say yes.

We enjoy a nice culture at Betsy because we operate as a family. We’re actually not even running a restaurant. We’re throwing a dinner party every night of the week.
Our little restaurant has had a lot of great press recently and it’s been mad humbling. In an unusual twist, I believe it’s deserved. I’ve never had the privilege of working with so many people who care so deeply about what we do and who conduct themselves with such integrity.

We cook 2000 plates of food every week, and there will be one or two mistakes that sneak through, but all we want is to make it right. We don’t use scripts or standardized language or anything corny. We’re just humans doing our very best and sometimes we need a little grace (and an opportunity to correct that errant error).

Getting back to yachts, the relationships we’ve forged with our guests give us ideal opportunities to earn said grace, with trust flowing in both directions. (Some of our greatest relationships with guests who are now friends started a little rocky.)

There’s a lot of talk about how hard it is to run restaurants or what a terrible business it is. I don’t buy it. All businesses are hard. Please drop me a note if you’re in a super easy business that feeds your soul while you’re making money hand over fist. Running a restaurant is deeply satisfying for all of us at Betsy because we’ve built a yacht-worthy culture that we’ll do just about anything to protect from hostility and bad vibes, internally and externally.

Our company handbook is one page and it reads “no dickheads.” You can’t shop here, work here, or sell us anything if you are, in fact, a dickhead.

We’re in a privileged position that we take our no dickheads rule very seriously. We have some say in who dines here—of who the guests at our dinner are. I will change your car tire on the side of the 101 or help you load drywall at Lowe’s, even though we’ve never met. I try my best to live a generous life, but kindness can be easily taken advantage of.

Too many times I’ve seen our team deflated by something outside of our control or fully solvable, had a guest been willing to opt in to humanity. If you’re reading this and think “yeah but that’s your job,” this letter is for you. Comment “have it your way” and I’ll send you a Subway gift certificate.

We have 40 seats at Betsy plus a few outside. Yesterday alone, 35 people canceled reservations. Things come up, I get it. However, we staff this restaurant based on certain expectations, agreements you might say. Our party guests have RSVP’d for one of the limited seats at said party, and we’ve made physical and emotional preparations to welcome you.

So, for the first time in my career, we’re adding a few guardrails to the experience of dining with us. These aren’t draconian mandates. We’re not introducing hard out times for your reservation or opening with lectures about how to order. We’re just asking that guests offer up a small ante for the sake of the entire dinner party: a fee for no shows or last minute cancellations. We’re also going to take a firmer stance on showing up with extra people and requests to combine reservations into larger parties. These are a few things that make it very difficult to sustain our half of this wondrous relationship with all of you. Our relationship means the world to us, so we’re looking to solve for them before they become an issue. I’ve seen too many examples of passive-aggressive hospitality to let that shit fly here.

We’ll go to the ends of the earth to make your night meaningful, but we won’t be abused or taken advantage of individually or as a business. We’re here because we fucking love it, and the only way we can keep loving it is with a little buy in from those who want to love it, too. We can’t all be Nicole from Pasadena Wine Shop, but to anyone interested in forging a mutually beneficial long-term relationship, I say “welcome aboard.”

If you’ve been following along, you already know that Betsy s is like a diamond, in that we’ve pressurized about a decade’s worth of activity into nine delirious months. I often talk about experiences being neither good nor bad. Each and every thing— from catastrophic wildfires to business and marital separation to an attempt at fleeing LA—has led me to this exact moment in time. Many chapters have closed. We might even be at the end of a volume with a new book just beginning.

I’ve never felt more clear on a path and, at 47, more certain of what to spend my life doing. Sitting at the center of the aforementioned whirlwind, I find myself completely at peace, never happier and deeply in love with life and what I’ve chosen to spend it doing.

With a new life resuming in Altadena, last Saturday night I closed a chapter (but certainly not the book) at The Ecology Center. Every September, a veritable who’s who of cooks, chefs, volunteers, friends, neighbors, and supporters turn out for the biggest annual farm dinner and fundraiser for a place I care so deeply for.

This was my first time at the helm, and while I was billed as the chef, this was the purest expression of a culinary barn raising there ever has been. A dozen professionals, each more talented than me in their respective disciplines, volunteered to come and clean green beans, butcher fish, scrub carrots, and pull together a magical dinner for 200 people on a perfect evening.

I’ve been an evangelist for the farm since the first time I set foot there and as I finish my tenure, I leave humbled and profoundly changed. I’ve said it before and it bears repeating, the farm caught me when I was falling. I arrived in the mud season, to constant rain and mud caked on everything. My little trailer was a damp haven that did its best to keep me warm during some dark days and nights. Farming, as with life, moves at a pace you can’t control, only surrender to. I tried to remember that during those lonely nights with the coyotes.

Inevitably, spring started to arrive in earnest and the days were a little longer. Almost overnight the farm was overflowing with all kinds of beauty—smells, animals, produce, volunteers. Things started feeling a little better with a little village of friends and co-workers.

About that time I realized that I could never do the work there alone so I reached out to a few folks from the then closed Altadena restaurant. Everyone was treading water with the idea that we’d open again. I was 1000% sure that it would never happen and wanted to do everything I could for that team. Fully braced to be rejected, I called Joey and Tom and asked if they wanted to spend the summer on an impossibly beautiful farm a mile from the ocean. I didn’t exactly mention the 14 hour days or herculean mission I signed us up for, but they know me so I’m sure it was understood.

To my surprise and tremendous relief, they said yes. Or more accurately “Fuck yeah i’m packing right now,” and “Ok yeah, I think so. Probably”

And so began the most free summer of adult life. We worked our asses off wrestling a restaurant on a farm into something we really wanted it to be. We all felt so young and righteous and to the credit of Evan and the entire farm enterprise, we had the keys execute on our vision. It’s not that we had a personal agenda, we felt compelled to do right by the farm and the farmers and truly amplify the incredible work that goes on in the field.

Truth be told, we may have gotten a little carried away, but that’s what it means to pretend you’re young.

A few weeks ago we packed up and came home to open Betsy. I’m not always great at endings and the work to do at the Ecology Center is endlessly dynamic. I’m proud and grateful that a team has succeeded us to try and find the balance that we were looking for over the summer. Saturday night was an opportunity to finish this part of the story on a high note and leave the door open for whatever the flow of life offers in the future.

I could never fully express my gratitude to Evan and The Ecology Center for finding me when I needed it most and not just nursing me back to health, but providing the place, time, and context for me to become the man I want to be. Again, words can’t hold the gratitude I’m feeling, but thank you all the same.

Also, I am a hippie now. I fought it for years and I must accept my fate. Peace.

I’m always going on about how it’s the accumulation of random skills that add up to a singular professional value. These trips were the exemplification of this principle. I’d stress like hell preparing four days worth of meals that could fit in two coolers, but on any given trip, “chef” was a flexible moniker.

In another life, I graduated from an automotive college, and would invariably be asked to perform some impossible repair to a vehicle or bike. I’d be trimming vegetables with a knife and, hours later, paring away downed trees from the path with a chainsaw or axe. We might need to cook up a quick shelter from early summer high Sierra storms for 15 people. I might even get to reset a dislocated shoulder or triage a broken femur. Although I loved the absolute hell out of it, I hope I’ll never work that hard again.

What continues to make Wilderness great is that they are a hospitality company that rides motorcycles. The experience comes first, and it’s never linear, and that crew is another world class improv troupe. “No” was not in the vocabulary and we were always clearing new pathways for being creative with hospitality.

Among the few simple guiding principles that informed our every decision, one has stayed with me for the better part of a decade: If you’re feeling it, they’re feeling it.

The first time I heard it, I only thought about bathroom breaks and how a feeling of nuisance trickles down through a hospitality experience.

There’s a simplicity to it: this new grill cook is kind of a dick — as the captain of my little pirate ship, if I’m feeling it, you bet your ass the rest of the crew is. That means it’s an absolute fucking emergency that Karl gets the fuck out of the building even if service, payroll, and me and Paul have to suffer a little bit.

There’s also nuance to feeling it. We spend more than anyone would believe on things that most restaurants think either don’t matter or that no one will notice. We use local olive oil, not the industry standard blended canola oil. We buy almonds from a guy who fucking loves almonds rather than purchasing commodity organic nuts. We buy Kosher salt from companies that don’t own slaves. Please hold while I climb off my high horse…

You could argue that people don’t actually taste or notice those differences but god damn if I don’t feel it in my soul when a corner is cut for profitability. And occasionally but frequently enough, someone will tell me that they like my restaurant because they always feel good after eating here. They’re feeling it, even if “it” is the culmination of hundreds of things that don’t make financial or logistical sense. That’s our superpower. We listen to the feelings. To quote another famous Tyler, “Felt like dirty dishes 'cause we was in sync.'"*

I love a slow burn idea like this. Over the last years, if you’re feeling it, they’re feeling it has become such an accurate barometer for so many things, professionally and personally.

It’s the reason we’ve fast tracked opening up Betsy in Altadena. The entire crew from the last rendition is feeling it. So I’m fucking feeling it. And if we’re feeling it, you’re feeling it. And it feels real good.

Right now, I’m putting a wine list together for the opening of Betsy with some very smart friends who’ve forgotten more about wine than I could ever know. If you ever perused the wine list at my former restaurant that I’ll not name so my god damn lawyer doesn’t call me again, I’m sincerely sorry. I wasn’t feeling that list and I never met a person who was. The Betsy list is only wines that we’re feeling. No head tilters or this-could-work-during-a-waxing-blood-moon-if-Jupiter-is-in-Uranus. Just a reasonably priced list of delicious, well-made wines from people who care.

It seems I’m also getting back into the coffee business. (Back on my horse for a moment here, hold my wine). I’m having a hard time finding the coffee experience I want to have as a guest. There are a lot of great spots out there, but nothing that feels like what I’d like to be feeling. Every business I’ve ever opened was a direct result of looking for something I can’t find. There’s a place in my mind that does what I’m after. I’m feeling it, and I hope and trust that when the time comes, they’ll be feeling it too.

*the creator

Bernee was open for 31 nights. It was the thing in the world I’m most proud of. The restaurant is still standing but Bernee is not.

It’s been almost 8 months. It turns out that Los Angeles is my home. I love it here. Altadena is my home. I’ve loved these mountains since the first time I set foot in them. How is this possible against the city of Los Angeles. The fight or flight response to the greatest trauma of life that sent me fleeing has given way to the strongest instinct to fight of my life. I can’t give up on our town. I won’t wait until someone else does all the lifting, physical and emotional, and then show up to re-open my restaurant. I have a limited skillset but I’m god damn good at the few I have. I want to be one of the many lighthouses in our community - Miya, Prime Pizza, Bulgarini, Good Neighbor. As we all put the pieces of our lives back together things aren’t going to be normal. What the fuck is normal now? It’s gone for a while at worst and fleeting at best.

I was hoping to re-open in October or November. It’s a scary idea. This is a fancy restaurant in a town that’s mostly gone. Construction crews and the heroes cleaning lots don’t want to knock off a 10 hour day and tuck in to some grand cru Burgundy. But I can feel the energy. Our team has remained steadfast - “We’re here. We’re ready”. Neighbors reach out and ask if or when. I think it’s time. We’re putting this opening on the fast track and we’re going to do it how we do everything… With the best goddam team ever assembled and relying on instinct and improv skills. It’s going to be raw and honest and rowdy and a time to remember. We probably still have our stride. After all, we trained for a whole month.

Before we open on a date that is somewhere likely the last day or so of August, we’re hosting few dinners in our new home, Betsy. My mother never got to see me achieve much, although I know she believed in me and I’ll do my best to honor her with this restaurant.

On a random assortment of Sundays (that I’ll publish on our newsletter because I’m behind on Resy etc) we’ll host about 100 people for dinner. There’s no charge for dinner and we only ask that you donate what you can afford to help keep the greatest team I’ve ever known afloat until we can reopen permanently. We’re all struggling and if you can’t afford a fancy dinner, please don’t let that stop you. This is bigger than money right now and we’re all just doing what we can to get through. We want to give back what we can to the community who gave us so much and lost so much.

Bookings will be available through Resy eventually but in the meantime sign up for the newsletter.

When I was 12, my dad taught me to drive in a 1979 VW Rabbit Diesel with a 4-speed manual transmission. We were on a dirt road back near a so-called “holler” in West Virginia. After he explained to me the various levers, velocitators, and decelerators in a car of that pedigree, he told me what was actually important about driving:

“Drive for your passenger’s comfort.”

It didn’t mean much to me at that moment—as our focus may have been on survival first, passenger comfort second—but, over the years, my father’s advice has seeped into almost every aspect of my professional life.

It turned up when I was working as a mechanic at an Audi dealer right after high school, where I realized that I loved the idea that someone brings you something broken and you fix it and give it back. A few years later, I went to culinary school because I wanted to own a restaurant—a vision that had very little to do with food, and everything to do with the experience and ambiance of dining there.

The next step was, naturally, a job as a bike messenger (we’ll get to coffee in a minute, I promise). I had no goals or ambitions within the industry when I started—I just wanted to ride my bike, deliver stuff, and look cool. I quickly realized, however, that when you deliver a package to someone who needs it, or you make a filing at the courthouse that seemed impossible, or you take a moment to chat with a bored receptionist, it makes people happy.

After starting and then selling my own bike messenger company, I knocked about in real estate and construction, which left me feeling unsatisfied and dejected. While talking to a friend with a little cafe, he shared some woes about a manager leaving and good help being hard to find, so I offered my services.

My first order of business was to learn about coffee. This was about 10 years ago, a time when really fuzzy, generally wrong information was passed down from snooty barista to snooty barista. It was evident pretty quickly that no one really knew where to start. I decided that if I was going to run a coffee shop, we were going to the best job possible.

It turned out that, after years of seemingly random occupations, I had found what I wanted to do. I wanted to open the best coffee company in the world, one that served the best cup of coffee anywhere as part of an unparalleled experience. That ambition and desire became Handsome Coffee Roasters, a roasting facility and coffee shop in downtown Los Angeles that made quite a name for itself before I left the company and it was sold to a larger coffee roaster.

Now—after sipping the rarefied air of coffee super stardom—I’m back to square one. A few weeks ago, when I opened a new espresso bar, Blacktop, I really had just one thing on my mind: something European, where people can stop in and have a drink—a little two-minute bright spot in their day—and go on to whatever’s next. In other words, I wanted to create a perfect, single-serving customer experience. So far, it seems to be working out.

So, without further distraction, here are five lessons in customer experience coffee has taught me:

1. Without Customers, there is No Customer Service

It’s easy to forget that we’re ultimately making a product—in this case, coffee—for someone. It’s easy to think this process is so important in-and-of-itself that the customers will line up for it. I’ve actually worked at that place. There’s a very fine line between our precious customers trusting the experts (us), and feeling like they’re being lectured on their life choices … for $6 a cup.

2. The Experience is Most of the Product

At this point in the trajectory of coffee, you don’t have to look very hard to find really great coffee. I prefer to feel welcome and appreciated in a comfortable space … and by the way, I’ll have some coffee. I can think of only two businesses that I’ll patronize despite a difficult space and questionable experience: Bulgarini Gelato, which seems to employ a never ending stream of that squeaky-voiced kid from The Simpsons, and those bastards at Time Warner—they really have me by the balls. Beyond that, I’ll take a great time and pretty good food/drink/sensual massage over a great product served by assholes.

3. Meet People Where they Are

Allow them to opt in to your Android’s Dungeon of craft. I know you’re really excited about malolactic fermentation on this esoteric wine, but I’m just a guy who wants something good. Let’s keep it relevant to our customer base. How about you do all the hard nerd-related work so I can enjoy the benefits? And if I ask to join your nuanced world of small-batch dorkery, please welcome me with open arms.

4. Your Customers Will Be as Great or Awful as You Permit

I’m a big believer in setting some expectations in both directions. If you allow customers carte blanche to walk all over your business, they will. I’m living this as I type, though I’m not sure the Soup Nazi approach is any more effective. It’s nice to have some guardrails: “This is what we do here, and we’ll make reasonable efforts to accommodate you, but if we sell hamburgers and you want soup, maybe this isn’t the right fit.”

This was an amazing revelation at Handsome. We inadvertently weeded out the customers that didn’t get it and were rewarded with the greatest customers on the planet. JR Crosby of Ptarmak once told me, “You have to polarize to galvanize.” I’ve always liked the idea of getting a strong reaction from people. Everything to everyone is a very confusing mixed message.

5. Have a Purpose

Know who you want to please and please the hell out of them. Haters are predisposed to hating, as they say.

All the haters in the world can’t take away how good it feels to delight someone who gets you.

It was this obsession with becoming a coffee celebutante that led me to improv, by way of the World Barista Championship. Forgive me for what you’re about to learn, but this is a real event where baristas present three drinks each to a panel of four judges. The competing baristas have chosen a coffee and worked with it for months ahead of time, learning each nuance and manipulating roast profiles and brew ratios to arrive at exactly what they’d like it to taste like. I’m realizing now how much this sounds like group sketch fodder. Using a headset in front of a crowd, each barista narrates the experience, talking at length about the coffee, the farmer who grew it, the tasting notes, the story of how it came to be. Judging is based on quality and taste, accuracy of the tasting notes, technical prowess, and—in my day—vintage-ness of suspenders.

Now you can’t just turn up at the World Barista Competition. There were regional qualifying events where the top few baristas were invited to the national competition, where it got a little real. The event was in a bigger venue and held in conjunction with the National Specialty Coffee trade show. It was a place where coffee pros from across the country and beyond would gather. Each competing country has its own version of this competition and only if you are crowned national champion do you get to move on and compete in the world championship.
I was fine at making coffee and getting better every day. The showmanship was what I wanted to master. I’ve always been outgoing enough and comfortable in front of people but this was different. This was performative and I wanted to don the headset and captivate my audience. So naturally I signed up for classes at Chris and Tammie’s 12th Street Improv Theatre and soul food kitchen.

The very first thing I learned is that improv is all about learning to be comfortable being uncomfortable. Making performance art with strangers on a stage with no script and no plan is hard.

That was the beginning of a journey that took me around the world, planted me in the middle of the greatest community of now lifelong friends that anyone could dream of, and got my name in the paper a few times. Imagine my life if I had won instead of placing 13th in the US.

The point is not that I’m an international coffee sensation, true as it may be. Those 4 weekends with Chris and Tammie (I don’t think Chris ever showed up) set in motion something that I could only articulate recently.

The entire premise of improv is “Yes and.” The job of each member is to build on the previous action and shape the story in the right direction. The instant someone says “no,” it’s over. The momentum is lost, the fun is gone, the show has ended.

I’ve done a lot of things since then. Owned some coffee companies, consulted all over the globe for coffee brands, helped open loads of restaurants and cafes, and these days find myself monogamously in love with the restaurant business. While my restaurant is closed as a result of the fires in Altadena, I’ve had some time to pursue some passions related to cooking and agriculture.

A few weeks back I cooked a dinner on a farm where I’ve been staying after the fires. It’s a magical place and I’m humbled to have my feet in the dirt there at all, let alone every day.

I wanted to bring our team from my currently closed restaurant Altadena back together, try to raise a little money for them, and tell our story with an evening of food.

The entire team from the restaurant couldn’t say yes fast enough. The story from that night is another book, although the lesson that crystallized is the most important thing I’ve learned about how I do what I do. Articulating that in a meaningful, understandable way has changed my life and restaurants beyond anything else I have done.

Normally our capacity for these farm dinners is about 80 people. I wanted a party. We capped the tickets at 100 and I continued inviting people in typical me fashion. I didn’t remember who I invited and had no idea how many would turn up.

If you’re planning a wedding, this could be a problem. The Poindexters who treat dinner on a farm like the Oscars were worried. The people who aren’t good at this were worried. But I had my crew. We weren’t worried. We were in a karate stance.

That team that night, and every night, put on a masterclass in hospitality as improv. We set the dining room for 120 people. We staged tables just out of sight to drag over and set up as each party beyond that arrived. We prepped enough food for 150. We burned the seating chart and shepherded people through a beautiful experience of moving down a seat to make room, thereby creating a community feeling of everyone welcoming everyone.

It was the greatest day of my life. The best dinner I’ve ever been a part of. It was a perfect show. And it will never happen that way again because it shouldn’t.

If you aren’t good at what you do yet, it’s not time for improv. Stick to your lines. Improv is learned only once it’s earned. It’s why working for free at NOMA for two weeks doesn’t give you license to open a locally foraged fermentation restaurant. It’s a note in a song, but not the album.