The Communal Table Talks
You're invited to join my two brilliant friends and me for a conversation about how to evolve restaurants.
Happy New Year!
First, please accept my apology for the rather long hiatus for this newsletter.
A few days after I sent out the last one, my cooking website, Cooks Without Borders, was accepted into a fabulous start-up incubator, AccelerateHER. It’s a joint project from Texas Woman’s University’s Center for Women Entrepreneurs and Stoke Denton. With the help and support of the pilot project, its leaders, mentors and the five incredible founders who are my peers in the program, I’ve been working assiduously to develop CWB from a passion project into a business. The program wraps up late next month.
I’ll have big news about Cooks Without Borders in the coming days. Meanwhile, if you haven’t taken a look at the site lately, and you enjoy cooking and eating, I invite you to take a spin and see what we’ve been up to. For instance, last month I interviewed Dana Cowin, the longtime editor-in-chief of Food & Wine magazine.
We had two cooking stories shatter our traffic records last month: One about moussaka — a spectacular dish with a curious history (and a killer new recipe) — and one about a quick and easy cardamom-pumpkin spice bread.
When I say “we,” that’s because I now have a partner in the project — Juliet Jacobson, an award-winning, Yale-educated web designer who’s co-founder of Digital Gizmo. Together we have refined Cooks Without Borders’ mission, and we’re working on expanding our offerings and features. Our readership has exploded this year; we’ve grown our monthly readership by more than 1,000% since last January, far exceeding our goal.
If you’d like to receive Cooks Without Borders recipes, stories and news (including our big news!) directly to your inbox, please sign up for our free CWB newsletter (and please pass this along to friends who love to cook).
The Communal Table Talks
My deep focus on Cooks Without Borders doesn’t mean I’ve been forgetting about restaurants; on the contrary, I have been honored to continue consulting with valued clients through Q4 2020, as well as doing some rewarding (and enjoyable!) pro-bono marketing work for a number of North Texas restaurants and other food & beverage businesses and nonprofits. I have just joined the advisory board of one of them, Promise of Peace Gardens.
I’ve also been working on a project I’m hoping many of you will want to be part of.
Five months ago, I thought it would be worthwhile to talk and think about the future of restaurants with the most interesting, creative and thoughtful thinker-doers I could conjure. An architect and a chef would be ideal. I reached for the sky, and the first two I approached — CarloMaria Ciampoli and Bradford Thompson — said yes. A restaurant-evolution dream team!
Bradford is a James Beard Award-winning chef in New York City who founded a highly successful consultancy more than a decade ago, Bellyful Hospitality. I first met him in 1999, when he was Executive Sous Chef at Daniel, where I spent a year researching a book. Bradford won the Beard Award for Best Chef Southwest when he was at Mary Elaine’s at the Phoenecian resort in Arizona in 2006 (he had been honored as one of Food & Wine’s Best New Chefs two years earlier), then went on to be executive chef at Lever House in NYC, an instructor at the French Culinary Institute and National Spokesperson for Share our Strength.
Carlo, originally trained as an architect, is brilliant, design-thinking generalist adept at thinking across a spectrum of design disciplines, scales and geographies to create places that inspire people to connect with their surroundings. Based in Boulder, Colorado, he has worked on projects from Hong Kong to Mexico City and has lectured at the New York Center for Architecture, at industry events and at Universities in the US, Europe, and Asia.
Since mid July, the three of us have been meeting for video chats each week to talk about and imagine the possibilities for the ways people coming together to enjoy food might evolve or could evolve. (Or if you’re in Texas, where I live, might could evolve!)
Beginning later this month, we’d love to have you join us, as we continue to explore the subject, in a series of free-flowing 30-minute live video conversations: The Communal Table Talks. At some point during these talks, we’ll share with you our prototype design for an evolved restaurant.
The first talk — The Human(e) Factor: Moving Beyond Clean Surfaces to Evolve Restaurants — will be on Wednesday, January 27. In it, Bradford, Carlo and I will host a conversation about how restaurants can express community, whom restaurants are for, and how they can work better for the people who run them, work in them and own them.
Please be part of it!
Reserve your spot here and get a link to the event.
Until then, I wish you a happy 2021, filled with progress, good health, soul-enriching community, deliciousness, joy and prosperity.
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Your moussaka recipe was amazing. Served it to our only company during these crazy times and everyone was impressed. Although it was my first time, a well-travelled guest said it tasted just like he had in Greece. Thank you!!!