A couple of weeks ago, through the agency of a friend, I ended up spending the evening in a commercial kitchen preparing food. The restaurant was closed for business that night, but had a full kitchen going for the dozen or so people who turned out to try their hands at being chefs. We all cooked various portions of a four or five course meal. That’s me at the left in my chef’s attire chopping scallions for garnish for one of the dishes.
Sad to say, but this wasn’t the first time I’ve ever labored in the back end of a restaurant. Both MD and I are very familiar with those duties. One of the truly bad moves of my financial life was investing in a franchise restaurant years ago. I still don’t know what came over me, but whatever did, it cost me a lot of money. I distinctly remember how it all happened. I was sitting in the kitchen of our house in Little Rock going through the mail and came upon a magazine buried in the pile. I don’t remember now what magazine it was, but it had an article on hot new restaurant concepts. One of the hottest, and one that was taking Dallas by storm, was a Mexican restaurant franchise called ZuZu. ZuZu Handmade Mexican Food, to be exact.
I read the article and inexplicably reached around behind me, picked up the phone and dialed the number to get more info. (A phone call, I might mention, that cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars before it was all over.) The person on the other end – a honcho from ZuZu corporate office in the Rolex Building in Dallas – painted a wonderful picture of restaurant ownership, and before I knew it, MD, our eldest son and I were headed to Dallas to see a ZuZu restaurant in the flesh and try the food.
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