Always, never

When I was a young cook, I went to Johnson and Wales University for my culinary education. There my favorite chef, Chef Hensley, used to use the word “Always” as his motto. I adopted it, and used my dremel to carve ALWAYS into the side of my knife to rememer to always follow his tenets of doing things the right way, every time.

One of the habits important to Chef Hensley was taking notes. I’ve said it myself to cooks for years, but have been pretty bad about following this advice personally. At times I’ll make a marathon of dozens of pages and then not take down one single note for months or years. I’ve tried to discipline myself to take pen to paper in some manner to make sure to maybe remember something from all the successes and failures I’ve had at the stove. I don’t need notes to know that there have been many more failures than successes, and it sometimes takes a billion-zillion attempts for something to work, and those missing notes would make finding the pattern a wee bit easier.

I came across one of my attempts at journaling while cleaning out my bedroom the other day. It had lodged itself between some boxes shoved under my bed. My grandmother was actively dying this week, finally succumbing on Wednesday early morning, and I was keeping myself occupied in order to not think about the impending devestation of a world with no Nana. The journal was a fairly impressive effort for me…I think it went on for nearly three weeks! In it I mostly talked about things I needed to do to get organized, which made me realize I’ve been saying the same damn things for a while now with little changes to my habits. Oh well.

At the same time, I somehow managed to write and publish a cookbook during COVID, kept a restaurant open while opening another restaurant, all while becoming a first time father in the last year. It’s definitely not perfect organization and attentive note taking that kept us going, but rather a sort of dimwitted sticktoitiveness that doesn’t know when to quit.

So now I say “Always, Never.” To me, it’s an acceptance of the way I do things and the path I take to get there. At this point, I’m probably not going to radically change my habits. I won’t always take perfect notes and there are probably hundreds of dishes and techniques that have been fogotten at this point. This blog is going to be my final attempt and making a record. I imagine it will be a messy repository of all things Astera-related. I’ll write my opinions on the state of the business, maybe explore some methods, talk about events we’ll be doing, or give my thoughts on culture and the hospitality business. Let’s see how long I can keep it up.

-Chef Aaron