Closing the File on Restaurant Recipes
My adventure in collecting restaurant recipes from across America has come to an end. It has been more than a month of driving, eating, walking my dog Ralph, and enough exercising to avoid putting on a lot of weight. Resisting delicious food is difficult enough, and even more so when the goal is to sample food in order to collect restaurant recipes.
I have put on a few pounds, but this spur of the moment idea has been one of the best I have had in years. Not only have I visited areas that I had never even thought about before, but also I have had so many interesting conversations.
My normal restaurant dining experience is quite pleasant, but I generally learn little about the place I am eating in. On this trip I needed to have conversations with the staff in order to obtain some of the restaurant recipes. It surprised me how many of the places I visited started as an idea by one or two people, who worked very hard to make their café or restaurant the success that it was. These people are generally very happy to talk about their trials, their successes, and their plans for the future. Sometimes if the right person wasn't there on the evening I visited, I was invited back to hear the story from someone who knew.
It is important to remember that each place is a business, and so the time for talking is in the late afternoon (if the place is open at that time), or after about 9 PM at night, when the evening crowd has finished and gone. The conversations always started about my trip and plan to collect restaurant recipes, but quickly turned to the history of the restaurant. Truly, each of these places should be looked on as someone's life work, similar to a book, or a major movie, or almost like raising a child.
The original plan was for me to continue driving through Nevada into California, and visit the wonderful valleys on the western side. In my mind I could taste the fresh fruits from the farmers' stands, and the wine samples of the various vineyards. I didn't get past the deserts of New Mexico, but I could probably make a separate collection of restaurant recipes just from the state of California. I could start to experiment with some of the restaurant recipes given in the cookbooks sold in my local bookstore. But those restaurant recipes do not have the host of memories that each one of mine has, and each is worth the trip, several times over.
From memories of gracious servers serving traditional recipes in a historic building of the Old South, to memories of a state trooper helping me change a tire on a deserted desert road. My new collection of restaurant recipes has given me one of my most memorable summers, and one I can revisit each time I make one of the dishes.
