Carnivale

Part 3... A new beginning.

Carnivale will always hold a special place in my heart. Even though it was an enormous source of stress and frustration at times. It seems so long ago, the world seems much different to me now. I had such a chip on my shoulder, I wanted to prove I had what it takes to be a great chef, it seemed so very important. It was about me and what I wanted, and how I was going to get there, I was driven. I had ignored many aspects of my life in the constant pursuit of culinary knowledge. When we opened Carnivale I was so buried in my job very little else mattered to me. I used to tell people I wanted to be a chef more than other people wanted to breathe, and that was true at the time. And then, and then something happened.

The general manager one day during lunch told us he had just interviewed a woman, for the assistant manager position, and how impressed he was with her, he thought she would be a great addition to the team. But, he said, she had the crazy idea of opening her own restaurant someday, we all laughed, not at her idea, just at the thought of willingly putting yourself through so much pain. By this time I wasn’t 100% on the idea of owning my own restaurant, I just didn’t know how I would do it. It also became very real to me that owning your own business is not really a recipe for a normal life of any kind. Part of me really wanted to but the other part of me was terrified, and unclear on what to do to make that happen. I also was so focused on Carnivale that my own place seemed like it would be a long way off.

You know in the movies when the main character sees a woman walk in the room and everything starts to move in slow motion? The screen gets a bit fuzzy, maybe some music starts playing, you know the clichè right? Well the first time I saw Elizabeth walk into a bar, it felt like that for me. We had decided to go for beers after work, and she was going to join us, and I had just walked to the bar to get a beer when she walked in. I immediately nudged one of the other managers and asked who she was. That’s Liz, she’s going to be another manager. You met her before right? No, I said, I definitely would have remembered that. I had all these feelings, feelings that made me feel weird inside, the minute I saw her. I had had a few girlfriends, but nothing serious. I found women thought it was really cool to date a chef until you tell them that basically, you work every weekend, and then that initial novelty wears off. Or that you’d rather not cook at home because you just did that for 12 hours and would rather order a pizza or eat a microwave burrito, then they come to understand the horrors of the restaurant business and run away as fast as they can. Your only option is to date someone also in the business who gets it, but that has its own set of issues.

As we prepared to open Carnivale we got to know each other, we spent a lot of time together going over and over the training, hiring, ordering, all the millions of things you do before opening a 600 seat restaurant. The more time I spent with her the more I had these inexplicable weird feelings, almost like butterflies in my stomach when we were around each other. My face felt warm sometimes when she entered the room, I didn’t know for the life of me what was going on with me. There was one day, one of the other managers came up to me with a silly grin plastered on his face.

“ I think someone has a crush on Liz.”

“What? No, no, I mean she’s cute, but no. What?’

He laughed at me, slapped me on the back, and walked away laughing even harder. Is that what was going on? I had crushes on women before, this felt different, very different. It took me a while to find the courage to ask her out, it actually took a few beers and shots of tequila, but I did and we started seeing each other. We kept this a secret though, we worried our bosses wouldn’t approve, so we kept our outside activities very clandestine. We were sort of like spies, we came up with places to meet at appointed times, we took separate cabs, we pretended not to know what the other did outside of work. Sneaking around was fun for a few months but it was starting to wear on us. Then things took a serious turn. One day on a trip to Michigan (I don’t even remember the lies we came up with to have some days off at the same time, but no one seemed to notice) I somehow found the courage to ask her to marry me. I found a name for all those feelings I was having, the warm face, the butterflies, the awkwardness, the elevated heart rate, it was love. I loved her, and the minute I realized this I felt like I had to do something about it.

Thankfully she went along with the whole program, and we became engaged. But we had to tell everyone at work, we figured it was time to come clean. To our surprise, almost everybody knew there was something going on with us, but were pleasantly surprised to find out we were getting married.

I was thinking about all this and looking at that picture. I remember asking her to come up to see the rooftop garden we had started, and in an impromptu moment asked her to pose for a selfie. At that moment, I can see how happy we were. I can see how happy we were to have found each other, to just be near each other. We both look different now, but those feelings haven’t changed, in fact, they have become more intense, something I could never have imagined.

When I started working at Carnivale I had so much I wanted to prove to the world, so many things I wanted to accomplish. When I left there I was ready to move onto something better, something different, something our own. I thought at this point in my life I would remember all the things I did at Carnivale, the impact it had on my life. To be honest, the only thing worth remembering is meeting my wife, and how every day since then has been an adventure. Don’t get me wrong I had a great team of people that worked with me, especially sous chefs, cooks, and dishwashers. I do have tons of great memories of Carnivale, there were so many talented hardworking people there, I have yet to experience anything like it. But in the end I met an amazing person that agreed to spend her life with me, something I still think as a great act of courage on her part. There have been many trials and much tribulation since then but we are still together. I have days where I contemplate what would have happened if I hadn’t worked at Carnivale, what would my life had looked like?

In the end we left to open our own restaurant together, as fun and crazy as Carnivale was, we wanted to see if we could make it on our own. That experience was wonderful and horrible at the same time much like the restaurant business itself. But thar’s a tale for another day.