The Hammock Papers: Away.

09 August 2011

Away.

Chez Panisse chef, David Tanis, is leaving the world-famous restaurant after being at the helm for 30 years.

Back to Chez Panisse: what motivates this decision to leave permanently?
I've been there a very long time, off and on, over the space of thirty years. While it feels like home, sometimes it's good to leave home. I've come to enjoy writing more and more. In college, I thought I'd end up going in that direction, but instead chose cooking — or "me" or something. But I kept exploring that side here and there, and then based upon the success of the cookbooks, here we are.

Chez Panisse is celebrating its fortieth anniversary this year. This month, in fact. Having been there for most of those years, I wanted to make sure that I was around for that celebration. This is one of those places where you can run away and then come back, and Alice has sort of seen this coming. In the 90s I went away for a few years to New Mexico and opened a restaurant, then I came back for a few years, and then in 2001 I ran away to Paris. This last phase has lasted five or six years, and it has been lovely, but now it's time to run away again.

Read the rest at Eater.

This way to Mecca.

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL