Stefan Bowers

My time in San Francisco is coming to a close. I need to find my bearings and get back on course.

I created this blog to unload. To purge. To pour bleach on, and expose the thoughts swimming around the channels of my brain like Loch Ness worms.

Purging thoughts does one of two things—blue pill, red pill shit.

You either gain a deeper understanding of your own fucked up psychology, or surrender to the fact that you don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.

Both can be learned from.

Everyone in the service industry should do this.

Get a room. Your own private online room. Like this one.

Unload your shit. Unleash your mind on yourself. Then decide whether or not you want to share it.

My career has been a kaleidoscope of culinary schizophrenia.

Italian. French. Eastern Med. Seafood. Southern. Pizza. Fine Dining-ish. New American… Fuck.

I have colonized flavor. Butchered technique. Stolen from the lands of other people’s cuisine.

In the kitchen, I am a man without a country.

So I’ll sail to yours, and fuck it up.

I have Zero culinary heritage. What do you expect me to do?

No grandma’s knee to cook next to growing up. No food memories of mom’s homemade specialty served every Wednesday night. No dad insisting he eat his favorite meal for Sunday supper. No cultural identity. No dinner at the same time each evening. No country.

My single working mom—Jewish, but a practicing Buddhist. My dad, who I didn’t live with—a WASP who ate out every meal. **Side note, my dad’s regular eating out instilled in me my love of restaurants.**

Like the only child I was, I grew up learning by watching, observing. Then mimicking behavior. Mimicking flavor.

European cuisine is easy to appropriate, and exploit under the cloak of American whiteness. This is why 98% of culinary schools teach European technique.

Thankfully in the early 2000’s things began to shift. The tight fisted grip European cuisine had on restaurants loosened, and cooks around the country started saying, Fuck You, I’m proud of the dinner my mom made us on Wednesday. And I’m gonna serve it to YOU.

I’ve tried to recreate regional cuisine respectfully throughout my entire career. But American dinners have awful preconceived notions of what’s right or wrong and when you’re running a business you better cater to them, or you’ll be begging the comptroller for mercy before you know it.

Though I’ve learned one very important truth. Every culture’s cuisine is a result of violence. The dividing and conquering of land, flavors and ingredients. Violence created hybrids of traditional cuisines that met the needs of the day’s conquerors and conquered alike. Like, do you think the Greek Fries you get with your gyro represent the culinary identity of Mykonos? Get real.

I hate violence. But the best cooking is born of it. An amalgamation of flavor carried on horseback, pillaging one village to the next.

So I go easy on myself.

I specialize in hamburgers now because I grew tired of culinary appropriation.

Thankfully, burgers were built into my DNA. I would attempt cooking them as a kid, not from influence, but out of sheer love for them. They’re the one food I grew up eating consistently. I’ve always been hooked. So much so I used to serial-steal my mom’s truck when I was 14 (while she was sleeping) to drive to Burger King.

When I started professionally cooking twenty-five years ago, there was the internet, but it hadn’t popularized the culinary mundane, so few aspired to be the next best smash-burger spot. And what are you gonna do with your brand new shiny French Culinary School Diploma—Dunk Fries?

That’s the ugly truth of culinary colonization. You leave a wake of bad ravioli, bullshit bolognese ragù and mangled tasting menus behind you—only to open a burger shop—not a country.