Cooking and running a restaurant

[jaybee]

I assume you love to cook. I also assume you want to run your own restaurant. How do those two activities compliment or conflict with each other?

[bluehill]

I truly love to cook, that's true, but the love of it gets lost. I can't single out one reason, but the first that comes to mind is the 7 nights a week burden. And it's a burden whether I'm sauting fish or seeing a movie.

This business is filled with great highs and tremendous lows, but the constant is--and here it's more a personality trait--the constant fear of failure. That is an everyday feeling one way or another.

What brings a tremendous satisfaction to me, and here I wouldn't trade owning a restaurant for anything, is the ability to bring about more awareness of how the food we choose to eat affects the world we live in. I've written about this in several other answers, so I won't enlarge the point further here, but suffice to say I'm intoxicated with the crumb of power I've achieved by the success of Blue Hill.

So, my actual love of cooking may be compromised a bit by the realities of owning a restaurant, but it's provided me with the pulpit of sorts to speak about what's important to me.