Michael Symon's Live to Cook_ Recipes and Techniques to Rock Your Kitchen - Michael Symon [63]
Divide the shrimp among plates. Add the capers to the pan, whisk in the vinaigrette just to heat through, and pour the pan sauce over the shrimp.
“Dad, I Need to Borrow Three Hundred Bucks”
The Caxton Café was the hardest reservation in the city as we entered the new year, 1997; we were jamming, and I was doing great food the way I wanted while running the financials efficiently. I’d fallen in love with Liz and her seven-year-old son, Kyle. Frank and Tim were solid in the kitchen and the front of the house staff had coalesced into the wonderful dysfunctional family that restaurants can become. I was in a kind of culinary nirvana, completely at peace, everything was perfect.
Except for that nagging little piece of the puzzle that wasn’t there yet. We were making a lot of money for the owners of the restaurant; we’d quadrupled sales. My goal, and now with Liz, our goal, was to own our own restaurant. When it was clear that the owners wouldn’t let us buy the Caxton or even give us equity—why would the owners sell or give a piece of this suddenly successful business if they didn’t have to?—I talked to some restaurateurs who were looking to open a new restaurant and needed a chef partner. I gave the Caxton my six-weeks notice—and they let me go four days later. Which would have been fine except for a little glitch: The new restaurant deal fell through.
So it was back to consulting, being miserable, and having no idea what was in store for us. Within weeks, though, Liz’s sister heard word on the street that Bohemia, a funky little restaurant in the neighborhood I’d been living in for five years, a semiurban enclave called Tremont, on the edge of Cleveland’s industrial Flats, was for sale. I found the owner immediately; it was true, the place, the appliances, the liquor license, it was all for sale. Lizzie and I talked it over. We talked with family, we spoke with a regular customer at Caxton who’d long said to contact him if we wanted to do something on our own, and we decided to go for it. Her name would be Lola, the name of a close and ebullient family friend and a name we just loved.
We didn’t want to be beholden to investors, so we determined we’d open the restaurant ourselves. In the end, we came up with $170,000 dollars from family and a friend. That was what we had and that was what we used. We did just about everything ourselves, and we created a new restaurant. One hundred seventy grand: hard to believe today that you could open a restaurant for that little money. Small as it seems now, it was nevertheless a lot to us; it was all we had. As soon as every penny was gone, we had no choice but to open for business. We had nothing in the bank—nothing; we were flat broke by March 1997. Liz, my buddy Chris, and I were still hanging lights when the first customers walked in. When my mom arrived, she started to cry because we were so behind.
We’d just open soft, on Wednesday, real soft and quiet to see how things would go. Just tell a few friends. We didn’t know if everything would work. About midday, Liz and I realized we had no cash, not a dollar bill to put in the till. We needed cash to accept cash, make change. The conversation went something like this.
“Dad, I need to borrow three hundred bucks.” He’d already lent us a serious amount.
“What for?”
“We need some money in the cash register to make change.”
“So go to the bank.”
“Dad, please, I don’t have time to go to the bank!”
“There’s an ATM down the street.”
“Dad, please!”
I couldn’t bear to tell him that we’d drained the accounts to nothing. Couldn’t do it. He gave me the cash, and we opened for business.
I don’t know how the word spread, but Lola filled up that