urban bicycle journeys

Tootie bought an electric-assist bicycle this past summer mostly to ride the three miles to Dave and Louise’s house. They have a swimming pool and we have pretty much an open swimming invitation. Tootie loves to swim laps. Furthermore, hanging with Dave or Louise or other friends around their pool is a calming presence in our lives. Dave seems to treasure doing pool maintenance. In the summer the pool passes into a comfortable shadow every afternoon about five o’clock, cocktail hour.

Chapel Hill NC started as a chapel and then a university situated at the top of a hill. Dave and Louise’s house is two-thirds of the way down that big hill. To drive a car there from our condo downtown one has to creep through all the stop signs on the UNC campus. Taking a bicycle is much more relaxing but returning requires pedaling up that huge hill. Tootie has conventionally cycled up that hill several times but the electric bike now makes it painless.

Their pool scene is so enticing that about five years ago Dave and Louise were out of town and a bunch of us had a Fourth of July party at their swimming pool anyway! The house was locked so you had to pee in the woods. A good time was had by all, including myself playing rhythm guitar while our friend Dan sang the Talking Heads song Psycho Killer.

Dave and Louise have three children. The eldest is theirs naturally and the younger two were adopted as infants from Russia. The eldest daughter is named Ginger and has a tech job in New York City, successful enough to have purchased her own apartment there. The younger daughter Violet lives at home in Chapel Hill. Their son Harry never expressed any desire to go to college and is now approaching thirty years old. For something like five years he worked in the kitchen of a Chapel Hill hot dog bar/restaurant called The Dog House. I talked to his father many times during that era and Dave wished he would take his cooking skills in a more fruitful direction. Since I have hired and fired many times, I was genuinely impressed that Harry showed stability. Business guys like that.

Harry ultimately went to culinary school in New York City, his older sister graciously sharing her apartment. It has been a couple of years since he completed the school and Harry has worked in several kitchens. What is it like, cooking for a restaurant in America now?

I recently returned from bicycling in Portugal, a country with a delightful restaurant culture. At more than one nice restaurant I confirmed that the entire place was operated by just three people, maybe in the same family; two in the kitchen, one up front. One small town bar / restaurant was completely operated by only one woman of apparent Thai heritage, including the cooking.

I live in New Orleans part of the year. Certainly most of the older family-run restaurants employ dozens of non-family staff. Several of the more famous old-school family-run restaurants have been bought out by local multi-restaurant corporations, often because they want to preserve New Orleans culture. These groups run the restaurants behind the scenes but do not make major changes. There are a few newer small family restaurants, mostly run by immigrants serving “ethnic food.”

Harry’s career seems to have gone well. His current job is associated with the California-based chain retailer formerly known as Restoration Hardware. Harry is part of a team of kitchen and wait staff that fly around the country, working for six weeks at a time, getting newly opened RH gourmet restaurants up and running, staying together in an Airbnb in each city. Harry was temporarily working at RH’s newly opened restaurant thirty miles away in Raleigh, and Dave and Louise invited us to drive over with them and Violet. The only time they could get a reservation on this Saturday night was at 5:00 PM.

Unlike my hometowns of Norfolk and Virginia Beach who have used their rivalry to their collective detriment, Raleigh, Chapel Hill, Cary, and Durham seem to coexist just fine. Raleigh has experienced tremendous growth in the past thirty years. A lot of money has and continues to be made around here, mostly associated with tech and software. I do like visiting Raleigh but never seem to have a reason to go. I had not recently visited North Hills Mall, five miles north of Raleigh’s downtown and next to the Interstate, now simply called North Hills. I discovered that the mall has been replaced by a downtownesque faux-ville of upscale retail and restaurants, surrounded by high rise hotels and office buildings.

Our destination was somewhat in the center of all this. RH is an enormous luxury furniture store with an expensive restaurant on the third floor. Walking through the bedroom furniture I made jokes that Louise should pick out a multi-thousand dollar chair. It is a shrewd marketing setup.

Let’s go upstairs, drink wine, and have a fancy dinner. Fortified by all this, why not pick out some egregiously expensive sofa, side table, or artwork on the way out? To someone living in Chapel Hill NC, someone who spends a lot of time traveling by bicycle, someone who lives part of the year in New Orleans, this carefully manicured environment still felt other-worldly, slightly creepy. It all reeked of trying to look and act wealthy, but in good taste.

I have been around enough country clubs and expensive restaurants to know what rich Southerners typically look like, and the crowd on the third floor of RH at North Hills did not look like that. It was a young crowd, everyone well put together; physically fit women in tight dresses and high heels, mostly White but still very multiracial/multicultural. No one looked worried about inflation. We, on the other hand, were here to see their son Harry and his work.

Our waiter was quite the professional, from an RH in Chicago, part of the visiting six week team. We ordered drinks. Louise wanted a gin gimlet but they do not have cocktails. Dave suggested a bottle of wine. Louise asked our waiter about her go-to type of white; Sancerre. The waiter said they had a nice one, and Dave said “sure.”

Neither Dave nor Louise had seen the price of that, $112.00. I may have been socially out-of-bounds but I interjected that we should consider instead the $64.00 of bottle of New Zealand sauvignon blanc, a type that I like and also the cheapest white wine on the menu. Dave and Louise said fine.

The RH menu was multi-faceted but expensive, not just the usual appetizer + entree but with separate listings for “salads” and “sandwiches.” The waiter suggested I get the $58.00 filet. Instead I ordered the grilled salmon with honey glaze.

Our party shared a charcuterie board. It was delicious, gooey aged cheese and slices of prosciutto. Moving on to entrees, my salmon was good but nothing special. Violet got the $22.00 hamburger. Louise’s entree was the best, a whole branzino fish. We later learned her son Harry was the cook for that station. In my recent trip to Portugal I had noted that the Portuguese leave many or most of the bones in their fish, maybe to show you it is authentic. Here at RH the entire fish was lovingly presented head-on and with crispy skin, but completely deboned and then put back together. The delicious white flesh was slightly seasoned.

Harry came out for brief a visit, resplendent in his kitchen whites. He said the branzino had been brined just fifteen minutes before sauteeing in a very hot pan, flames flying.

Harry has really found himself. He had to get back to his station. I know his parents are proud.

It had been a great meal but Dave and Louise wanted to immediately drive back to Chapel Hill. They had left their pets home alone.