As I sit at my desk emailing thru changes to the wine list, and ordering a tea delivery from Tea Total, and filling in the wage schedule to fax thru to the bank, and debating whether I should zap over to the supermarket now to pick up some castor sugar so I can get onto the cherries in red wine syrup- or whether I should wait to see if Gilmours deliver the other 9 5kg bags that they forgot to drop of yesterday ( Rick ordered 10 bags - they delivered 1! - love it when stuff like that happens this time of year!);  but, as I contemplate all of that, I've re read a card that arrived yesterday from the Distillerie Deinlein, and the words have given me pause in all the rush, to consider what this should really all be about. I'm sure they won't mind if I borrow them and share  with you:

Christmas Gift suggestions:

To your enemy, forgiveness.

To an opponent, tolerance.

To a friend, your heart.

To a customer, service.

To all, charity.

To every child, a good example.

To yourself, respect.

(Oren Arnold - 1900-1980)

And so, from us to you - our heartfelt compliments of the season, and the hope that you get to have a special Christmas!

(The huge pohutakawa in our gully which has decided to flower this year - something it does only occasionally, and which I've decided to interprete as a positive omen for the year to come!)

As I believe I've stated elsewhere, I'm a huge fan of Gordon Ramsay -believing that there had to be so much more to him than came accross initially in the early TV shows that he did.  The later ones, 'Kitchen Nightmares" and the "F word" have confirmed for me, that he is someone with compassion, knowledge and enthusiam, who simply has no time for people he considers to be idiots. Oh, that we could all be so black and white in our approach to life!!

This book is a great read - a description this time, of how he build the business side of his empire, how he went from owning one restaurant to now being a director in The Gordon Ramsay Group which owns restaurants all around the world.

He is disarmingly honest about what has worked along the way and what hasn't. And I suspect he is able to be so frank, becos he really isn't burdened by selfdoubts and fears about what people will think.

He is enormously successful in a corporate sense, primarily becos he has the good sense to know what he doesn't know and to pay good people to do that for him. Serendipity also played a major part, in the arrival on the scene of his father in law, who as a successful businessman in his own right, saw the potential in the Gordon Ramsay brand, and has worked with Gordon since the inception to build the phenomenal company. They are a formidable team. And then the introduction to the equity group Blackstone, has opened up almost limitless opportunities for them in the availability of hotels, who's restaurants need an overhaul, and in terms of the capital to throw at those projects, and help make them the best they can possibly be. Money alone doesn't make for a sucessful restaurant - I can think of any number of heavily financed projects  that we have watched go belly up over the years, becos the focus was on the 'look' and not on the tedium of day to day operations. Gordon discusses in fascinating detail how his company has grown to deal with all the angles and aspects of restaurant and hotel catering, as the operation has got larger.  No detail is ever too small to be ignored - they have a centralised management structure that takes up 6 floors in a building in London, and the capital cost in running that proves how incredibly serious they are about running everything very, very well.

These guys are the best - and they are driven to be the best, becos it is a fundamental need of Gordons. He freely concedes that no matter what he is doing, he needs to be better than anyone else - and even though he has reached the rarified strata of a global brand, you can't help but get the feeling that that drive pushes him still. Does he ever relax?!

I read nasty little comments in the papers sometimes from the English media, on how now that Gordon has 10 restaurants he's stretched himself too thin, and cracks are starting to show, and I wonder to myself what it is that motivates people to make those sorts of comments. It has to be a form of jealousy - becos he has achieved so much in a relatively short time frame, some people can't help themselves but take potshots at him. How dare he think he can do it all? Becos he's stepped outside the previously established framework  of what a chef is 'allowed' to achieve, people feel vindicated in trying to pull him down to size. The glorious thing about Gordon Ramsay is that you get the feeling that reading such mealy mouthed commentary from people who've never made a single business decision in their own lives, only serves to spur him on. He doesn't let anyone put limits on him.

He does however understand that to grow, you need good people alongside you - and one of his most endearing aspects is the credit he is so very quick to give the chefs that have allowed him to expand his empire. He never pretends to be at all his restaurants, so has the good sense to allow the chefs in charge to develope their own personalities and strengths. That tells me that he isn't driven by his own ego - theres room for other people to shine in his world and I admire him for that.

I found the book completley inspirational on a business level. Not becos I have any desire to emulate - we are simply not about building a global brand - but becos I love the concept of someone who doesn't accept limits, who believes that anything is achievable and who gives it the best shot they can. Sometimes it doesn't work, and you learn from those experiences for the next time.  We have been involved in other businesses in the past, to varied success - all of which I've always put down to a useful learning experience. There are always  other business ideas floating around,  and I have no doubt that in the future as our children move on to a more independant stage in their lives, our  core business will start to send out shoots in a number of ways.

Amongst the many things that I've picked up from this book is the thought, that anything is achieveable if you want it to be so, and are prepared to put in the hard yards to make it happen.  Thats an approach I can definitley live with!

And added as a postscript a couple of weeks after I wrote the above, I've just read an article on Gordon Ramsay in the New York Times. written by Bill Burford, who wrote the excellant 'Heat", and I found that contained a fascinating perspective on the realitites of opening his New York restaurant. I've come over to the house  tonite in disgust after we had a table for 8 not turn up- something that happens to us very rarely, and which hurts on a nite like tonite when we've turned away lots of people becos we thought we were full. It mentions in this article however that they were loosing $22,000 from no-shows, so suddenly I don't feel  so bad anymore...

Anyway had better head back over to the restaurant, cos last nite before we close for Christmas and some people arriving for drinks. Think my sense of composure has been restored!!

A description of discovering mid life that you aren't happy in your corporate life ( being made redundant tends to cast a negative pall over things), and seeking to retrain and follow your dreams.

I'm lucky. Apart from a couple of years working as an accountant, I have always lived and worked my dream - the restaurant is my passion, and I can't understand people who wait until they're in their 40s, before they make life affirming decisions to radically change the direction of their careers.

But I digress. This lady had always wanted to train to be a chef at Cordon Bleu in Paris - in no small part becos it was where her hero Julia Childs had trained decades previously. So when her corporate life came unstuck, she seized the opportunity to go and train in Paris, and the book describes that process.

Interesting on any number of levels for me - Rick and I toy with the idea of one day running an independant chefs training school along the lines of what Darina and Tim Allen have established at Ballymaloe, becos we see it as a possible future income stream to the business, and a natural extension to the cookschools that we already run.So interesting to see how the classes are run at this long established school - that now has franchises all around the world ( including one trying to get established in Martinborough, and which is being sytmied by some staunch local opposition which seems to be based on the prinicipal of " I'm here, but I don't want you here, so I'm going to appeal and appeal any decision that allows you to open...").

Having read Julia Childs biograhpy some time ago, I'd thought that the Cordon Bleu schools were caught in a time warp of classic french cooking, but it would appear from the description of the classes at the higher grades, that this is  not in fact the case in todays world, where they take a more global approach to good food.

People from all over the world come to study, and it seems to me that most of them are there becos their parents can afford to pay for it, or becos they're following a dream . There is no doubt they would learn alot about food preparation , but it doesn't in any way seem to emulate the realites of a professional kitchen.

Its a brand that people pay to come too becos of the cachet associated with the name- what I have read in some of Michael Ruhlmans books about training at the Culinary Institute in America, would seem to me to be a less romantic but definitly more pragmatic approach to the realities of working at the coalface of the hospitality industry. But most of the people that go to the Cordon Bleu cookschool are looking ahead to a life time of dinner parties I suspect - not churning out hundreds of meals a week in a hot, pressure cooker environment.

Not intended as a criticism of the book however - its a nice affirming tale, of one womans decision to chase her dream, to work hard to achieve it, and to accomplish what she set out to do, with style and panach, and passion.

I wrote in my diary when I finished this book the other day, that it was a life story that I could strongly identify with, and was a story that I didn't want to end.

Judith Jones is the legendary editor who worked with Julia Childs and her 2 french co writers to publish their ground breaking food on french cooking for the American market, back in the 60s, when the whole notion was seen as not commercially viable. As if that wasn't enough, she then went on to work with a  series of trailblazing and now seriously famous food writers, who, when they started with Judith, were not known at all. People like Marcella Hazan, Claudia Roden, Madhur Jaffrey, Irene Kuo.

She spent her early working life living in Paris ( just like Julia Childs), met her husband there, and eventually came back to America having had her attitude to food and wine radically changed by the french approach, and also with some serious credentials amongst the publishing world, for  being the editor who first spotted the significance in the manuscript written by Anne Franks father.

The America she came back to, was  one in which food and its preparation was seen as incidental to the things that were really important in life. The food industry had actively  created an environment in which people were told that food preparation was too much trouble and they were much better off buying prepackaged, prepared foodstuffs. Worse, the pace of life encouraged people to look on food as something you treated as a pitstop - grab it at a drivethru and eat on the run.The complete anthesis to the leisurely, intense approach that the French( in general) have to food and meals.

Julia Childs, MFK Fisher and James Beard were  all there - all trying to stem the flow of  the inexorable industrialization of the food chain. But cooking had been marginalised - treated in a patronising fashion as something irrelevant and best left to the back pages of the cheap womens magazines.

The cumulative impact then, that someone like Judith Jones has had, in helping to move society's attitude forward is almost impossible to quantify. Julia Childs was very definitly the right person at the right time - and no one predicted the storm of interest created by her first tentative TV cooking show. She led the way, and helped create an environment in which people were keen to learn and keen to rediscover the joys that can by had by pottering in the kitchen.

What Judith Jones appeared to be especially adept at doing was in encouraging people to tell their stories and their food histories - America is full of immigrants keen to keep alive their food customs and heritage -is a way that maintained their integrity, without having to modify things dramatically to meet presumed American tastes. Its hard for us to imagine now, but this was very radical stuff back then. Revolutionally in fact. And it would appear that there were no limits to her interest in food and its history and its signficance in peoples lifes. Even on her own in the later part of her life, she continues to travel and to quest and to be open to new ideas and tastes. I have such respect for someone who is forever interested and prepared to learn.

Needless to say what she helped start trigger is now a booming market - a massive interest  worldwide, that has, as with all things created some monsters of its own. Read a fascinating article the other day on the cultural phenomenon, that swirls around the Food Network, filled with all those people who desperately want to be 'star's', and who see being a TV chef, as their path to fame and riches. The inescapable fact is  that so many of them haven't done the hard yards in any shape or form,  but that doesn't seem to thwart them in their focus. ( But does make a huge amount of what is on the Food Network, unwatchable from my perspective.)

The people that Judith Jones brought into our worlds remain icons to this day, becos they were masters at what they did, and that sort of knowledge never dates. I hear Rick say quite often ' I'll check in Julia Childs" - when someone asks about something, that he can't immediately answer. I suspect that there are a huge number of modern foodwriters and presenters who will disappear into the nether, in years to come, becos they have contributed nothing new or groundbreaking.

This book was a pleasure to read of a life well lived - in the pursuit of food and its cultural significance and the simple untrammeled pleasure that can be derived from cooking for those you love.

A gentle book - made all the more poignant on discovering a publishing footnote right at the end, to say that the author died before the book was published.  A shock, and reminder that none of us know what the immediate future holds..

A lady, who lives by herself, and decides to buy a house in a rural part of the South West of France - to which she retreats every year, and gradually establishes herself as 'l'Americaine'. The chapters describe her progress to being accepted within the area, and  the discoveries she makes enroute.

Like us, she finds that not everything is superb in France - you can be on the recieving end of shoddy workmanship, just like anywhere else in the world. We had a couple of very average dining out experiences, when we were there - actually one would be better described as god awful, -a somewhat rude awakening to that beguiling notion we carry around in our heads of how fabulous everything is in France. Not necessarily so.

In a book like this, a whole lot is revealed about the author herself - an interesting notion, becos she comes accross as someone who values her privacy, and sense of self. Theres lots of books in this genre - people who in middle age  who decide to make a dramatic change in their lifes, so as to create some vitality and change to normal routine. I've read my fair share of them, starting with the granddaddy of the genre, Peter Mayle - and some I've loved and some, needless to say I haven't been quite so stuck on.

This is one of the better ones where you get a feel for the village and the people, in tones that leave no residual taste of condenscion. And the full stop at the end - the sudden realisation that she won't be sitting down to write any follow ups, kind of rocks you back on your heels, and makes you reassess where you are at the moment, becos there are no guarantees in life, that things will continue as we may expect...