inefficiencies
stress fatigue impossible
unsustainable

As you knew, today’s haiku is based on an a newspaper article about the restaurant industry.

In the guest opinion essay, “Foodie Fever Dreams Can’t Keep Restaurants Afloat” by Vivian Howard, a chef and restaurateur, is the author of two cookbooks and the host of the PBS series “A Chef’s Life” and “Somewhere South.”

Ms. Howard writes:

Even so, Chef & the Farmer closed, in large part because the inefficiencies, stress and fatigue brought by an unsustainable business model became impossible to ignore. Our industry needs to evolve or else more full-service, cuisine-driven restaurants like mine will languish their way to extinction.

About being in the restaurant business, she write: “…perhaps why you so rarely hear a parent say: “You should get into the restaurant business. It looks like a nice life.“

As Anthony Bourdain once said, “I mean, I admire anyone who wants to cook and knowingly enters the field.

It’s a hard thing.

But, you know, look before you leap.

Because I’ve seen that so many times, kids coming out of cooking school and working in my kitchens, and literally two weeks in, you see it.

You look behind the line, and you can just see the dream die.

This terrible information sinking in, like, “Oh my God, this is nothing like they told me it was going to be.”

And I am thinking of going out to dinner tonight.

At least, as of right now.

I think I need a job that pays you to be on the beach.

Maybe the one I have that lets me on the beach at lunchtime is good enough.

But consider the beach.

Twice a day the tide comes in and wipes it clean.

Completely and efficiently.

No fatugue.

No stress.

Though I am sure that if I had the job to clean sweep the beach twice a day, I would make a mess of it and I would languish on my way to extinction.

sun shone salt glittered
like tinsel the wind tousled
the sea prettily

Adapted from:

Prepared for a slice of heroic adventure, they found themselves in the middle of a floating vicarage garden fete .

The sun shone.

The salt in the air glittered like tinsel In the enclosed water of the Solent, the stiffish southerly wind did no more than prettily tousle the sea.

Though I had made an important fuss of laying compass courses on the chart and calculating tidal streams, there was no navigation, since everyone could see exactly where everywhere was.

There was no solitude, either.

There was hardly any room at all in which to move.

From the book Coasting by Jonathan Raban

Jonathan Raban, the British travel writer, critic and novelist known for his candid accounts of travelling the world in books such as Passage to Juneau and Coasting, has died aged 80, his agent has confirmed.

and here you may find
me on almost any lunchtime
walk along the shore

Every day the sea
blue gray green lavender
pulls away leaving the harbor’s
dark-cobbled undercoat

slick and rutted and worm-riddled, the gulls
walk there among old whalebones, the white
spines of fish blink from the strandy stew
as the hours tick over; and then

far out the faint, sheer
line turns, rustling over the slack,
the outer bars, over the green-furled flats, over
the clam beds, slippery logs,

barnacle-studded stones, dragging
the shining sheets forward, deepening,
pushing, wreathing together
wave and seaweed, their piled curvatures

spilling over themselves, lapping
blue gray green lavender, never
resting, not ever but fashioning shore,
continent, everything.

And here you may find me
on almost any morning
walking along the shore so
light-footed so casual.

Tides by Mary Oliver

If I leave my the building where I work and turn left and walk up the street, cross at the corner and walk up a path through a parking lot, it takes me about 2 minutes to get to this view.

Oddly enough this was not mentioned as a perk of the job when I interviewed here.

Favored by good fortune and smart enough to not question it but just enjoy it.

lunch time beach walking
servers clicks webpages emails
somewhat disappear

Out the door of my office, down the street and cross at the corner.

Take the fenced in path through the parking lot.

Bang – Zoom, I am on the beach.

I am walking across the sand wearing khakis and a button down to be sure but still …

Jim Harrison once wrote along that lines that it would take a half a day but he could get on plane, land in northern upper lower Michigan, get in his car and be back at his home in Leelanau.

Really, he said, it was the only way he could handle being in Los Angeles.

Back at my desk, the servers, clicks, webpages and emails are waiting for me.

But I knew they would be when I left.

Whatever happened to those little naked elves?