Holiday Drinks, Yum!

I happen to know that Christmas cannot come soon enough when a certain coffee chain starts pimping their festive coffee cup as early as November 1st. I’m not sure what it is about the cup: If it’s the promise of the pending holiday cheer; the start to the jolly season; the looming conclusion to the [...]

Apple Cider Spiced Hot Toddy

One of the best things about fall has to be the hot toddy. Take the quintessential fall beverage — apple cider — and turn it into a grown up beverage that just screams to be sipped while wearing riding boots and knit sweaters. Here’s a twist on the standard, adding just a little something extra…spiced [...]

Remix – the Spanish Coffee

One of my favorite drinks can be found in Portland, Oregon at a long-lasting bar called Paddy’s. Paddy’s is a gorgeous older bar, with a back bar nearly forty feet wide and sixteen feet tall, replete with two of those rolling library ladders for the bartenders to get to the ultra-premium top shelf. This bar, [...]

Into The Heat

As tough as I imagine myself to be, I’m still… a guy. I can hike twenty-some miles in a day (if I put my soul into it), break back with friends on construction projects and endure tons of mosquitoes. But I’m still… a guy. At the end of the day I can still be accused [...]

Old School Cafe Management Skill: That Item Makes Me This Much

Operator Solutions Using Mocafe Last night, a perfect New England summer night, I was talking about cafe and restaurant management with an old friend, a former executive chef (like me), restaurant owner and major lines food salesman. The topic of passion was how old-school successful operators calculate the hourly success of their business. One of [...]

Summer 2011: Backcountry Fishing

A summer favorite of mine is fishing. I don’t get to make a lot of trips each year, so when I do, I make it count. One of my favorite areas to fish is up in Montana – Big Sky Country – on the upper reaches of the Missouri River, near the headwaters, where the [...]