VIEW FROM The treaty
I got my start in foodservice about 8-9 years prior to my promotion to Exec. Chef at the Treaty of Paris which happened in April 1989. I actually came to the Treaty on my first stint as a cook in late 1985 during the Frank Depanise years. I actually got into this business for all the wrong reasons as a teenager. I did not fit in, at school. I wanted to be with people whom would accept me. What better than a restaurant with a bunch of dis functional semi adults with drinking, drug, and whatever other personal problems you can imagine?
This is the industry where you go if you want to hit the ground running in life and not through school. Restaurants will chew you up and let you know quickly wether you will or won’t make it in life. There’s no bullshit here! You can talk alot of shit (and I did) but when it comes right down to it, your cards are on the table for every service. And you either suck at it or you don’t. I think I did suck at it in the beginning. But I was willing to take the verbal blasting until I got good at it. And there was plenty of that.
I don’t even know how it happened. One day I had been the Sous Chef there for a couple of years and the next thing I know I am the Exec Chef. It was amazing. However, I don’t think I really had time to stand back and blink at it because I was always so petrified of failure that I rarely took time away from it. The challenges were constant and many. That is both from the Food/Culinary challenges and the challenges of working in a 250 year old converted horse stall, which is what the treaty kitchen is today/was hundreds of years prior, built on top of 200+ year old public sewage systems. You figure out the health nightmares and use your imagination to it’s wildest extent and I bet I could top it with reality.
I knew so little then. I had been a Sous Chef, and sort of a manager to that point for about 3-4 years, I was still very green. An they got me at the Treaty for a Song and a Dance as far as money was concerned. I made about 20k less than the last chef made. How bout that for Stupid?
The treaty of paris thing
But, oddly enough, not only did I save them oodles of money there, business kept going at a great clip and their food costs continued to improve as did the labor costs. Not bad for a Novice. Oh yeah, and the great reviews from the local papers actually got better for my tenure. Now, I say all of this not to blow my own horn, cause the reality was that I had an group of excellent cooks that went through there over my tenure. That was my real success. Our team!
There are too many memories of the Treaty and the surrounding Historic properties in Annapolis to list. It saw the peak of my drug and alcohol abuse and the rise of my clean and sober years to come. But everything I did and currently do with any level of success, I really believe comes from this space in time of my life. There were influences both bad and good here, and people who left their mark on me, such as Frank Depanise, Richard Perkins, the guy who got me started at the Treaty, Paul Murtaugh, and in the years after when I returned, I had worked with some of the more negative aspects of the business for awhile.
I’ll simply call them thieves, and their names need not be mentioned. Fortunately this was short lived, and a great mentor was to come. One whom I would initially hate, and then appreciate and respect, for many years to come. Again, my many thanks to Richard Perkins, Frank Depanise, Paul Murtaugh, Gerard Boismain, Bill Burruss, Kevin Frederick, John Wall, Gregg Richardson, Wayne Kirkley, Craig Brown, Jason Bohan, Brahim Bendeba, Dan Hawthorne, Jim Erikson, Mike Greentree, and the multitude of people I am missing here that all contributed in some way to the successes I had at the Treaty of Paris from 1985 and back again in 1987 thru April of 1993.
