In the follow-on book to Unreasonable Hospitality, the Unreasonable Hospitality Field Guide, readers are asked to write notes all over the place. In the first few chapters, he asks the reader to write down their definition(s) of hospitality. I wrote down three things, each an example of what I consider hospitality:

Reasonable people can feel like the virtual elimination of the “Three Martini Lunch” represents progress. Progress in the campaign against alcoholism. In the homogeneity of a workforce that would romanticize getting absolutely hammered over lunch. But nostalgia is a powerful thing, and even I am not immune.

I grew up in an area of California called “the Central Coast,” almost exactly halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, in a town called Pismo Beach. As a child in the mid-1980s there, the most sophisticated thing I was exposed to was at the local steakhouse, McClintock’s. After dinner, a server came around with an assortment of after-dinner liqueurs: Kahlua, Bailey’s, Disarrono amaretto, and some others I can’t recall. 

Throughout this site, you might come across a reference to Wingtip, a business I founded and ran from late-2002 until early-2018. It included a men’s retail component and a private social club and it was based in San Francisco’s Financial District. Wingtip taught me many of the bar & restaurant tricks I incorporate into my dinner, so if you wanted to learn more...