J. named and wrote a creative brief for a new restaurant concept for clients who are friends. Their high spirits were contagious as we sat and talked about siting for best exposures, how they’d entice one of the region’s best chefs away from what would be their fiercest competitor and why a bar should be a destination inside the space. This will happen, they said, sooner over later.
I listened to the high notes of J’s imagined-on-paper culinary masterclass…undressing expectations, the artful use of discordance through astringents and bitters, highest integrity of sourced meat, tasting with the eyes first.
How not to see in the rising of those hopes the beauty of the balcony person? There is an interesting fact about my life/work partner that becomes all the more interesting when it’s noticed, as it was by these friends. He will sit for hours listening to the aspirations or challenges of a client or friend and never take a note. He will remember everything. He listens to get it. And everything he hears or imagines around that core becomes the stuff on which the dream is built.
A balcony person sees, understands and celebrates the unique spirit and purposes of another. I wonder if it might not be the best measure of a man or woman to have earned the epitaph, “He highly valued and clapped for his friends.”