Your book opens with a seismic revelation about your identity at 18. Describe how that moment reshaped the way you saw yourself, and how it echoed throughout your career in hospitality?
It reinforced my belief that the only way to be loved was through invention, so I started to abandon all the things I knew about myself and started from scratch. I got to play out that character in the restaurants I built over the next thirty years.
In The Bottomless Cup, you write candidly about turbulence at home. What was the hardest part of revisiting that period, and what did you learn about yourself while putting it on the page?
One of the lines that I say in the book, is “everyone was responsible but no one is to blame.” I approached it with more empathy than when I lived through it. I learned more about what aspects of myself came from my Mom, my father and my stepfather.