Before There Was an Itinerary

Modiin, Israel → Tuscany, Italy | 2010–2011

On my first day of culinary school, I was on the train from Modiin to Herzliya when my wife called to tell me she was pregnant.

She had taken a pregnancy test. Apparently, cigarettes had suddenly become unpleasant, which had made her suspicious.

She couldn't wait until I got home to tell me.

Personally, I thought waiting until I got home would have been perfectly reasonable. I was already on my way to culinary school. I had allocated that morning to one major change of identity.

I was thirty years old. Until recently, I'd had a corporate job, a university degree, an apartment, and the sort of life that could be explained to another adult without first asking him to keep an open mind.

Now I was sitting on an Israeli commuter train carrying knives toward a profession famous for terrible hours and terrible pay, while a person I hadn't met was quietly establishing a claim on my future income.

Around me, people were going to work.

I was going to learn how to cut an onion correctly.

There had been a period when this distinction made me feel rather pleased with myself.

It lasted until the phone rang.

A perfectly respectable career, ruined by cooking

I'd never been especially well suited to office life.

I'd finished my degree, partly because it was what one was supposed to do. I hadn't particularly enjoyed it. What interested me was cooking.

I loved feeding people. I loved the excitement of a kitchen, the noise, the pressure, the controlled chaos. There was something immensely satisfying about producing something tangible after several hours of effort.

An onion didn't require a meeting to establish whether it had burned.

So I went to culinary school.

Every morning I caught the train from Modiin to Herzliya. I spent the day learning techniques, working with ingredients, and discovering how much I didn't know about something I'd thought I was reasonably good at.

Then I returned to Modiin, where I worked at a café and bakery, often at night.

The café was a proper working kitchen. We made croissants from scratch. In the evenings I prepared pasta, eggplant Parmesan, panini, and the sort of food people ordered while discussing lives with considerably more reasonable hours than mine.

Some of our customers came from the wealthier parts of town and possessed the peculiar confidence of people who believed purchasing a sandwich had also purchased the person making it.

My kippah didn't always improve our relationship.

Neither did my personality.

But I loved the work.

I loved the pressure, the kitchen drama, the satisfaction of getting through an impossibly busy evening and knowing that we'd done it well.

The problem was that I still didn't have much of a plan.

Culinary school would eventually end. I would have a certificate, a reasonable collection of knives, a baby at home, and the opportunity to join a profession in which working sixteen hours a day was considered an expression of passion rather than a labor-law violation.

It wasn't exactly the future I'd imagined.

Daniel arrives

Daniel was born on June 19, 2011.

Culinary school and the pregnancy had occupied roughly the same nine months. This is convenient for a writer and was considerably less convenient for my wife.

Suddenly we were parents.

There were bottles, diapers, interrupted nights, and all the other things that arrive with a newborn without the courtesy of checking your professional ambitions first.

I loved being a father. I also loved cooking, and I was becoming increasingly convinced that this was what I wanted to do with my life.

The difficulty was figuring out how those two things were going to coexist in anything resembling financial harmony.

Fortunately, I had friends.

Unfortunately, one of them had an idea.

A friend with a dangerous suggestion

Her name was Carina. Or at least that's what we'll call her.

Carina and her husband, Patrick, were part of our circle of friends in Modiin. We were the sort of group that spent Shabbat meals together, entertained one another, and generally became involved in each other's lives in the way that happens when you're young, raising families, and living in Israel.

Carina loved my cooking.

One day she suggested something.

"Why don't you rent a villa in Tuscany? We love your food. You could go to the markets, cook for us, and we'll pay. It'll be fun. Who knows? Maybe you can make a business out of it."

There ought to be a register of sentences like this: casual suggestions made over a meal that subsequently consume fifteen years of somebody else's life.

I thought it sounded wonderful.

Italy. Markets. A villa. Cooking.

What could possibly go wrong?

I hadn't organized a culinary holiday before. I had no travel company, no professional hospitality operation, and only the vaguest understanding of what I was getting myself into.

On the other hand, I knew how to cook.

And I knew how to have a good time.

I decided these were probably sufficient qualifications.

The best part was that Carina and Patrick couldn't actually come.

The two people responsible for the entire idea were unavailable for its execution.

Two other couples joined instead.

So, in late 2011, a few months after Daniel was born, I packed my bags and went to Tuscany.

An Italian villa and a rather unexpected count

Italy was magnificent.

There were markets filled with produce, butchers who regarded their work as a form of national service, beautiful cheeses I couldn't eat, and olive oil that made you understand why civilizations had spent centuries fighting over this part of the world.

I could go shopping in the morning, see what looked wonderful, bring it back to the villa, and cook.

There was no restaurant menu.

No stranger at table twelve complaining that his fish was taking too long.

No need to send a plate through a kitchen door and hope someone explained it correctly.

The people eating my food were also the people I was spending the holiday with.

We could talk about what we'd found at the market, what we'd eaten the night before, where we wanted to go tomorrow.

Dinner wasn't an interruption to the holiday.

Dinner was part of the holiday.

For someone who loved cooking, entertaining, talking, traveling, and generally being involved in everything, this was an extremely dangerous discovery.

Then there was Filipo.

Filipo owned the villa.

He was an Italian count.

Naturally.

Because apparently renting a villa in Tuscany also came with the possibility of meeting European aristocracy.

But being a count was the least interesting thing about him.

Filipo sang opera. Beautifully, as it happened.

And he was Jewish.

His mother had told him toward the end of her life that she was Jewish. He subsequently embraced his Jewish heritage, married an Israeli woman, and was raising a Jewish son.

I had traveled from Israel to Tuscany to cook kosher food for a few friends and somehow found myself in the home of an Italian count who sang opera and had discovered he was Jewish.

Italy had evidently decided to make the introduction particularly memorable.

I liked Filipo immediately.

There was something wonderfully unexpected about the whole arrangement.

And that, I was beginning to discover, was part of the attraction.

You could arrange a villa and plan a menu. You could decide which markets to visit and what to serve for dinner.

But the people you encountered, the stories they told, and the surprises waiting behind an ordinary-looking doorway were what made traveling interesting.

I had gone to Tuscany to cook.

I was discovering a world considerably larger than the kitchen.

The hundred-dollar company

There was another realization taking shape.

Traveling kosher had always required a certain amount of resignation.

You could go somewhere beautiful, provided you accepted that eating might be the disappointing part.

I saw no particular reason for this.

I liked being Jewish.

I liked Italy.

I didn't want to spend a week apologizing to either of them.

Why couldn't kosher travelers enjoy wonderful villas, great food, beautiful places, and the same sense of discovery that everyone else seemed to take for granted?

Why couldn't the food be one of the reasons to go?

When I returned to Israel, I took a job at Laticini, a restaurant in Jerusalem.

I also started building a website.

I found someone on the internet who would build the entire thing for a hundred dollars.

No branding agency. No strategic positioning exercise. Nobody asked me to identify the three adjectives that best represented the emotional promise of my customer journey.

A hundred dollars.

I wanted a few photographs, some information about the trips, and a way for people to contact me.

This was before I discovered how much money could be spent making those three things considerably more complicated.

People started hearing about what I'd done in Tuscany.

A couple booked a private trip. Another group began coming together for the following spring.

I was still working in a restaurant kitchen, but slowly something else was happening.

I was becoming a travel organizer.

Or at least someone who accepted money to organize travel.

There is a distinction, although at the time I wasn't particularly interested in investigating it.

I didn't know that this would become my profession. I certainly didn't know that fifteen years later I'd still be searching for beautiful villas, negotiating with hotel managers, finding kosher ingredients in unlikely places, and explaining to perfectly reasonable people why their perfectly reasonable requests were occasionally impossible.

I had an idea, a website that cost a hundred dollars, and an alarming willingness to say yes before discovering how to do something.

Which is why, when a woman named Judy called a few months later looking for a villa for thirty-four people, glatt kosher catering, separate beds, a Torah scroll, and a lightbox for checking lettuce, I didn't hesitate.

"Of course," I told her. "What's the problem?"

It was an excellent question.

There were so many possible answers that I decided not to investigate them until after I'd gotten the job.