Breakfast at Five

Tuscany, May 2012 | The trouble with becoming a luxury travel company

At five in the morning, Tuscany is a beautiful place.

The hills are quiet. The sun is beginning to rise. The birds are singing, and somewhere in the distance, an Italian farmer is probably having an espresso before beginning an honest day's work.

I wouldn't know.

I was in the kitchen making breakfast for a group of people who had paid me to give them a luxurious holiday.

I was also their chef, waiter, dishwasher, housekeeper, and, as far as I could establish, the entire management team.

It was an impressive organizational structure.

Very lean.

No unnecessary middle management.

In fact, no middle management whatsoever.

There was just me.

The trouble with a good idea

A few months earlier, I'd returned from my first trip to Tuscany convinced I'd discovered the perfect profession.

Rent a beautiful villa. Take people to the markets. Cook wonderful food. Enjoy Italy.

It had worked beautifully with friends.

Then people started offering to pay me.

This seemed an encouraging development.

My hundred-dollar website was functioning, word was spreading, and I'd managed to assemble a group for May 2012.

We were returning to Tuscany, to the same villa where the whole adventure had begun.

I was enormously pleased with myself.

I'd found customers. Real customers. People who were prepared to hand over actual money in exchange for the promise that I would arrange a wonderful holiday and feed them exceptionally well.

There was, admittedly, the small matter of actually delivering the holiday.

But I was young, enthusiastic, and possessed the particular confidence of someone who hadn't yet discovered the difference between being a good cook and operating a hospitality business.

I didn't think I needed much staff.

More accurately, I didn't think I needed any.

This would prove to be an interesting educational experience.

Five o'clock

The day began with breakfast.

Not my breakfast, of course. The guests' breakfast.

I had to get everything ready before they came downstairs, prepare their lunches to take along on their excursions, and make sure the day was organized.

Then there were the rooms.

Someone needed to make the beds and straighten things up.

That someone was also me.

It turns out that when you rent a beautiful villa and promise people a lovely holiday, the beds do not make themselves.

Neither do the dishes.

I don't recall this being mentioned in the original business plan, although to be fair there hadn't been much of a business plan.

By the time the guests had eaten breakfast and were ready to head out, I had already put in what many people would consider a respectable morning's work.

They were going sightseeing.

I was going grocery shopping.

To be fair, this was my favorite part.

A chef loose in Tuscany

I loved the markets.

I still do.

There is something about shopping for food in Italy that makes you question nearly every decision you've ever made about where to live.

The produce, the little shops, the people who have spent their entire lives selling one particular thing and are not remotely interested in your opinion about how it ought to be done.

For me, this was heaven.

I didn't have a predetermined dinner menu.

I'd go to the market, see what was beautiful, find out what was fresh, and build the evening's meal around it.

There was something wonderfully romantic about that kind of cooking.

It was also slightly insane.

Because by the time I'd finished wandering around admiring tomatoes, buying vegetables, finding fish, and imagining what I might cook, I still had to go back to the villa and actually make dinner.

For paying guests.

Who would presumably be expecting something considerably more impressive than a chef explaining that he'd had a marvelous afternoon at the market.

And this was kosher cooking.

Which meant that not every marvelous thing I encountered in Tuscany could simply be brought home and put on the table.

Italy is extraordinarily good at producing wonderful food.

Unfortunately, a surprisingly large percentage of that food comes with some form of pork, shellfish, or cheese whose ingredients and production require rather more investigation than the average Italian shopkeeper considers necessary.

Still, I loved the challenge.

I loved taking what was available and making something beautiful from it.

I loved the freedom of not working from a fixed restaurant menu.

And I loved the idea that the meal would reflect where we were.

I didn't want people to come to Tuscany and eat the same food they could have eaten in Jerusalem or New York.

We were in Italy.

Dinner ought to know that.

The ravioli incident

Somewhere during that week, I decided it would be a wonderful idea to teach the guests how to make fresh ravioli.

This was exactly the sort of experience I'd imagined when I started the business. We were in Tuscany. We had a beautiful villa. Why shouldn't everyone spend an afternoon learning to make proper Italian pasta?

There was one small complication.

I'd never made ravioli.

I'd made plenty of fresh pasta. I knew how to prepare the dough, roll it out, and turn it into all sorts of respectable shapes. Culinary school had not been a complete waste of time.

But ravioli required another step.

You had to fill the pasta, fold it neatly, seal the edges, and produce something that looked as though it belonged on an Italian dinner table rather than in an elementary school arts-and-crafts exhibition.

I'd never actually done that.

Naturally, I decided to teach a workshop.

There is a particular confidence that comes with being a newly qualified chef. You have learned a great deal, and haven't yet had enough opportunities to discover exactly how much you don't know.

I had the dough. I had the filling. I had a group of people ready to learn the ancient Italian art of making ravioli.

What I didn't have was the faintest idea how I was going to fold the first one convincingly.

Fortunately, Italy provided an emergency intervention.

The young woman who helped manage the villa for Filipo was there. She had grown up making ravioli with her grandmother, who had taught her when she was a little girl.

To her, folding ravioli was presumably about as complicated as tying her shoes.

To me, at that particular moment, it was the difference between maintaining my professional dignity and being exposed as a culinary fraud in front of my first paying customers.

Just as I was about to demonstrate a technique I hadn't quite mastered, she stepped in.

And began showing everyone how to do it properly.

Beautifully. Effortlessly. With the sort of confidence that comes from having done something since childhood rather than having decided to teach it that afternoon.

I was saved.

The guests got their authentic Italian pasta-making workshop. The ravioli were folded correctly. And I got to preserve the illusion that this had been the plan all along.

It was, in fact, a better workshop because of her.

Here was someone who had learned to make pasta from her grandmother, in Italy, demonstrating a tradition that had been passed down through her family.

You couldn't have arranged a more authentic experience.

Which was fortunate, because I certainly hadn't arranged it.

I had simply been rescued by it.

I learned two valuable lessons that afternoon.

First, never underestimate an Italian grandmother.

Second, if you're going to teach people something you've never done before, make sure there's someone nearby who actually knows how.

Preferably before you start folding.

The invisible staff

Back at the villa, the real work continued.

There was preparation, cooking, setting the table, serving the meal, clearing everything away, and washing up.

At a proper restaurant, these jobs are generally distributed among several people.

There's a reason for that.

I had apparently decided that the reason was inefficiency.

I could do it all myself.

And technically, I could.

That wasn't the problem.

The problem was that all of those jobs still had to be done, regardless of how tired I was or how much I'd rather have been sitting outside enjoying a glass of wine.

The guests had come to enjoy Tuscany.

I had come to create the circumstances in which they could enjoy Tuscany.

These were not quite the same thing.

And yet, I was having a wonderful time.

I loved the cooking. I loved the responsibility. I even loved the pressure.

There is a particular satisfaction in getting through a ridiculously complicated day and watching everything come together.

Dinner appears on the table. People sit down. The food is good. The evening unfolds.

For the guests, it looks effortless.

This is one of the great tricks of hospitality.

When it's done well, nobody sees the work.

When it's done badly, everybody sees everything.

I was learning this distinction in real time, generally while holding a dishcloth.

An expensive education

Looking back, I can see several things I should have done differently.

Hiring a waiter would have been a promising start.

A dishwasher wouldn't have hurt.

Someone to help with the rooms might have been an interesting innovation.

Perhaps even another person in the kitchen.

These are things I understand now.

At the time, I was simply delighted to have a business.

I had gone from wondering what to do after culinary school to taking paying customers on holiday in Tuscany.

That seemed rather extraordinary.

And it was.

I was building something that allowed me to combine the things I loved most: food, travel, people, beautiful places, and the excitement of making something happen.

It didn't feel like a conventional job.

It felt like an adventure.

An adventure involving an unreasonable number of dirty pots.

I began to understand that the experience I was selling was much larger than the food.

Yes, I was the chef.

But I was also responsible for making the holiday work.

The villa, the meals, the daily arrangements, the little problems that inevitably arose.

Someone had to think about all of it.

And I was discovering that I rather enjoyed being that someone.

Perhaps not the bed-making part.

But the rest of it.

The beginning of something

There are photographs from that trip.

Beautiful Tuscany. Wonderful food. A lovely villa.

Looking at them now, you'd think we'd had a marvelous holiday.

And we had.

The photographs just don't tell you that the person responsible for dinner was also responsible for cleaning up afterward.

Or that breakfast began at five.

Or that the celebrated pasta instructor had been rescued from professional humiliation by a young Italian woman who'd learned to fold ravioli from her grandmother.

But it had worked.

The guests had enjoyed themselves. The food had been wonderful. And I'd managed to operate an entire culinary holiday with a staff of one.

A sensible person might have returned home and concluded that the next trip required a waiter, a dishwasher, a housekeeper, and possibly a professional who knew how to make ravioli.

I reached a slightly different conclusion.

I could do anything.

Remember Judy? The woman who had called asking for a villa for thirty-four people, glatt kosher catering, separate beds, a Torah scroll, and a lightbox for inspecting lettuce?

I'd already told her I could handle it.

After surviving a week of five-in-the-morning breakfasts, housekeeping, cooking, serving, and an unexpectedly successful ravioli workshop, I was feeling considerably more qualified to make that promise.

Whether I actually was more qualified is another question.

And this little triumph did something rather dangerous.

It emboldened me.

By the time we returned to Tuscany that summer, I wouldn't be content with looking after Judy's thirty-four guests.

I'd decided that another three families staying in nearby villas sounded like an excellent opportunity.

There were only so many hours in a day, of course.

But I hadn't yet developed the habit of allowing that particular detail to interfere with my ambitions.