I continued working through the rest of high school and upon graduation, a friend that I had made at the hotel was moving up to La Jolla to manage the front office for a newly acquired hotel owned by the same company that owned the Circle 8.  This hotel company was operated by family friends of ours; my mom’s best friend to be exact.  My friend, Wayne, asked me if I wanted to be a bellman and make tips for the first time in my life while going to UCSD.  I was a 4.2 student and only applied to SDSU, UCSD and UCLA.  I was young, dumb and stupid just like most graduates not knowing what to study or what I really wanted to do.  I knew I didn’t want to go too far and when Wayne asked me to work for him, I nearly had a heart attack thinking of leaving my dad after 5 ½ years of working together.  While attending UCSD I joined a fraternity and it was at this point that I knew I could cook.  My good friend, Danny and I would go to the Asian markets in Kearny Mesa for some sushi grade Ahi and by the time we were back at our apartment, there were 10-15 guys waiting for dinner. Every time I cooked dinner it was like having a banquet because so many guys would just show up.

One thing led to another and by the time I graduated in 1991, I still had no idea what to do with an economics degree with an emphasis on math and art history.  I did the only thing I knew how, which was work in a restaurant. I went back to Pam Pam and worked for my dad for about 6 months and then, ironically, my dad’s friend that got us into the deli business was now in the mortgage business: Uncle Steve.  Uncle Steve told my dad and I that his company was making money hand over fist with refinances and that if we got our real estate licenses we could go work with him.  We were suckers and went for it and we made a ton of money for about 2 years until the interest rates took a jump up.  It was at that time that I was living in Encinitas spending a ton of money on fine wine and food, travelling up to Temecula on the weekends and talking with Joe & Bill Hart.  I really had an appreciation for food and wine, but still didn’t know much about cooking.  My friend Jonathan and I, same friend from high school, would putz around in the kitchen, but certainly nothing professionally yet.

When the rates went back up, my income dropped by over 50% and I was forced, along with my dad, to go back to Pam Pam and cut our losses.  For the first year back at the restaurant, Jonathan and I were dreaming up some great ideas of restaurants.  There were two concepts he and I were thinking about. One was centered around skewers and everything being served on skewers with cool dipping sauces and the other was a wrap restaurant.  This was in 1994 or so and there was a place called World Wrapps that was started up in Berkley by two San Diego kids.  My dad and I took a flight up there to check it out and decided that there wasn’t a great location in San Diego for that type of concept.  But, wraps were a great idea for a menu addition.  I would go into the restaurant around 9am and work on specials for the day in the kitchen and then at night I would turn around and run the front as the manager.  The lead cook we had at the time was Dennis and he and I would come up with killer specials.  We were using chimchurri sauce years before it was popular in San Diego.  We ended up transforming the menu at Pam Pam into a full service restaurant and we added some wraps, skewers and pastas and nearly doubled the sales that year.  This was the point that I really began to think about this as a career.  It was at this same time that I went to Boston for a week and trained under Chef Michael Schlow, who was voted one of Food and Wine’s Best Chef’s 1996.  It was with him that I really got schooled on the finer details of food and wine.  I came back with an unbelievable appreciation for the culinary arts.

My dad and I actually thought that if we could do this at this dinky little restaurant in a hotel, that we could take this out into a community in town and really make something for ourselves.  We looked and looked for about a year or so all over San Diego for a space. and there was this space in Hillcrest that was vacant.  But, my parents thought that it would be too high profile of a location for me to run the kitchen with my extremely limited experience.  So, we put the word out for a Chef and we found someone that we thought was perfect. I told him my concept for a restaurant, which was a casual fine dining restaurant that was unpretentious and had a commitment to great wine and that was going to serve a contemporary American cuisine with emphasis from South, Central & North America.  We opened Terra Restaurant on May 7, 1998 and I was the General Manager.  Our Chef that we thought was so great, sabotaged and sank us from the get go.  Kitchen staff weren’t trained properly, didn’t know the menu correctly and therefore the consistency was awful.  We parted ways after about 3 months and then we hired another Chef and another and another.  We went through 6 Chefs in the first two years.

more to come…….

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