No one goes into the hospitality business to be hated. The most unsettling and least lovable aspect of this two-tined enterprise — the starting of, and the writing about the starting of, a new restaurant — has been an unrelenting hate wave. I volunteered for these twin gigs, so I ask for neither a wide berth nor the slightest break. Somewhere along the way I forgot the old macrobiotic axiom: the bigger the front, the bigger the back.
Hate isn’t what it used to be. It’s been reduced to a handy-dandy stand-in for envy or dislike or befuddlement; you are a hater if you’re not a lover. Love isn’t what it used to be either; love is just an inapposite, skin-deep substitute for respect or a hug or a one-night collaboration. Maybe the texting world limits all profundity to monosyllables; shouldn’t we be grateful that genuine passions remain too complex for Twitter?
But it is love, alas, in its most post-post-modern incarnation as well as grandma’s heirloom sense, that makes any hospitable exchange work. Hate is something I am still digesting, slowly, with much Fernet Branca.
Herewith is a modest list of 100 people who have either announced their status as haters or have given ample clues.
1-4. The four people who created the Boycott Bruce Buschel’s Restaurant campaign on Facebook; they were inspired by my 100 rules for servers.
5. The woman who interviewed me for The East Hampton Star under the guise of being a reporter and then wrote an article as an embittered part-time waitress.
6. The man who sold me the property hates me. He wanted to be partners but settled on being the general contractor for the renovation. “Who knows this building better than I?” he asked. Turns out, almost everyone. After the town condemned the building, we parted ways.
7. When the old building was carted away, I gave the next general contractor $10,000 to pay the carting company. Months later, I got a bill and a threatening letter from the carting company; it had never been paid. Its people hated me. Until I paid them.
8. I confronted the general contractor, and now he hates me. (Don’t try to make sense of this.)
9. My dear friend in Florida hates me. He is semi-retired and sees only the activity and excitement in my life — none of the frustration, risk, sleeplessness, obsession or anxiety. My Florida friend is not alone; several other friends share his limited view. They all remind me of the pickpocket who meets the Buddha and sees only his pockets. (Make this 9 through 14.)
15. My drumming teacher hates me. He has a samba band, a jazz quartet and a few other musical groups that wanted to play Southfork Kitchen. But I traded in the cabaret license for a full-service restaurant license way back when. No live music. Unless you can play spoons.
16. The antique wood dealer down the road hates me. When his counterpart in Connecticut wanted half the price, and the wood had the same provenance, I went north.
17-29. Freddy, on a Web site called the League of Ordinary Gentlemen, wants to slap my face, lock me up and make me serve “self-absorbed, socially retarded yuppoid nothings…for eternity.” He had the good sense to omit his last name but include mine in a headline that The Times won’t let me publish. If you Google me, you’ll find Freddy on the first page. (He also has a battalion of like-minded commenters, which we have humbly abridged to a symbolic dirty dozen.)
30. Josh Lulov hates me. He’s the 10-year-old boy who chases butterflies in left field as the main character in my novel about Little League. I have been inattentive to Josh, and he lets me know.
31. When a Buddhist woman from my wife’s zendo saw me buying salmon, she lectured me for a good 15 minutes about the unsustainability of wild salmon and the unhealthiness of farmed salmon. She asked for a job as a part-time procurer for the restaurant. I stood there like a lox. She hates me.
32-36. The five Web site designers I did not hire.
37-42. The six logo designers I did not hire.
43-50. The eight chefs I did not hire.
51-59. The waiters and busboys who stopped by the restaurant and asked for jobs.
60-62. The two owners of Almond restaurant hate me. We talked in the winter about their becoming the chef and manager of my seafood house. We even had a name, Almondfish. The chef’s wife hated it (62). They got busy, our deal fell apart, but their bartender heard about the new place in town and is now my general manager, Kevin Tunney.
63-66. The four people I know who know the most about wine hate me. Each wanted to be the sommelier at the restaurant, or at least to purchase the wines. Kevin Tunney is doing that job. He loves wine too much to hate.
67-77. The 11 other owners in my rotisserie baseball league hate me. I am usually an active trading partner and a fair country kibitzer, but this season, mired in 10th place and distracted, I am M.I.A. in the A.D.L. (the American Dream League, second-oldest in the nation).
78-79. The man and woman who wanted to be pastry chefs hate me. We won’t have a pastry chef. Chef Isidori will take care of the sweets.
80. mj from Iowa hates me. mj represents an untold number of faithful blog readers: “This column was absolutely pointless. Now, I am actually rooting for your business to fail, if only to give the editor an excuse to stop printing your ramblings.”
81+. The editors who have to monitor my double-entendres, my scandalous accusations and my tendencies to veer off course, way off course.
82. My wife hates me. I don’t blame her. We cannot go to a bistro or farmer’s market or tennis match without being peppered with questions, résumés and shop talk. Who knew that being an entrepreneur would be even more indulgent and selfish than being a writer?
83-84. One son hates that I write so ungingerly about a high-end restaurant when so many people are getting crunched by the Big Recession. The other son hates that many of his friends in the downtown restaurant game either ostracize him because of this blog or quote it incessantly.
85. The architect who drew up the renovation hates me. When I hired TBD Design Studio, he turned green with envy and eventually left the project. Our conversations went like this:
“I can design this restaurant,” he would say.
“But these kids bring a Brooklyn attitude to their work,” I would say.
“Hey, I come from Brooklyn, too.”
“Yeah, sure, when the Dodgers played there.”
86. The carpenter on my softball team hates me because my current general contractor will not hire him because of an old feud. Small towns are rife with old feuds — ex-partners, ex-lovers, ex-teachers, current cops, creditors, debtors and the fruit of family trees that spread across centuries.
87. The guy who was supposed to design and install the bar hates me. I couldn’t wait for him while he served time in the county clink on a D.U.I. charge. I wrote a post about him and the delay, but it was too sympathetic for The Times to run. People hate drunk drivers even more than prolix bloggers.
88. The local Coca-Cola guy hates me. He called me and told me so after I wrote about his manners. Many sales people hate me because I opted to buy from their competitors. Micros. Sysco. Crescendo Audio. Fishers Furniture. Crossland Courier. Wes Design & Supply. Zesco Products.
89-91. The three artists who approached me about hanging their work in the restaurant hate me. We are a restaurant, I told them, not a gallery.
92. The fireplace guy hates me. He was nice until he wanted me to sign a contract that held me personally responsible for all costs. I balked. It was strictly business, I told him, nothing personal. He balked.
93. Rebecca Marx, a writer for The Village Voice, hates me. “Working as a waiter at his establishment will be the service industry’s equivalent of being a first-year cadet at the Citadel,” she wrote.
94. George Hirsch hates me. He is a respected chef with a television show. He wrote me a nice e-mail message that I never answered. I have failed to answer many e-mail messages. My apologies to all of the readers I have unintentionally offended, slighted, snubbed or overlooked.
95-98. The neighbors who are sick and tired of the sights and sounds of construction at 7 a.m. and have a ton of traffic, human and vehicular, to look forward to in the months and years ahead hate me.
99. Someone out there hates me because he or she always wanted to have a small restaurant that served honest food in a friendly environment but never quite found the time or energy or capital to make that dream come true. You’re not a hater, not really, just uncomfortable with all these feelings about all of this highfalutin’ foodie talk in The New York Times.
100+. Let this one final number symbolize all the haters who would prefer I write only about the business at hand — the hard indisputable numbers of small finance — instead of the personal experiences and observations. Also, let this ever-mounting number represent the commenters who consider me a dilettante or interloper, a verbose fraud, a bore, a bourgeois prig, a bad writer, a waster of space, a privileged narcissist or just a good old-fashioned blowhard. I am glad you have not been shy in expressing your opinions. I will toast you on opening night.