CHAPTER TWO: A LOVE LETTER
Below is an excerpt from my upcoming memoir, The Girl With the Duck Tattoo. The opening chapter begins with me barfing into a stainless steel toilet in the corner of a crowded holding cell in Pigeon Forge, TN. The second chapter jumps back in time to describe how my life was some time before, for contrast. While editing, I realized this chapter feels like a love letter. So here it is. It’s not the most exciting of the chapters, but it’s the one that makes me the most nostalgic (and also inspired for what may be to come). With love, Sarma
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CHAPTER TWO - NEW YORK CITY
Rewind a couple of years from this rural Tennessee jail and you’d find me in New York City, the co-creator and owner of a unique and highly acclaimed restaurant in Manhattan called Pure Food and Wine. I was 33 when we opened our doors in the summer of 2004. Despite the city’s notoriously competitive and challenging restaurant market, with its sky-high rent and operating expenses, we’d always done well. We weathered the 2008 downturn that took down many other restaurants in New York City, even some long-established ones, and followed that with an upswing. We withstood the recession better than many other high-end restaurants because we were different. If you wanted to consume aesthetically pleasing, organic, raw-vegan food paired with good wine and creative sake cocktails in a sexy restaurant setting (or a dreamy garden in the warmer months) we were your only option.
Our garden was part of what made us special. The outside was more spacious than the inside. Outdoor space is a premium for Manhattan restaurants, and ours was further valuable in that the space was private—behind the restaurant, surrounded by other buildings. Compared to the more common sidewalk cafes with pedestrians and traffic whizzing by, our guests could sit in relative quiet under a canopy of trees, the branches strung with glowing white lights. Also, unlike most outdoor seating, we didn’t have cheap plastic or metal furniture; instead, the tables were rich brown wood and the chairs were the folding wooden Parisian-sidewalk-cafe variety, the seats and backs of which were cushioned in bright cherry red. We’d paneled the walls along the edge of the garden with dark ipe (pronounced “ee-pay”) wood and used the same to build out banquet seating along that perimeter. Those banquets were covered with long, burgundy cushions and matching pillows. Our cloth napkins were a farmhouse-style: off-white cotton with a burgundy stripe. Back then we’d had to request these specially from the linen company, since no other restaurants used them. Nowadays, they’re everywhere, and I still like to think we started that napkin trend.
During regular service, all the tables were set with place settings, wine glasses, and votive candles. There was an L-shaped outdoor bar topped with a thick slab of dark stained wood surrounded by eight hand-made square wood stools. We had the same ones at our indoor bar, made for us—along with the tables—by an old Estonian man with a woodshop all the way east on Avenue C. (I kind of loved that man; he reminded me of my Latvian father, with a similar accent and mannerisms.) The garden was generally peaceful and comfortable, amidst the vibrant green of the surrounding and overhead leaves, rich-colored wood, burgundy covered banquets, bright red seat pillows, and candlelight. The effect was naturally seductive.
The vibe was similar on the inside: custom-made wood tables, chairs upholstered in bright cherry red, the same ipe wood covered part of the walls, while the rest was painted a fiery burnt orange. There was no artwork other than three photographs, hung together on one wall, of a very precocious-looking duck. Low-ceilinged and candlelit, the inside had a warm and inviting energy. The glossy wood-topped bar was near the front of the restaurant beside the host stand. Four wood-framed glass doors opened all the way up in the summer to face our small front patio with seating for eight to ten. This area was three steps down from the sidewalk and bordered with an iron fence. The semi-subterranean feel added to its cozy vibe.
People sometimes had a hard time finding the restaurant. Our signage was a simple bronze metal “pure food and wine” lit from above to give it a subtle glow. Irving Place, the street on which it was located, was astonishingly quiet considering its location just one block from the very busy Union Square. Our next-door neighbor was the more brightly lit Mario Batali-owned Casa Mono, with illuminated colorful signage and a prominent corner location. Around that corner, Casa Mono had a casual little bar called Bar Jamon, and then a few small storefronts beyond was our juice bar and takeaway spot, followed by a windowed kitchen, with an entrance for staff or deliveries. Our spaces were all connected in the back, forming an L-shaped property which wrapped around those owned and operated by Mario Batali’s restaurant group. It was convenient because I could come and go through the entrances on either street.
Batali’s Spanish-themed restaurant and bar couldn’t have been more different from us; they were known for organ meats, with a big grill up front at Casa Mono, and a giant cured pig’s leg of jamon displayed prominently in the window of Bar Jamon. Meanwhile, our menu featured only plant foods, nearly all of it raw. I realize this description hardly makes our menu sound appealing, but our food was really good: vibrant, flavorful, beautiful and also, as a bonus, healthy. To this day, I’ve never tried a non-dairy ice cream as good as ours. It wasn’t just good compared to other vegan ice creams; it was good compared to all ice creams. People couldn’t reconcile how it could be so rich and creamy yet contain zero cream, or milk, or eggs. At a food event during our first year open, renowned chef Michael Lamonaco, having passed by our table and picked up a sample of our ice cream, came running back waving the tiny cup and spoon at me to tell me, “This is amazing! You are on to something big with this!”
And I think he was right.
Our ice cream sundaes were so good, and I take small comfort knowing that they were at least visually immortalized in photos on Instagram, along with a lot of our regular and rotating dishes. Or the tiny little savory tarts we sent out with the tasting menus: pecan, black pepper, and pinot noir tart shells filled with herbed cashew cheese, caramelized shallots, marinated black trumpet mushrooms, with a gooey apricot-Riesling sauce. I can taste that combination of flavors and textures now in my mind. My insides ache when I think about all this, and of what it felt like sitting at the candlelit bar, marinating in the good vibes of that restaurant, safe and sound.
We frequently benefited from low expectations. It was common to hear of someone being dragged to the restaurant by a friend, assuming they were going to hate it and expecting to dial for a pizza delivery as soon as they walked out the door, who had instead been totally blown away. I loved it when this happened. Or, when we got overflow from next door, since Casa Mono and Bar Jamon were both small spaces with limited seating and tended to be very busy.
The second summer Pure Food and Wine was open, a middle-aged couple introduced themselves, excitedly telling me that they’d first wandered into the restaurant about six months prior after intending to eat at Casa Mono but finding the wait too long. So they figured, Why not try this place next door? They hadn’t realized it was meat-free until after they’d been seated in the garden, but since the setting was so beautiful, they figured they’d stay and give it a try. Why not. That dinner, they explained to me, was revelatory; they’d loved the food, felt unusually good afterwards, and acknowledged that they could stand to lose a few pounds. From that day forward, they shifted their diets to incorporate more fruits and vegetables and cut out most meat and dairy. They came back to the restaurant often. “I’ve dropped thirty pounds!” the man exclaimed, patting his belly. Then, moving his hand a couple inches in front of his stomach: “It used to come out to here!”
I loved stories like this. The accidental happy converts.
“One Lucky Duck” was the name of the brand I’d launched one year after Pure Food and Wine opened, at the same time that I began to formally split apart from my original collaborator in the restaurant—just as our cookbook, Raw Food Real World, was published.
Timed with the book’s release, I launched an e-commerce site: oneluckyduck.com. It was an online store for our cookies, snacks, and other products, summarized by our tagline: “the best of everything for the ultimate raw and vegan lifestyle.” We carried all the otherwise hard-to-find ingredients to make the recipes in the book as well as skin care products and supplements. The site also housed my blog, where I posted essays, often getting very personal about my aspirations and my struggles. My openness was a bit unusual but it had a way of making my readers feel like they knew and understood me.
I also renamed our juice bar, “One Lucky Duck Juice and Takeaway.” It was a small and cozy spot with counter service offering fresh juices and shakes, a takeaway menu that mostly mirrored our lunch menu, and a rotating variety of desserts, cookies, and sweets displayed in a glassed-in pastry case. A freezer in the back housed pints of our hugely popular dairy-free ice cream. Three small tables lined one wall, above which hung three matching photographs of baby ducks from the same photographer who’d photographed the big duck in the dining room. The opposing wall was lined with shelves that held various products, including our own shelf-stable cookies and snacks, made and packaged by hand and branded with the distinctive One Lucky Duck logo.
In the earlier years of the business, we sold One Lucky Duck branded snacks wholesale to other stores in and around New York City, and then to the local Whole Foods stores, then expanding to over thirty Whole Foods locations, many in California.
By 2009, I published—this time on my own—a second colorful hardcover cookbook. Both books were sold in stores, on Amazon, and via our own locations. They sold quite well compared to most cookbooks authored by non-TV chefs. In 2010 we opened a second One Lucky Duck takeaway location across town in the Chelsea Market complex. Later, my younger half-brother—who had worked at the restaurant for a while—opened a third One Lucky Duck outpost in Texas, where he lived. We were on a trajectory to keep growing.
The logo for the company was, of course, a duck. The one I had tattooed on my arm: I believed in my brand so much that I branded myself. We’d grown quite a following and sold tote bags, t-shirts, and other products emblazoned with the logo. They were popular: it thrilled me that people loved our One Lucky Duck bags and carried them around, effectively advertising for us. We gave colored One Lucky Duck stickers away at the counters and included them in each online order; customers would send photos of them stuck on various places (laptops, kids lunchboxes, bicycles, and so on). Again, more free advertising.
The response was encouraging. I felt with absolute certainty that we were building a movement, the aim of which was to make a healthy way of living—one that also benefited animals and the environment—appealing in a mainstream way. We were stubbornly nonjudgmental in both our style and output, and therefore attracted an audience made up of all kinds of people, not just hardcore vegans or vegetarians. Our customers were young and old, male and female, famous and anonymous, fashion plate and hippie—but usually they were of means. It always frustrated me that our food and products were so expensive; our clean, unprocessed, and all-organic ingredients and New York City rent made that unavoidable.
Pure Food and Wine and One Lucky Duck were covered consistently in the press, and nearly always favorably. Mainly this was because we were seen—especially at the beginning—as groundbreaking. No one had opened an upscale raw vegan restaurant in New York before; the only other like it had been in Marin County, California, and had closed by the time we opened.
I was particularly proud of how the media ranked us alongside other top-tier NYC restaurants. Forbes magazine annually listed the best restaurants in NYC and we were included four times in the three-star category, among names like Gotham Bar & Grill, Eleven Madison Park, The Modern, Veritas, wd-50, Blue Hill, and Babbo. Press mentions were often due to the frequent sightings of famous people at our tables. During interviews, I felt squeamish when inevitably asked to name celebrities who had come in to dine; I disciplined myself to name only those who had already been identified in the press as having visited, preferring to respect people’s privacy. Still, it was fun seeing actors, musicians, politicians, athletes, and other celebrities at our tables or picking up an order from the takeaway.
Sometimes I’d hear about someone noteworthy having visited the restaurant without my having known about it. I was having dinner one night at an Italian restaurant in the West Village with a friend of mine who’d acted in a few films. Emma Stone was seated at another table with her then-boyfriend, Andrew Garfield. My friend had acted in a film with Stone, and on our way out he introduced me to her. She shook my hand and, with a look of something registering in her brain, said, “Oh my gosh, I love your restaurant!” I reeled a bit from that encounter; when you’re not used to being recognized, recognition like that—from someone famous—feels funny, in a good way. Of course, I probably had a One Lucky Duck tote bag—my regular stand in for a purse—over my shoulder, giving her a hint. But it struck me that I’d never realized she visited the restaurant. Some people were in and out under the radar. New York City was kind of like that; you’d be standing in line at the grocery store and realize the frazzled woman ahead of you with no makeup on and a fussy toddler in the cart was Kate Winslet. No big deal.
There was always outside interest in expanding either Pure Food and Wine, One Lucky Duck, or both. Some of it wasn’t serious, or else it was from a random person pleading with me to franchise in whatever random small town they were from, which made no sense. But most of the interest was incredibly flattering and sometimes intriguing. Rob Trujillo, bassist from Metallica (and a major crush of mine), told me that he would be my investor if I’d open a Pure Food and Wine in Northern California. Gisele Bundchen, when she lived across town in the West Village, repeatedly said she’d be my partner if we opened a One Lucky Duck near her townhouse. I don’t know how serious these offers were but they seemed reasonably so, and why I didn’t take them up is another story.
There was interest internationally, too: a prominent group from Japan was extremely eager to bring my entire concept to Tokyo and, after meeting a few times in New York, I’d flown over to Tokyo for a few days to see their operations and tour the city. They took great care of me and treated me like a dignitary. So did a group of potential Turkish investors. I was flown first-class to Istanbul, picked up in a fancy car and installed in a low key very cool boutique hotel (which they owned), and had one of the best short trips of my life. When talking business, the investors interacted with me as a serious businesswoman; when showing me around the city and taking me to restaurants and bars, they treated me like a sister. When it snowed unexpectedly one morning, they called up to my room inquiring about my shoe size so they could buy me boots. (A heartwarming offer that I graciously declined—the snow wasn’t that bad.
On one of the days of the trip, we’d taken a short flight over to the seaside resort town of Bodrum, where this group also owned a resort property. We had dinner with colleagues there at a waterfront restaurant, drank lots of wine, and one of the women at the table read my coffee cup—the way one might read someone’s palm. It’s a Turkish thing, I think. After you finish your Turkish coffee, you place the cup upside down for a few moments. Then, someone who knows how to read coffee cups will flip the cup over and analyze the pattern made by the last grainy drops of coffee sliding down the insides of the cup, much as one might look at the lines on your palm. She looked into my cup, furrowed her brow, and said, “I see a deep sadness here.”
I swallowed hard to suppress something that wanted to come up and out. I didn’t want to cry. It was a quiet moment at the table, which someone mercifully disrupted with the start of new conversation. I felt like this woman had just looked into my soul.
From the outside, it might have appeared as if I led a truly glamorous lifestyle. Traveling internationally in first-class on those occasions certainly made me feel like I was, and, on those trips, I most definitely was living glamorously. But the rest of the time, not so much. I unpacked from Istanbul in my tiny, dusty, chaotically messy studio. The idea that I was frequenting the best organic spas, doing yoga every day, or regularly jetting off to fabulous vacations in Belize with a Louis Vuitton bag packed full of designer resort wear was just that: an idea. I was not doing those things. But I sometimes got the feeling people thought I was.
I was doing work I cared for deeply, surrounded by people I cared for deeply, and I could eat the most delicious and healthy food all day long. I was lucky and with so much to be grateful for. At the same time, I was working like crazy, often sleep-deprived, and sometimes also deeply unhappy—depressed, I realize now. I longed for things to be different. My normal state was to be outwardly upbeat and gracious while inwardly overwhelmed, often sad, and sometimes overcome with a sense of quiet desperation. Given what later transpired and what I know now, I would give anything to go back to that time of purity and opportunity, messy as it was. Back to the cozy and safe nest of my restaurant family, and to my regular seat against the wall at the end of our candlelit bar, or my table in the back corner of the dining room, basking in the good energy of that place, lost in the background music of the soundtrack—always compiled either by me or by my longtime bar manager, Joey.
Joey was nearly as much a part of that restaurant as I was. He was hired the first year we opened—one of many staff who had been witness to, and part of, lots of changes and transition, seeing me fight for our place and often fighting alongside me for it. Many others who started early on and stayed for years were also there to witness major events in my life, like the acrimonious and tabloid-chronicled split between me and my original partner in the restaurant, Matthew, who had also been my live-in boyfriend for four years. Or when my cat died and they comforted me. Together we weathered the recession and two brutal hurricanes, one of which shut down lower Manhattan for over a week. We also later survived a corrupt CFO and attempted coup. “Attempted coup” sounds dramatic, and in fact most were unaware of it, but I nearly lost my beloved brand to the control of a couple of fat corporate guys who smelled the untapped value and thought they knew better than I did. Never, I vowed, would I take my eyes off the road again.
Meanwhile, with so many artists and musicians on the staff, I went to as many of their shows and performances as I could, trying to be a good Mom. In the early years, I stayed at the restaurant late drinking wine with them after hours; when I didn’t stay it warmed my heart knowing they were hanging out late into the night even in my absence. One could have said I was naïve, letting them take advantage of my lax ways, but I didn’t see it that way. I was glad they wanted to stay in each other’s company. If it cost me a few thousand dollars a year in extra wine, so be it.
For years I lived directly across the street; it was extremely convenient. Sometimes, when the lines to the bathroom were too long, I could just run across the street to my own. Or, if I called in the morning and no one was answering when a host should have been on duty, I ran over in my pajamas to answer the phones until he or she finally showed up. I remember going to sleep one cool summer night with my window open and hearing the distinctive loud laugh of Jeri, one of our longtime and best servers, hanging out with others on the small front patio. This was among the best and most comforting sounds to fall asleep to. It reminded me of when I was little and would go to sleep to the sounds of a dinner party downstairs, the soothing melody of the wine-fueled laughter of my parents and their guests easing me into my dreams.
Like many restaurant families, we were an incestuous lot; but we were not a dysfunctional family. Everyone genuinely cared for one another and for the business. From time to time there was a father figure of sorts in the picture, like Adam, a bookkeeper turned general manager who was unusual in that he didn’t socialize much with the staff. But he was well-liked and ran a tight ship, keeping everyone accountable for costs and reining in my permissiveness by proposing sensible rules to which I’d grudgingly agree. He was likewise supportive of our generosity in structured ways, like giving raises to hourly staff where and when we could, or like when we once doled out $30K in holiday staff bonuses simply because we’d had a good year. I carried a ton of personal debt during these restaurant years (debt from a prior relationship) but I wanted our family to feel supported.
I was also—always—deeply and firmly optimistic. I knew we were headed for much bigger things and I’d eventually pay those debts. I knew the growth I privately envisioned would come about and that I’d stay in the driver’s seat. I knew I’d never sell out or let someone else dictate who we were or change our style and culture merely for the sake of inching up profits. It wasn’t about money. As cliché as it sounds, it was about changing the world. I wanted to be part of a meaningful shift, a global shift, towards the consumption of more plants and fewer animals, promoting healthy and compassionate living and abating destruction and suffering. I wanted our work and our brand to matter, to make a difference. And I wanted it to outlast me.
