I own a dinner delivery business, and although I work in a commissary kitchen, my storefront is based entirely online. Over the years, I’ve spent a lot of time chatting with seniors, helping them navigate the internet. After I walk them through the checkout page, I’ll say, “Technology is overrated.” My wife calls it hand-holding.

Life wasn’t always like this. Before the pandemic, seniors had things under control. If they wanted to order pizza or make a restaurant reservation, they picked up the phone. Need a plumber or a prescription filled? Everything was at their fingertips. It was called a phone book.

COVID put the kibosh on all that. Chat boxes replaced 800 numbers, hieroglyphic QR codes appeared out of nowhere, and everyday transactions like scheduling a haircut turned into a drop-down clustermuck of styles, cuts, shampoos, waxes, and nose hair trimmings.

As AI creeps into our lives like an eccentric genius with a drinking problem, there are pockets of resistance – mostly older folks – who still use the cell phone as an old-fashioned telephone. And after a lifetime of mingling and chatting with guests at brick-and-mortar restaurants, I’m here for them.

Granted, when my cell phone rings, I might be cooking 30 pounds of shrimp scampi, or juggling 15 quiches in the oven. But I will always answer or return the call. Often, the conversations start with, Why are there 22 Pasta Bolognese in my shopping cart? Or, Why were our meals delivered to a house we lived in ten years ago? And the all-too-common: Did my order go through?

I’m not tech-savvy, but I am a tech survivalist. I know just enough quick fixes to avoid catastrophe (close the tab, refresh the page, clear your cart). If the situation is code-red and the system’s crashing, I have an expert to call: a software engineer with an Ivy League education and a big tech job in New York, the young man who built my website ten years ago when he was a teenager: my son, Noah.

Once the troubleshooting saga is over, I’ll use the time to ask questions. Where are you from originally? How long have you lived in Denver? Have you ever been to my old cafe at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts? (A humble brag).

I am amazed at how many people have lived in the same neighborhood or house for fifty years or more. There are multiple generations of Denverites who went to the same high school! I also hear from people who moved during the great Colorado “migration” from 1992 to 1999. (My wife and I fall into that category; apparently native Coloradans still refer to us as transplants.)

None of this local lore would ever come up in a chatbot.

An added benefit of the owner answering the phone is that our conversation often turns into a suggestion box. “I’m all ears,” I respond. Can you add meatloaf to the menu? “Uh, no, maybe go to King Soopers for that.” Judith’s sister is visiting, and she loves Key Lime Pie. Can you add it to next week’s menu? I’ll check with the bakers. Or I’m hosting book club for ten people on Saturday; can you cater? Sorry! We’re too busy to cater.

I am not a Luddite. Email, texting, and my website will always play a prominent role in my life and business (although there are times I’ve wanted to throw my laptop through the window). Yet answering the phone allows me to build relationships in a way that technology will never replace. There’s room for both.

I used to think that in an ideal world, customers would sail seamlessly through Jays2go.com, the phone wouldn’t ring much, and I could devote more time to things like pickleball, ice cream runs, and, well, writing. But then I’d miss out on catching up with our customers, hearing about their families, careers, how they’re tired of cooking, and that they love our fish, how we grill our steaks, and all the great salads, vegetarian and gluten-free options.

Best of all, when they tell me how JAYS2GO has changed their lives, I am so glad I picked up the phone.

Jay Solomon is the owner and chef behind JAYS2GO, a Denver-based gourmet dinner delivery service. When he’s not in the kitchen, he writes about food, family, sports, growing up, and the highs and lows of restaurant life. His business website is www.jays2go.com. Jay’s wife, Emily, contributed to this story.

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So what meal have I made every Sunday morning for my family for the past 20+ years?

You guessed it: pancakes. Fluffy, crispy at the edges, more rotund than round, slightly lopsided, and glistening when they come off the stove. Made from scratch, the same way, every time, for as long as I can remember.

This breakfast ritual dates back to weekend sleepovers at my grandmother’s. I’d wake up to the buttery smell of pancakes coming off the griddle and saunter downstairs to see a stack of golden brown flapjacks staring at my eight-year-old drooling face. After theatrically swirling the maple syrup, I’d dig in, coming up for air only when my grandmother asked, “You want seconds?” Yes, please!

With parents dashing off to work during the week, my typical breakfast was wolfing down a bowl of soggy corn flakes or catching the bus while an egg sandwich dripped down the side of my chin. Sleepover pancakes offered a chance to get pampered, talk about the weather rolling in, and guess where the sirens or strange cars were headed the night before.

When my wife and I had four kids of our own, our morning routine began with on-your-marks-get-set-go! We raced to and from multiple schools, the temple, and my restaurant, and also carpooled to every sport involving a ball. As the kids grew older, breakfasts evolved from a rotation of five boxes of cereals to egg burritos and egg-and-bacon sandwiches gobbled on the run.

I longed for a time to pause and gather without looking at the clock or running out the door.

I had my answer. Pancakes.

Early in my career, I was a recipe developer for food magazines (long story, it was a side gig). As much as I cherished my grandmother’s Bisquick flapjacks – appropriate for the time – I created a scratch recipe using whole wheat flour and cornmeal. My version is lightly sweetened and more wholesome than flimsy pancake mixes from a box, and the cornmeal adds a cornbread-y nuance. And if you ask me, hold the butter and syrup – they are perfect as is!

You’d think after spending all week cooking in a loud and frenetic restaurant kitchen, getting up early on a Sunday morning to make pancakes would be the last thing I’d want to do. Yet I found tranquility in measuring and whisking the ingredients, checking the consistency, and dropping the batter onto the sizzling pan. When the edges are crisp and a peek underneath reveals a caramel mosaic, it’s showtime, baby! With a quick flick, I send the pancakes somersaulting through the air.

As the aroma wafts throughout the house, the best part was listening to the kids, half-asleep, yelling down from their bedrooms.

“Dad, you making pancakes?”

“I’m on it!”

“Pancakes ready yet?”

“One minute!”

“We’re waiting!”

“They’re up!”

Soon, one by one, the kitchen table fills up, and maple syrup gets passed around. Chatter ebbs and flows between bites. Everyone gets seconds. No one rushes for the door.

When our kids left for college and careers, they took the scribbled-down recipe with them. And every once in a while, our family chat lights up with photos of their own version of the Solomon family pancakes.

Most chefs have a signature dish or two, the Bolognese or lobster bisque that everyone talks about. I probably have twenty (haha). Over forty years in the restaurant business, and the dish I’m most famous for in our household has never appeared on any of my menus.

Here’s the recipe.

Jay’s Family Pancakes

1 ¾ cups whole wheat flour

¼ cup coarse cornmeal
3 tablespoons sugar

2 teaspoons baking powder

2 teaspoons salt

2 large eggs

2 cups whole milk

2 tablespoons canola oil

In a medium mixing bowl, blend the dry ingredients. In another bowl, whisk the eggs, add the milk and oil, and whisk again. Gently combine the wet and dry ingredients. Let the batter stand for three minutes. (This allows the leavening agents to do their magic).

Heat a lightly oiled 8-inch pan over medium heat. Ladle about ½ cup batter onto the pan. Flip when the edges are caramelized, and a peek underneath reveals the bronzed mosaic surface.

Yield: 7- 8 pancakes

Notes: Breads and baked goods made with whole-wheat flour tend to be denser than those made with refined white flour. To compensate, whisk the eggs with the milk and oil before folding in the dry ingredients. If the batter is too thick, add a few tablespoons of milk. (Consistency may vary based on the brand of flour and cornmeal.

Jay Solomon is the owner and chef behind JAYS2GO, a Denver-based gourmet dinner delivery service. When he’s not in the kitchen, he writes about food, family, sports, growing up, and the highs and lows of restaurant life. His business website is www.jays2go.com.

Whoever said life is about the journey, not the destination, never drove a rental truck with no rearview mirror across flatland Middle America, on a beeline for Colorado. The trip was 100% about the destination.

After ten years of running a restaurant in a small college town in central New York, I’d grown tired of the up-and-down business cycles. Ithaca’s economy was tied to Cornell and Ithaca College’s school calendar. When the students left town, they took their parents’ credit cards with them. I could overlook a quiet wintry Tuesday when snowplows outnumbered cars on the roads, but when Ithaca turned into a ghost town during every single winter and summer break, I was at the end of my rope.

My wife Emily and I yearned for a fresh start. We put together a wish list and visited cities across the country in search of a new home.

One place quickly stood out: Denver.

When we stepped off the plane and saw the Rocky Mountains and glaring sun, we were smitten. Strolling down the 16th Street Mall, a mile-long stretch of restaurants and bars, we felt the happy hour energy spilling onto the sidewalks. A few blocks away, my favorite musical, Broadway’s touring “Phantom of the Opera,” was in town. Walking around Denver’s Wash Park, strangers smiled and nodded as if they knew us.

The clincher: the city’s historic neighborhoods featured houses we could actually afford.

By the summer of 1997, we were ready to take the plunge. On July 31, Emily and I huddled in Ithaca’s AAA office and purchased a TripTik, a spiral-bound strip booklet of maps showing our 1600-mile route to Denver, mile-by-mile highlighted in orange marker, passing through Buffalo, Erie, Cleveland, Chicago, Des Moines, Omaha, and finally, Denver.

The next day, we jammed our belongings into a seventeen-foot rental truck, said our goodbyes, and headed west.

That’s the sanitized version of our embarkation to Colorado.

Leaving was easy; saying goodbye was hard.

Having spent most of my life in central New York, I was excited to move to a bigger city, but also intimidated. Life was comfortable; there wasn’t much traffic, everyone knew everybody, and everywhere you needed to go was less than ten minutes away. We had Cayuga Lake, the famous gorges, and the Saturday farmers market, where I once sold cookies out of the back of my Chevette.

It was a small town, but it was my small town.

Until it wasn’t.

By the time I turned 37, it seemed like almost everyone around me had left. My sister Lisa left her entry-level job at the university and moved to Colorado, sight unseen. A week later, she landed a higher-paying job in an executive suite. My childhood friend, Joe Snyder, departed for CU Boulder and rarely came back. Years later, when he visited during the holidays, he’d corner me in my restaurant and give me a hundred reasons why I should move to Denver—the downtown, Coors Field, the skiing and hiking, and a trendy neighborhood called Lodo.

Even my father bolted west for Las Vegas as soon as he retired.

I had a nice run with Jay’s Clinton Hall Cafe; the townies supported me as best they could during slow times. My restaurant and cookbooks were regularly featured in the Ithaca Journal and weekly papers—the “local-boy-makes-good’ stories. But there was a gnawing feeling that it was time to leave.

After we loaded our rental truck with moving boxes, computer desks, and bedframes, we made our last trip to Myers Heights to say our goodbyes.

As we pulled up, my 85 year old grandmother was outside sitting under the carport.

“Well, this is it,” I said, getting out of the rental truck.

“So you’re really leaving?” she asked.

“I guess so.”

“You’ll be coming back, right?” she asked.

“Of course, I’ll be back soon to visit,” I said.

“Why do you have to leave?” She asked, still in disbelief that her last grandchild was leaving. This wasn’t the first time she brought this up. It was a sore subject.

“I think I’ll have a better chance in a bigger city, opening a restaurant and such. There are more people, more stuff to do. Lisa’s there; she likes it,” I said, my voice trailing off.

“Okay then. Bless yourself. Drive safe.” With that, we hugged, and I could smell the kitchen where I spent so many Sundays, eating stuffed grape leaves out of a pot on the stovetop.

And off we went.

The cross-country drive stretched over four days. By the time we reached Denver, our TripTik — dog-eared, coffee-stained, consulted like a sacred treasure map, guiding us through eight states and a dozen rest stops—dropped us into the middle of rush hour and tapped out. Our final destination, an apartment complex called the Breakers, was nowhere to be found on the map. Just a big fat orange blob circling the “Civic Center.”

I did what any normal adult from a small town would do. Stopped at a traffic light, inching through gridlock, I rolled down the window and yelled to the driver next to us.

“Hey, how do we get to the Breakers?”

“Where?”

“The Breakers. On Mississippi Ave.”

“No idea!” And off they’d go. Then I’d try again at the next light.

“How do we get to Mississippi Ave?”

“East or West?”

I turned to Emily. “Is there an East or West Mississippi?”

She checked the map. “East!”

Too late. Off they went.

Eventually, we found a mini mart and pulled over for gas. In that era, mini marts were informal visitor centers. You could always find someone who looked like Ranger Rick behind the counter, offering to give you good directions.

Or so I thought.

“Go south on Colorado, east on Alameda, and southeast on Leetsdale.”

I frantically scribbled it down on a piece of scrap paper.

“Uhm, is that a right or left on Colorado?”

“Right, I guess. It’s south on Colorado.” Ranger Rick looked at me like I was an idiot.

After we left, I turned to Emily. “Sorry, I didn’t bring my fucking compass.”

“Calm down, Jay. I heard people use the mountains as a guide. They’re always pointing west.”

“I’m going to burn that TripTik!”

Almost 100 hours after we left our past behind, we landed in our new home.

Jay Solomon is the owner and chef behind JAYS2GO, a Denver-based gourmet dinner delivery service. When he’s not in the kitchen, he writes about food, family, sports, growing up, and the highs and lows of restaurant life. His business website is www.jays2go.com.

Joe Namath — Broadway Joe, mink coat, shaggy hair — stood in front of the cameras and guaranteed a New York Jets victory over the heavily favored Baltimore Colts in the Super Bowl. Then he went out, beat the Colts, and was carried off the field on his teammates’ shoulders.

The “Miracle Mets” —chronic losers whose games flickered on our black-and-white TV — shocked the baseball world by winning the World Series, one of the greatest upsets of all time.

I fell asleep listening to the Knicks on a staticky AM radio, rooting for Walt Frazier and Willis Reed to bring home one more trophy for the city – and for me, four hundred miles away.

All I had to do was win the fifty-yard dash at my grade school’s annual track and field day, and my life would be complete.

The fifty-yard dash was the only event that mattered. No one cared who won the three-legged race, tug of war, or obstacle course — those were birthday party games. The winner of the fifty-yard dash would instantly become the most popular kid in the grade.

When I dozed on the school bus, I dreamt of crossing the finish line, grabbing the blue ribbon, and getting carried off the field on my classmate’s shoulders, just like my New York City heroes.

There was a slight problem: I wasn’t born a natural athlete. Before I turned nine, I was more interested in thumbing through the Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedias than playing ball in the back yard. Only when my schoolyard pals started trading baseball and football cards and picking teams for kickball and dodgeball did I wonder, “What am I missing?“

I didn’t want to feel left out. So when Dad got home and opened to the sports page, I’d watch his face light up at the headlines. When he jumped up and cheered at the TV when his team scored a touchdown, or threw a fit when they blew a lead, that was real drama, not the “how was your day at school” conversation filler. The emotional tension between winning and losing was invigorating.

Determined to prove my mettle, I dedicated myself to winning the coveted 50-yard dash. The days leading up to field day, I randomly challenged kids to match races on the school’s asphalt playground. This was my so-called training phase.

We’d line up, and another kid would yell, “Ready, set, go!”, and I’d explode off the starting line.

“Run with reckless abandon!” I could hear our gym teacher, Mr Caliel, in the background. He wasn’t taking sides, but I knew he was talking to me.

I beat each kid handily.

When the big day finally arrived, I awoke to pelting rain. Not uncommon for upstate New York, but still, a cloud burst to my unrelenting enthusiasm.

There were parents in the bleachers. I didn’t know they were invited. My mom and dad worked all day. And were they actually cheering for kids stumbling through the sack race? Kids belly flopped over the high jump – that was worth clapping for?

I really needed to focus on my race. It was mine to win.

Wait, nobody told me the race was moved from the cinder track to the infield grass. I’m supposed to sprint on slippery, sliding wet grass?

Mr. Caliel gathered the runners together to go over the rules. Apparently, he had a starter gun - that was new. And who was the kid warming up doing jumping jacks? Nunzio? He wasn’t one of my recess pals –he just transferred here. Rumour was that he’d been held back a year.

So now I’m running against a fourth-grader?

I had a weird feeling in the pit of my stomach. My fortress of supreme confidence was starting to crumble.

The runners lined up. Mr. Caliel raised his starting pistol.

“On your mark!”

I crouched down. What the--? That kid, Nunzio, was in a three-point stance. Who does he think he is?
“Get set”!

My whole body tensed up, solid as a rock.

I heard a loud pop.

“Go!!”

In less than two seconds, about the time it takes me to go down a slide, I slipped and fell, face-first onto the mossy grass.

Nunzio zoomed by me, followed by the others.

Stunned, I got up and limped to the finish line.

The nine-year-old self in me came out in full force, and I broke down in tears. The tears turned into wheezing sobs.

I felt an arm around me, and a hug from another—my schoolyard pals. We were snarky to each other, always, until now.

Mr. Caliel handed out the ribbons. When he called me up for the dreaded yellow ribbon, I wanted to puke.

My humiliation was now complete. I threw the yellow ribbon in the trash.

In the weeks ahead, I gave up on sports. I swore off Joe Namath. Stopped watching the Mets. Reverting to my bookworm days, I hibernated in the library, buried in books about Mark Twain, Teddy Roosevelt, and JFK.

Then I stumbled on The Jim Ryun Story. Watching The Wide World of Sports on television on Saturdays, I’d heard about Jim Ryun; he was mythic. The first high school kid ever to break the four-minute mile. Later in college, he shattered world records, including the fastest mile ever run.

What got me, though, was Ryun’s rigorous training —he ran every day! And being from Kansas, he wasn’t flamboyant, like Broadway Joe, or a lovable underdog like the Mets. He was a different kind of role model: quietly confident, humble, and driven to excel.

I also discovered “the kick” —runners would cruise along for most of the race, saving energy, then unleash a furious sprint at the finish.

Gradually, the trauma of the 50-yard flop heard ‘round the school started to fade and burn itself out. From those embers of disappointment, something new emerged and caught fire inside me. I think it was called redemption.

I made up my mind.

Going into the fourth grade, the biggest race on track and field day was the fifth-of-a-mile, a full loop around the oval track. No one paid attention to the goofy softball throw or relay race (obviously). But the winner of the fifth-of-a-mile was held up on a pedestal, the real deal.

I hatched a plan.

My family lived on a country road with not much traffic. The school bus usually picked me up at the end of our driveway. Almost every day before the bus arrived, I’d practice running along the road’s shoulder, using the mailboxes at the end of driveways as markers. Eventually, I made it to the yield sign at the corner, about a quarter mile away.

Channeling Jim Ryun, I pushed myself to finish strong, even if it was only ten yards.

I trained stealthily for months leading up to track and field day. There was no more braggadocio -- I didn’t tell a soul, not even my parents. Although they had to wonder why their kid was waiting for the school bus ten minutes early every morning, when my previous habit was dashing out the door with an egg sandwich still in my mouth.

Running on cold, damp, often snowy mornings taught me things that ball sports could not. I wasn’t racing against Nunzio or my pals; I was learning about discipline, drive, and determination. Every mailbox I moved up to strengthened my resolve, small signposts on my quest for redemption.

The fourth-grade track and field day could not come soon enough. When it finally arrived, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

Mr. Caliel went over the rules. I shuffled my feet and acted nonchalant on the outside, but I was an inferno on the inside.

We lined up. The gun went off. Nunzio, the clear favorite, jumped out to the lead, no surprise.

On the first turn, I stayed behind in a gaggle of runners, letting Nunzio set the pace, hugging the inside.

On the back stretch, I ran wide, clearing a path. Pace yourself, breathe, stay patient. The pace was brisk, but I could handle it.

Nearing the far turn, it was now a two-man race, the pack far behind. Nunzio was starting to tire.

I was breathing down his neck – he was huffing and puffing.

Rounding on the outside, I caught up! We’re stride for stride!

On the final turn heading for home, fifty yards from the finish, I unleashed my secret weapon – the kick!

Barreling down the stretch like a crazed fourth grader, I bolted past Nunzio.

To the screams of the parents in the bleachers and my classmates along the track, I crossed the finish line and collapsed onto the infield grass.

This time, the smell of grass was exhilarating. I lay there, on my back, delirious from victory.

The rest is blurry. My pals picked me up off the ground. I’m pretty sure my classmates mobbed me. (That’s the version I’m going with.)

Mr. Caliel called the runners together. Known for his tough love and no-nonsense demeanor, even he was cracking a smile when he called me up for the blue ribbon.

Postscript:

There’s a popular theory that the core of your personality is formed by the time you’re three years old.

If that were the case, I would have become a librarian.

In reality, I entered one of the most competitive, creative, and physically grueling professions.

Forty years in the restaurant business, opening over a dozen places, I’ve seen my share of heartbreak. I won’t pretend that every setback in life had a happy ending. I do believe, however, the resilience and grit that it took to survive, and ultimately thrive, had roots in my quest for redemption — and the fleeting fame I achieved (ha!) — on the oval cinder track fifty-plus years ago, on a cloudless day in May.

Jay Solomon is the owner and chef behind JAYS2GO, a Denver-based gourmet dinner delivery service. When he’s not in the kitchen, he writes about food, family, sports, growing up, and the highs and lows of restaurant life. His business website is www.jays2go.com.

At 4:32 am on a humid summer morning, I jolted out of bed. I overslept my alarm on my first day back from a long-overdue vacation. I pulled on my chef’s coat, threw down a coffee, and flew out the door.

Twenty minutes later, I was inside the empty commissary kitchen. No one else was crazy enough to be there at that hour. I immediately began pushing heavy storage racks across the floor — mobile shelves stacked with oversized pots, jangling utensils, and about a hundred bottles of spices, oils, and vinegars.

Straining, I awkwardly pushed two racks at once.

Then, a lightning bolt coursed through my body. The right side went completely numb, starting with my cheek, extending down my arm, and fingers. My right leg buckled beneath me. I felt my face slam against the concrete floor.

Unable to move, I lay down, staring at the grimy wheels of a utility cart as the initial shock gave way to a surge of primal terror.

What is happening? Did I trip? Why can’t I feel anything?

With every passing second, my panic escalated.

Oh gawd – stand up! You’ve gotta stand up!

Slowly, my motionless body came back to life. I pressed my left hand against the floor, slid my left knee forward, and cautiously stood up. My fingers tingled, as if they’d fallen asleep. I took one step, then another.

I let out a huge sigh of relief.

Was I electrocuted? I turned around, hoping to see what could have tripped me? An errant electrical cord? A fallen mop head?

Nothing.

Confused, I gingerly walked into the main kitchen and stood in front of a bank of ovens.

Act normal, I told myself. If I act normal, everything must be okay. I looked down at my prep sheet: a full day of playing catch-up.

Grill eighty pounds of chicken. Seventy pounds of flank steak. Put up water for twenty pounds of penne.

Push, push, push, that’s what great chefs do. We battle through pain, adapt on the fly, and race against the clock. Gash your hand? Bandage it up; stitches can wait. We compare scars and burn marks and burnish our kitchen calamities. That’s our tribal code.

So I turned on the ovens and fired up the grill. Blue flames filled the stovetops. Overhead fans kicked on. Mise en place. Cutting boards. Knives. Towels. Gloves. The opening ritual momentarily calmed me.

The cavernous commissary was still eerily empty.

Who was I kidding? If I go down again, there’s no one to help. What, then?

I texted my wife. “Something really bad happened. The right side of my body went numb. I fell on my face. But I’m okay.”

Less than a minute later, the phone rang. I explained to her what happened and how I was running behind.

She was not amused. “Stop what you’re doing. We’re going to the ER.”

She picked me up and drove to the emergency room. Unmoored from reality, I texted my staff that I would be back later in the morning.

Mention “stroke-like symptoms” in the ER, and you’ll jump the line. I was whisked into a harshly lit white bay filled with a team of doctors, nurses, and beeping medical devices. Bewildered, I lay on a hospital table, not quite a bed, surrounded by a half circle of white coats and concerned faces.

They ordered a barrage of tests and urgently interrogated me. What time did you fall? How long did you lose feeling? Did you lose consciousness?

“It was around five. I felt paralyzed for maybe a minute.” One of the doctors did a quick calculation. “If this is a stroke, there’s a medication we can give you. But you’ve only got ten minutes to decide.

“Wait, what?”

“It’s a clot-busting drug.”

“Why only ten minutes?”

“It only works if it’s administered within three hours of a stroke. Your window is closing fast.”

“A magic pill?”

“Not quite a pill. An IV.”

“Ohhh. What’s the downside?”

“It only helps certain kinds of strokes, and we don’t know what caused your episode. And there’s a risk of internal bleeding.”

“What would you do?” I softly asked.

“I can’t answer that,” the doctor said.

I’ve been in the restaurant business my whole life. I live by the mantra of “every second counts.” Yet the sense of urgency displayed in my professional kitchen seemed like child’s play compared to the real crises confronting me in this emergency room.

The juxtaposition was glaring.

I felt weirdly okay. And the thought of being hooked up to an IV and bleeding out threw me off. “I’m not taking the drug,” I answered.

Without missing a beat, the stroke team went back to work: CT scans, blood draws, heart rate monitors, blood pressure, and pulse readings. They tickled my feet and shone a flashlight into my eyes.

I’d been to the emergency room plenty of times before with knife cuts, severe burns, and freak accidents. Usually, I got stitched up and sent on my way.

Not this time.

“Do you think I’ll go home today?” I figured it was worth a try.

“No. We need to hold you overnight. You need an MRI.”

Oh, man. Now I was spiraling. The trauma of suffering a stroke was replaced by the sober realization that my business might be closing indefinitely, a sentiment that felt trivial and myopic.

I moved to a private hospital room, and the waiting game began.

The next day, the doctor showed up with some news.

“You have an irregular heartbeat. Most likely, you had an ischemic stroke. Caused by atrial fibrillation - Afib.”

“So now what?”

“With Afib, blood pools up between beats and forms a clot. If the clot travels through a blood vessel or artery, it can form a blockage, which will deprive your brain of oxygen.”

“That doesn’t sound good.”

“It’s like a heart attack for your brain.”

I was speechless.

“We’re going to prescribe a blood thinner. Eliquis. It’ll help to prevent blood clots.”

“How long do I take it?” I asked.

“Twice a day, he said. “For the rest of your life. And don’t ever miss a dose.”

There was no sugarcoating.

“When can I go home?” I couldn’t wait to change out of my hospital gown.

“Soon. But another team wants to see you.”

My wife and I had no idea what bombshell was about to drop.

We heard the familiar knock-knock at the door.

A new team of doctors stopped by my room. I hadn’t seen this group before. They wheeled in a mobile computer that displayed an X-ray image of my neck and head.

“We’re from the Spine Center. Your MRI detected a serious issue with your neck. Cervical stenosis,” the lead doctor said.

“I don’t understand.”

“Let me show you.” The doctor moved the cursor. “The spinal canal in your neck is severely narrowed, compressing the spinal cord and nerve roots.”

“But my neck doesn’t hurt.”

“You may be asymptomatic. But if you fell off a bike, or get rear-ended, or trip down the stairs, you could suffer a catastrophic spinal injury.”

I tried to comprehend what was happening. A brain fog started to roll in.

“Does this mean surgery?”

“Spinal decompression surgery. We will relieve the pressure on your spinal cord. And fuse your upper vertebrae in your neck.”

My circuit board was crashing. It was starting to all sound like mumble jumble.

“What if I don’t do the surgery?”

“Bone spurs, bulging discs, nerve damage. You may be at risk for paralysis.”

“When do I do this?”

“We have to wait at least three months after your stroke. But not much longer. Cervical stenosis only gets progressively worse.”

“And for recovery?”

“Six to eight weeks, maybe longer.”

And then depression set in.

For three years through the pandemic, I didn’t miss a single week—not one sick day. As the restaurant industry tanked, my dinner delivery business surged to meet the crushing demand. Against all odds, I had pivoted from running a string of sandwich shops to building one of the busiest chef-driven delivery operations in the city. In our city’s darkest days, our mission was simple: deliver nourishment, comfort, sustenance, and a rare taste of happiness.

It had taken me nearly forty years in the restaurant business to reach this peak.

So what would happen if I shut it all down for weeks—or months? Would my customers patiently wait, or quietly drift away? In this business, out of sight is out of mind.

How would I take care of my family? Pay the bills?

I survived a stroke. Now I needed spinal cord surgery.

It was a hard pill to swallow.

To be continued…

Jay Solomon is the owner and chef behind JAYS2GO, a Denver-based gourmet dinner delivery service. When he’s not in the kitchen, he writes about food, family, sports, growing up, and the highs and lows of restaurant life. His business website is www.jays2go.com.

When I was a kid, there were only three seasons in a year: football, basketball, and baseball. The four seasons other people recognized were meaningless in my sports-obsessed world.

Around late March, when basketball ended, and snow still covered the ground, baseball season moved into the gym. Players lined up wall-to-wall playing catch — fwaap, fwaap, thud — the sound of stiff gloves slowly being broken in. Ground balls ricocheted off the hardwood floors. Inside the batting cage, the sharp crack of the bat echoed as hitters took wild swings, aiming for imaginary fences.

Lansing might have been a small rural town, but the school prided itself on its competitive sports program. Which is probably why the Athletic Director, Mr. Caliel (affectionately known as Uncle Freddie) splurged on “JUGS,” a robotic pitching machine.

With JUGS on the mound, any teammate could stand in for the pitcher. All they had to do was feed a baseball down a chute between two spinning, donut-shaped rubber wheels. The centrifugal force fired the ball out like a cannon. Depending on the velocity of the wheels, the pitch could be anything from a looping meatball to a screaming chest-high fastball.

I’ll admit it upfront: I was a mediocre fielder — every pop fly turned into an adventure with a little too much drama. Coaches usually parked me in right field, where I could do the least damage. But when I entered the batter’s box, it was a different story. There was swagger in my step, mano a mano with the pitcher. I lived for the thrill of crushing a pitch on the sweet spot of the bat — the meaty part of the barrel.

As a left-handed pull hitter, I started my swing the instant the ball left the pitcher’s hand. When I connected, I yanked a lot of pitches down the first base line. Just as often, though, I fouled off balls into the parking lot and school windows. It didn’t help that I crowded the plate and stepped into the pitch, literally. Inside pitches often plunked me, giving me a free base.

In my junior year of high school, on the first day of spring baseball, I couldn’t wait to test my mettle against JUGS. As my turn approached, I knelt in the on-deck circle and watched the hitter ahead of me flick lazy line drives off chest-high puffballs. Hmmph. It looked too easy, barely a notch above Tee-Ball.

When I stepped into the cage, I called out to Peck Colt, the team’s captain, who was feeding the machine.

“Peck, turn it up a notch.”

Peck dropped the ball for the first pitch: thunk, JUGS sent a fastball down the middle of the plate. I roped a clothesline to the back of the cage.

Second pitch: same result, a tether ball floating straight over the plate, and I hit another liner.

“Peck, crank it all the way up!” I yelled. I wanted to see if I could hit the fastest pitch that JUGS could deliver.

I can’t say for sure, but I detected a gleeful smile in Peck’s response. I could sense the eyes of my teammates peering over to the batting cage.

My bat coiled back, locked and loaded. As soon as Peck dropped the ball into the chute, thunk, I started my swing, my front foot edged forward.

The ball propelled out of the chute like a mad rocket, zig-zagging, spinning wildly, a knuckleball from hell.

The problem was, I’d never seen a knuckleball up close and personal. Sure, I’d played Wiffle ball as a kid — trying to hit one was like swatting a fly — but that was a toy compared to the rogue missile now heading toward my head at about a hundred miles an hour.

My cocked bat was already unleashed; no time to duck or bail out of the box. (A checked swing was never in my wheelhouse.) My survival instinct was to meet the ball out front before it hit me - an act of self-defense.

I made contact, alright. The ball foul tipped off the handle of my bat and continued its murderous path straight into my face, landing squarely between my eyes.

The rest is reconstituted memory of what I’ve been told. Upon impact, I fell backwards, like I’d been shot, and blood gushed from my nose. My Boomer sports glasses shattered on impact. Someone pressed an ice pack against my face. Someone else jammed a roll of toilet paper up my nose. Uncle Freddie called my parents. I remember sitting on the curb by the bus lane, waiting for the ride to the hospital. In those days, there was no ER to rush to. Ithaca’s hospital was forty-five minutes away.

X-rays revealed a vertical fracture of my nose. My face swelled until my eyes were slits. The doctor told my father, “Your son had an angel looking over his shoulder. If the ball landed one inch to either side, he’d lose an eye.”

My face was a mess, but after about ten days, the swelling went down. I returned to the team, probably too soon. The first time I stepped into the batter’s box, I flinched. For a hitter, flinching is the death knell. I told myself it was temporary—a reflex, nothing more. But it lingered.

My mojo was gone. The physical trauma of taking a pitch to the face had faded, replaced by something deeper: the realization that I might have to give up the sport that had claimed so much of my childhood. I sure as hell wasn’t going to ride the bench every game. My season was over before it began.

For the first time in my young life, there was no baseball to anticipate – and to participate in— just a void.

The truth is, I had been living in a silo. For years, I assumed my future would always include a field, a ball, and a scoreboard. But in reality, I wasn’t nearly good enough for minor league baseball, or even Division III. The same went for basketball and football. I’d been a full-time high school jock, but I wasn’t headed for the big time.

At one point, as a kid, I even thought I might play football for the Minnesota Vikings one day. Ed Marinaro—a local legend and Cornell All-American—had made it to the Vikings. Maybe I could too.

That was a ludicrous, crazy thought. There’s a difference between dreaming big and dreaming like you’re on psychedelic mushrooms.

In hindsight, the JUGS pitch changed my life. The crushing blow to my face forced me to hang up my cleats and ask a hard question I had never seriously considered before:

What am I going to do with my life?

Lansing sat on the doorstep of Ithaca, a college town where you could always find a job in a restaurant. Steakhouses, McDonald’s, Friendly’s, taverns, country clubs—somebody was always hiring. It wasn’t long before I traded in my baseball uniform for an apron. To my surprise, I discovered there was life outside of sports. The chatter and camaraderie of the ball field was replaced by the frenzy and energy of the kitchen. The adrenaline was different, but the rhythm felt familiar.

There’s no doubt sports taught me resilience, grit, teamwork, discipline, and the drive to succeed. But it was stepping off the field and out of the gym—and into a professional kitchen—that ultimately shaped the course of the rest of my life.

Post Script

Thirty years after I hung up my cleats, my eight-year-old twins’ youth baseball team needed a coach. Despite some reservations—mostly from my kids—I dusted off the baseball knowledge of my youth, pulled up my stirrups, slipped on a cap, and stepped back into the dugout. I never made it to the Oneonta Yankees or the Toledo Mud Hens, but I still had a solid grasp of the fundamentals.

And you know what? In 2012, I coached a scrappy Denver team— a roster of “honorable mentioned” All-Stars—to a District championship and a trip to the State Finals.

But that’s a story for another day. ⚾

Jay Solomon is the owner and chef behind JAYS2GO, a Denver-based gourmet dinner delivery service. When he’s not in the kitchen, he writes about food, family, sports, growing up, and the highs and lows of restaurant life. His business website is www.jays2go.com.

I was born in a weather-beaten, century-old house in the hardscrabble part of town. We didn’t have a front lawn, so we played in the street—which worked out fine until the day a neighbor marched me back to our front door and told my parents I’d chased a kickball into oncoming traffic and nearly been run over.

By the time I was five, I’d already been banned from the corner store for stealing a Super Ball. Some runty kid nicknamed Pugslie stole my ball, so what was I supposed to do?

On the way to Sunday school one day, walking with my brother and sister, I threw a fit and veered off on my own. I spent the entire morning lost and freaked out, wandering around the city until a police officer tracked me down.

My mother didn’t have a driver’s license yet, and with three kids at home, her job options were limited. She took a position as a crossing guard at the nearby elementary school. I tagged along while she worked the school crossing, and, bored out of my mind, made snow angels in the middle of the sidewalks, played hopscotch on the crossing path, and on the rare days the sun came out, I’d stare at it like it was a flying saucer until my eyes blurred and my vision turned color-blind for weeks.

I’m not one hundred percent certain, but I’m probably the reason my mother quit.

Then one day, my father came home from work and found me in our dirt driveway playing with my Tonka trucks, caked in mud. That was the last straw of many last straws.

After a quick calculation on my future life prospects, given my downward trajectory and wayward meanderings, my father made a snap decision.

“We’ve got to get you the hell out of here,” is what I think I heard him saying.

Or was it, “What the hell is wrong with you?”

Either way, midway through second grade, we moved ten miles up the lake to the bucolic town of Lansing. Our new home was a modest ranch, but we traded our dilapidated front stoop and cruddy sidewalks for a sprawling acre of grass that melded into the woods, with a bubbling creek running through it—alive with guppies, frogs, and squiggly salamanders.

For the rest of my childhood, that backyard was my happy place. I played baseball with my siblings—fungo, pepper –and ran down-and-out football routes while my father lofted passes through the trees. We built a basketball court near the edge of the woods, and shot hoops until the sun went down. In the dead of winter, my father would flood the yard with a garden hose and turn it into an ice rink. We tossed horseshoes, hunted through pricker bushes for wild raspberries, and even stuffed dried-up weeds that looked like tobacco into hollowed-out driftwood, trying to smoke them like we knew what we were doing. (It was disgusting.)

But I digress. On my first day at the “Little School” (that’s what the locals called it back then), I sat next to a boy named Joe Snyder. The first thing I noticed was his shiny new Beatles lunchbox, gleaming like a treasure chest on his desk. I glanced around the classroom. Other kids also had cool lunchboxes— Superman, The Flintstones, The Monkees.

My wrinkled-up brown paper bag, already sagging before noon, looked downright shabby. I could feel eyes on me — curious necks craning to get a look at the new kid with the frumpy lunch. My jet-black hair and dark Sicilian-Syrian complexion didn’t exactly help me blend into this sea of fair-skinned, Anglo-Saxon faces. I already stood out. The paper bag just confirmed it.

By the time we lined up for lunch, I was feeling the jitters.

And then I saw her.

Behind the counter stood none other than my grandmother — Tayta Badia. Was I so oblivious that I hadn’t realized my own grandmother worked as a lunch lady? Yes. Yes, I was.

Dressed in a flowered apron and hairnet, Tayta Badia — Mrs. Solomon to everyone else — had recently joined the cafeteria staff. And to my utter and absolute astonishment, she began handing out free ice cream cups to my entire class.

Suddenly, the kid with the paper bag didn’t seem so uncool after all.

Let me tell you about my grandmother, Tayta Badia, the matriarch of the extended Solomon and Shalaby family. She lived at the end of a dirt road, a hamlet called Myers Heights, perched on a hill overlooking Cayuga Lake. The houses were modest, but the views of the water were palatial. And of the dozen multigenerational homes on Myers Heights, nearly everyone was related—and most worked in the salt mines below Cayuga Lake. No one locked their doors, or even knocked, for that matter. Sunday meals, fresh-baked Syrian bread, and vegetables from the gardens were routinely shared.

When Tayta was only fifty-three, my fifty-nine-year-old grandfather, Jesse Sr., died of “angina” – a heart attack. In a community where most people lived into their seventies and eighties, his untimely death was both shocking and devastating. My grandmother’s grief was unfathomable.

To get out of the house, Tayta took a job in the Little School cafeteria. She never learned to drive, so each morning she set out on foot with my younger cousin Riad, who lived with her, trudging a quarter mile down the road to catch the school bus to work for her, and school for him.

Tayta Badia found more than a job in the school cafeteria—she found a new community and a renewed sense of purpose. For the next fifteen or so years, the same generosity and kindred spirit she had lavished on her extended Myers Heights family flowed outward to her coworkers, teachers, and school administrators—and, of course, to generations of elementary school children who passed through her cafeteria line.

Best of all, during my grade school years, Tayta would catch my eye as I slid my tray down the lunch line and subtly dole out a frozen treat: Drumsticks, ice cream sandwiches, creamsicles, you name it. And every year on my birthday (and all of her other grandchildren’s birthdays), ice cream cups for the entire class!

Tayta and the lunch ladies took pride in their work; the meals were often made from scratch. The monthly menus were mimeographed in blue ink and sent home to the parents, and I remember pleading with my mom to let me ditch the peanut butter and jelly sandwich in favor of the hot lunch of the day.

Weekends were a different story. Nearly every Sunday of my childhood, our extended clan – cousins, aunts, uncles, second cousins –gathered at Tayta’s house for a mid-day feast. My taste buds would leave the earthy realm of my mom’s meat loaf and dad’s take-out Kentucky Fried Chicken and enter the stratosphere of Tayta’s home cooked Syrian meals: platters of stuffed grape leaves and overstuffed cabbage rolls; crisp-edged kibbe and kibbe nay; a fragrant one-pot rice pilaf with chicken and garbanzo beans; cousa stuffed with ground beef and rice; and bowls of lentils and rice topped with caramelized onions —imjadera—humble ingredients transformed into something magical.

On the blessed days when Tayta turned her kitchen into a bakery, the phone would start ringing. “Tate’s baking Syrian bread!”—and off we’d go. You could smell it before you even reached her carport, that warm, yeasty aroma drifting into the cold air. We’d charge up the stairs and burst through the door just as she was pulling the great round loaves from the oven—puffed and golden, airy and buttery, the kind of bread that melted in your mouth. We’d crowd around the kitchen table and tear into them – like we were savages – ripping off warm pieces and dipping the bread into tahini or slathering with butter, crumbs scattering like confetti across the table.

Ahh, so many fond Norman Rockwell memories of growing up….

Until the proverbial S-H-I-T hit the fan. During my college years, my parents separated — though, in truth, they’d stopped speaking long before anyone admitted it out loud. The house went up for sale, and almost overnight, it was gone. Along with it went the back acre, the patch of earth that held so many of my childhood memories.

After I graduated, I wasn’t ready to commit to a full-time job. At least that’s the version I’m sticking with. Truthfully, the job offers weren’t exactly panning out. I was adrift. And I wasn’t about to choose between living on my mother’s couch or my father’s.

So one Sunday, I made the familiar pilgrimage to my grandmother’s house. I unloaded the whole mess at her kitchen table.

She listened, then gave me a look.

“Listen to me, Buster Brown. I’ve got a pull-out couch on the porch.”

“I don’t want to impose.”

“Don’t be a jackass. Get your things and bring them over.”

“Well—”

“Don’t even give it a second thought. Stay here until you get your feet on the ground.”

And just like that, my post-college life began — not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with a soft landing.

Tate did my laundry. She cooked dinner every night. She kept me up to date on neighborhood gossip and who died the other day. The hardest decision I faced each morning was whether to choose Tayta’s pancakes or French toast.

The only thing she asked in return? Drive her to her favorite grocery store once a week.

Not a bad deal.

She bailed me out in second grade.

And she bailed me out again after college.

Post Script

It took a few months, but eventually I found my footing. Some days, I took over her kitchen, testing recipes and brainstorming while devouring grape leaves and cabbage rolls.

When I finally came up with a business plan and secured a kitchen to work out of, there was just one hitch. I needed three hundred dollars up front for food supplies. To a guy sleeping on his grandmother’s pull-out couch, that was a lot of money.

Before I could finish explaining, Tayta pushed back her chair and disappeared upstairs. She came back down holding a thick wad of bills.

“Here. Take it”

“What’s this?”

“Just take it, John D.”

(She had a habit of calling me “John D.”, short for John D. Rockefeller, an oil tycoon in the 1900’s.)

I stared at the stack of bills in her hand. “Where’d it come from?”

“None of your beeswax.”

I hesitated. “I’ll pay you back.”

“Don’t be a jackass,” she said, already pivoting toward the stove. “Now, you want pancakes or French toast?”

And just like that, Tayta became the first — and only — seed investor in a career that would last forty-plus years.

Jay Solomon is the owner and chef behind JAYS2GO, a Denver-based gourmet dinner delivery service. When he’s not in the kitchen, he writes about food, family, sports, growing up, and the highs and lows of restaurant life. His business website is www.jays2go.com.

This was supposed to be a self-promoting, high-five salute to the grit and tenacity that it took to survive four-decades in this ruthlessly competitive business.

This was supposed to be a celebration of my culinary journey,

But somewhere along the way, it turned into something else entirely—something with far greater meaning.

Forty years ago, I opened JJ’s Café in Ithaca, New York, a cozy little breakfast-and-lunch nook wedged between a family-owned shoe store and Rosetti’s Italian restaurant.

When I graduated from Cornell’s Hotel School, it wasn’t my life’s mission to open a sandwich shop. During college, I worked a series of churn-and-burn part-time kitchen jobs, all of which had one thing in common: the head chefs were egomaniacs who treated their staff like crap.

But if you’re twenty-four and you’re hopelessly (and irrationally) driven to opening your own sit-down restaurant (and your family name isn’t Marriott or Pritzker), where do you start? You spend every hour of every day hunting for the best possible location with the cheapest rent and start-up costs.

In my case, the first rung of the ladder turned out to be a vacant real estate office that sat near a busy five-way intersection, surrounded by a neighborhood of elegant brick homes with horseshoe driveways and weeping willow trees.

What’s more, a no-name convenience store was directly across the street. Every lunch hour, this 7-Eleven knockoff had a line out the door for the world’s most pathetic sandwiches. The drip coffee was sludge, and the cookies were dry as cardboard.

A light bulb went off. I’d spent my previous summer in DC, interning at a nonprofit organization by day and working at a gourmet deli in Georgetown by night to cover my rent. This being Georgetown—the swanky part of D.C.—the menu was anything but ordinary. My small-town taste buds were electrified by its culinary improvisations: curry chicken and apple salad, roast beef croissants oozing with melted brie, turkey layered with Boursin and mango chutney, and cheese tortellini tossed with basil pesto. Compared to the pastrami subs I used to snarf down at the Grand Union deli counter, this was a full-blown culinary awakening.

All of which is to say: I brazenly envisioned opening a quaint market café built around gourmet breakfast and lunch sandwiches, intriguing soups, and freshly baked cookies (a novelty back then). In other words, my own Georgetown deli, only in Ithaca.

But first things first: to bring my entrepreneurial dream to fruition, I needed to transform a nondescript office space into a prep kitchen and dining room. To fantasize about running a trendy cafe was one thing; to roll up your sleeves and put thoughts and words into action was another story.

Honestly, if I tried to pull this off in a major city, I wouldn’t stand a chance. The build-out alone would have been a money pit and bureaucratic morass: architectural drawings, plumbing and electrical permits, zoning approvals, and a calendar filled with building inspections.

Fortunately, Ithaca wasn’t a big city; it’s a small college town. Even better, I had a card up my sleeve. Or so I hoped.

Enter my father, Jesse A. Solomon. Gruff, smart, with a searing sense of humor. His impatience was legendary. If he walked into a diner and someone coughed behind the counter, he’d immediately pirouette back out the door.

When I broke the news to him about my ambitious post-graduation plans, the conversation didn’t go as planned.

Me: Father, I’m opening a sandwich shop.

Father: Why in the hell do you want to do that?

Me: It’s a great location, and the rent seems good.

Father: You went to a four-year college to open a sandwich shop?

Me: I have to start somewhere. It’s a no-brainer.

Father: Listen to yourself – you’re still a kid. Learn on someone else’s dime.

Me: I’m tired of working for bozos.

Father: Where is it?

Me: Cayuga Heights. Near the Triphammer intersection.

Father: Have you lost your mind? Those people don’t eat at delis.

Me: Actually, they do. You know the convenience store across the street? Its deli sucks, but there’s always a line out the door.

Father: You gonna have coffee?

Me: Of course. We’ll have gourmet beans like hazelnut and mocha java.

Father: You’ve got to be kidding. Do not serve that fancy shit.

Me: And egg sandwiches on croissants.

Father: You’re gonna compete with the Egg McMuffin? You’ll never make it.

Me: This is not fast food! I spent a summer at a Georgetown deli, remember?

Father: (scratching his forehead): What in the hell are you talking about?

Me: The menu’s the easy part. The hard part is putting in a kitchen sink, countertops, and a new floor. The walls need painting–

Father: Who’s going to do all this?

Me: – and I’ll need a good sign that you can see from the road. I don’t know, I’ll look in the yellow pages.

Father: No goddamn way. DO NOT LOOK IN THE YELLOW PAGES.

Me: Okay, okay. So who’s going to help me?

Father: Have you signed a lease?

Me: Yep. I got the keys.

Father: (big sigh) Okay, this is serious. Let’s go see it.

My father was the OG of tough love. He could push your buttons, but he’d be the first to jump to your side in a bar fight.

It wasn’t pretty, but we got the job done. Jesse summoned his “cousins”—Otsie, Bobby, Dickie, Nick, Roy, Rudy—sturdy men who’d grown up together, gambled, fished and hunted together, raised families, and played (and bet on) every game imaginable: horseshoes, ping-pong, pinochle, darts, pool, golf, football, poker, thoroughbreds, even tiddly winks and pitching pennies.

They showed up with toolboxes, power drills, and tape measures, pencils tucked behind their ears, all while keeping up a running commentary on the dubious wisdom of opening a sandwich shop in Cayuga Heights. My choice of mauve paint was declared “pathetic.” The orange Formica countertop was “nauseating.”

And yet, despite their skepticism, they were dead set on making sure Jesse’s know-it-all kid didn’t drive himself straight off the cliff.

JJ’s Cafe opened its doors in February 1985. To draw attention, I put an A-frame sign out by the five-way intersection every morning. The cafe’s early days are a blur, but I can say with absolute certainty: opening a cafe in the dead of winter, in upstate New York, was not the brightest business decision.

Still, in a small town, word travels fast. By early summer, lines were forming at lunch. The roast beef and turkey melt sandwiches were huge hits. I added bagels to the breakfast menu, and the freshly-baked chocolate chip cookies flew out the door. My father called it a “gold mine.”

As I mentioned, I wasn’t exactly convinced that my life’s calling was to run a sandwich shop. I was young, restless, and in a hurry. I had my foot in the door, but I wanted more.

My heart was set on owning a full-fledged sit-down restaurant—globally inspired, adventurous, a place with a buzzy international menu that made people excited. But that leap required serious money. Opening a cafe on a shoestring was one thing. A dinner restaurant was a whole different ballgame.

About two years after JJ’s Café opened, I sold it to a mother-daughter team (for a nice windfall). I used the proceeds to take the next step: relocating (and reinventing) to a much larger establishment in Ithaca’s historic downtown district.

The new place needed everything—gas hook-ups for the oven and grill, drain lines for the dishwasher, and fresh paint on the walls. And the fuse box kept blowing.

This time, I didn’t even think about reaching for the Yellow Pages. My father and his cousins showed up in force.

And of course, the good-natured ribbing picked up right where it left off.

“So you’re gonna have Delmonico steak and fries on the menu, right?”
“What the hell is blackened redfish?”
“Never heard of jambalaya either.”
“Did you really say jerk chicken? You gotta be kidding.”
“You'd better serve a basket of bread with their meal. Seriously—Otsie, tell him. People want bread and butter when they eat out!”

The banter was nonstop — their pointed but well-meaning questions hit me like a velvet glove —but the sentiment was undeniable. These guys showed up for each other, and for their families and extended families as well. Farming communities come together for barn raisings. These cousins had been metaphorically raising barns their entire lives.

There was one thing I could never quite figure out, though. They all called each other by the same nickname: Lonz.

Jesse would say to Bobby, “Lonz, how we gonna saw this?”
And Bobby would answer, “Lonz, we’ll use a circular saw.”

For as long as I knew them, that’s just how they talked. It was always “Hey, Lonz, you going to Finger Lakes?” or “Lonz, double or nothing on the game?”

Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore.

“Why do you guys call each other Lonz all the time?”

The room went quiet. Their heads turned toward me as if I’d violated the sacred code of some secret society.

My father shook his head in disgust.

“You don’t know who Mario Lanza is?”

“Should I?” I asked, shrugging.

“He was an opera singer in the 1940s,” my father said. “Only the greatest crooner of all time. Better than Sinatra.”

“I did not see that coming.”

My father laughed. “There’s a lot you don’t see coming.”

Mystery solved.

Post Script:

After I moved on, JJ’s Café stayed open for another twenty-five years.

My next chapter—Jay’s Clinton Hall Café—lasted nearly a decade. When I wasn’t in the kitchen, I was writing: more than a dozen cookbooks and a steady stream of food stories for magazines and newspapers. Eventually, I sold that restaurant too, and newly married, Emily and I began packing for the next adventure.

In 1997, Colorado came calling. Within a year, we opened Emily’s Gourmet to Go in downtown Denver, a bustling panini-and-soup lunch spot. With a family on the way and the thrill of starting over in the Rockies, I no longer felt the urge to work dinner shifts.

It’s safe to say, after four decades in the restaurant business, I’ve learned a thing or two—not just about food and cooking, flavor profiles, and kitchen technique, but about how to lead and motivate a team and allow them to thrive, and how to meet (and hopefully exceed) every customer’s expectations.

Sadly, Jesse and his fellow ‘cousins’ —Otsie, Bobby, Dickie, Nick, Roy, and Rudy—have all passed on. My father and this Lonz crew didn’t just help launch my career—they taught me the value of camaraderie, family, community, and loyalty. They taught me the importance of showing up for the people in your life. Those lessons, just as important as everything I’ve learned in the cauldron of the kitchen, have strengthened and bolstered my life ever since.

Jay Solomon is the owner and chef behind JAYS2GO, a Denver-based gourmet dinner delivery service. When he’s not in the kitchen, he writes about food, family, sports, growing up, and the highs and lows of restaurant life. His business website is www.jays2go.com.

One of the biggest breaks of my life came during a summer hiatus from college, when I was accepted into the Boston Park Plaza Hotel’s prestigious management training program. The Plaza was a crown jewel of the city, set in the heart of downtown and overlooking the Boston Common.

The 1,200-room hotel could house my entire hometown in upstate New York. The Plaza’s stately Grand Ballroom—with massive crystal chandeliers towering above—felt less like a hotel and more like a European estate: majestic, elegant, awe-inspiring.

The Park Plaza would be a seismic leap from my previous summer jobs. After years of working in sweatshop kitchens at Pizza Hut and McDonalds, and before that, washing dishes at a local steakhouse, I’d finally punched my ticket to something that resembled a legitimate career.

I sublet a room in a student house near Harvard Square, just a fifteen-minute subway ride to work. On my first morning, I climbed the subway stairs and found, to my utter delight, a Dunkin’ Donuts waiting for me at the top. Coffee and a glazed donut in hand, I took a short, jaunty stroll through the Boston Public Garden, in full bloom. There was a spring in my step — I was practically skipping. I was falling in love with this ole’ Beantown!

I reported to the hotel’s Human Resources office, buried deep in the bowels of the building, and introduced myself to the clerk behind the desk.

“Hi. I’m here to start the management training program.”

He barely looked up. “Last name?”

“Solomon. Like King Solomon.”

“I don’t see it. First name?”

“Jay. I’m from Cornell’s Hotel School. I interviewed over spring break.”

“Who’d you speak with?”

“Pat So-and-So,” I said. “He came to campus.”

“Just a second.”

The clerk disappeared behind a door.

My nerves were rattled. Five minutes earlier, I’d been thumbing through scenic Bostonian postcards in the hotel lobby. Now my urban summer extravaganza was in danger of getting squashed before it even started.

The clerk returned. “You’re in accounting and receiving. Third floor.”

“Wait—what? I was told I’d be in management training.”

“Nope. You’re interning in accounting.”

I was stumped. I hadn’t applied for an accounting internship. No way. I might have fluffed up my flimsy résumé and oversold my economics and finance grades. I desperately wanted this internship —who knew what I’d said during the interview? I liked accounting, but I certainly never said I loved it.

I tried to compose myself. “Is there an employee orientation?” I asked.

“Go to the third floor,” the clerk grunted. “Next!”

I turned to leave the same way I came in.

“Hey buddy, where you think you're going? A voice came out of nowhere.

“The third floor,” I said.

“Not that way. Employees use the freight elevator.”

Good grief. I rode up the elevator with a laundry bin filled with dirty linen and a cart filled with room service debris. So much for my arms-wide-open welcome.

The hotel's accounting and receiving department had a hushed, eerie feel, reminiscent of a 24- hour library. Workers hunched over cluttered desks and hulking computer screens, with filing cabinets everywhere.

A guy named Tim introduced himself as a supervisor and showed me to a work station in the far corner of the office. He brought over a huge stack of crumpled papers.

“Your job is to match up the requisitions with the invoices and receiving.”

“As in making sure they’re paid?” I replied, floundering for guidance.

Tim looked at me, quizzically. “Match the items on requisitions with the same prices on the invoices. Do the same for receiving.” He turned and disappeared into a distant cubicle.

And with that, I stepped into the mind-numbing, soul-crushing world of pencil-pushing. Newspapers and magazines have fact-checkers; accounting offices have number checkers. That was me—double- and triple-checking accounts payable and receivable, sales receipts and deposits, time cards, and employee schedules.

Over the next few days (and weeks), I found myself looking at the clock, daydreaming of spotting famous people in the lobby, and finding excuses to wander the hotel’s sprawling passageways. This was a far cry from Michael Scott’s Dunder Mifflin office filled with hijinks, manufactured drama, and yuks.

I grew up in the country, where traffic lights didn’t exist, and the roads were narrow and winding. Riding a bike to school meant a passing semi-truck could blow you into the ditch. My backyard was surrounded by overgrown woods and cornfields. Summer nights were spent camped beneath an apple tree gazing at the stars and shooting the shit with friends.

I wouldn’t trade my upbringing for the world, but I needed to see more of the world. Although my summer job was pure drudgery, I wasn’t ready to throw in the towel and go back home. I had to buckle up and make it work.

After hours, I found reprieve by exploring Boston Proper - Quincy Market and Haymarket Square, historic townhomes in Beacon Hill, the elegant shops on Newbury Street, and Boston’s Little Italy - the North End. On one late afternoon walk, I stumbled upon Charles Street, an old-world neighborhood with fine restaurants, coffee shops, grocers, boutiques, and cobblestoned sidewalks.

Three or four blocks up the street, my life flashed before my eyes—in the best possible way.

A crowd of tourists gathered around a large, street-level window. Inside, a line of chefs dressed in crisp whites cooked over a live fire, grilling, sautéing, flipping skillets, brandishing tongs and knives, as if performing on a stage. This was pure culinary theater. It was mesmerizing.

Until that moment, my perception of kitchen work was shaped by grim back-of-house realities: grizzled cooks hidden behind swinging doors, surly chefs barking orders in chaotic, pressure-filled caldrons. All grit, no glamour. But this scene on Charles Street shattered those assumptions.

As the summer wore on, I began detouring on my walk home just to peer into the open kitchen on Charles—my face practically pressed against the glass, studying the acrobatic movements of the chefs working the line, oblivious to the gaggle of onlookers outside.

It’s rare to pinpoint the precise moment in time when a life changes. I can remember when I first laid eyes on my wife, smitten at first sight. I can remember the delirious minutes when she gave birth to each of our four children.

And I remember that afternoon on Charles Street—leaving a bland, monochrome office and discovering the intoxicating energy, allure, and choreography of a professional kitchen. That was the day when my life’s trajectory changed forever.

A few years later, after cycling through stints in middling restaurants and a handful of small but successful entrepreneurial ventures, I felt the pull to return to Boston. This time, I was on a mission. With a seasoned résumé in hand and a growing cache of culinary credentials, I made a beeline for the iconic restaurant on Charles Street—the one with the floor-to-ceiling window and open kitchen that had first sparked my imagination.

I was hired on the spot.

(To be continued.)

Jay Solomon is the owner and chef behind JAYS2GO, a Denver-based gourmet dinner delivery service. When he’s not in the kitchen, he writes about food, family, sports, growing up, and the highs and lows of restaurant life. His business website is www.jays2go.com.

Me: Whose dog is this?

Emily and Aiden, in unison: Ours!

Me: Where’d it come from?

Emily and Aiden: The Humane Society. And it’s a she.

Me: What’s he doing here?

Emily: He’s a she. She’s a rescue –we adopted her.

(Long, incredulous pause.)

Me: What’s her name?

Aiden: The shelter said her name was Giggles. We’re changing it to Lulu.

Me: So, we’re keeping her? Where’s she going to sleep?

Emily: Way ahead of you. We have a crate.

Me: Pooch, get down, down boy!

Aiden: Dad! Call her by her name!

And so it began—the incredible, unlikely journey to becoming a dog parent.

Lulu didn’t arrive out of the blue. Emily and Aiden had been plotting for months, despite my ardent reservations. Three of our four children had grown and flown to the East Coast, and after several years of nonstop commotion and controlled chaos, the house had grown quieter. Like so many households in transition, my wife and teenage son hoped a dog would fill the void.

I never took their mission seriously, even though Emily grew up with dogs, and Aiden was obsessed with planning weekend trips to the animal shelter. (As a toddler, he was terrified of them—so much so that he skipped sleepovers if a dog was involved. That fear somehow dissipated almost overnight.)

On the other hand, I did not grow up with a dog, and I never contemplated having a dog. Canines were fine, but best kept at arm’s length. If a dog appeared on a neighborhood walk, I’d cross to the other side. While others saw a warm, fuzzy companion, I saw a ticking time bomb, ready to pounce.

Whenever the discussion veered into bringing home a rescue dog, I’d shut it down. “No way, I’m not going to have anything to do with it!” was my typical undiplomatic response. “We’re too busy, count me out!”

So here we were. A frisky, googly-eyed, bushy-tailed Lulu had officially invaded our/my living space. According to the shelter, she was “about two years old”, transported to Colorado from Texas, and described as part Husky, part Border Collie. She had black fur, a white belly, white paws that looked like tube socks, and a black-and-white tail with brown highlights. Her eyes were mismatched—one blue, one brown.

Within minutes of her arrival, it was painfully clear we were in over our heads. Lulu’s frantic exploration of her new home (and her nonstop panting) had not subsided. An SOS went out to Megan, our friend and resident dog whisperer.

Megan arrived and immediately launched into a crash course on the bewildering universe of dog ownership: food options, treats, leashes, collars, toys, chew sticks, feeders, lick mats, and on and on. I hovered on the sidelines. In retrospect, we—as a family (I’m not naming names)—had absolutely no idea how to assimilate a dog into our household. For myself, I was still trying to answer the most basic question.

Me: Where’s the dog going to sleep?

Megan: In the crate.

Me: Where’s the crate go?

Megan: That’s up to you. Usually in your bedroom.

Me: Oh God.

Megan: She could also sleep in your bed!

Me: Ugh!

(Megan glanced at her watch, then turned to Emily.)

Megan (urgently): We need to call Petco and see when they close.

Emily: Tonight? Can we go tomorrow?

Megan: No, we really should go tonight. You need a chain collar, a better leash, a water bowl…

At that moment, Lulu ricocheted across the room like a pinball, careening off furniture and coffee tables.

Me: She seems really hyper.

Megan: Well, she’s part Husky.

Me: I don’t know what that means.

Megan: Huskies can run for miles. You’ll never tire her out.

Emily: Petco closes in twenty minutes.

Megan: Let’s go!

There are scientific studies suggesting that behavior observed around the age of four strongly correlates with personality traits in adulthood. I’m convinced my lifelong dog phobia took root when a large black dog chased me on my daily walk home from kindergarten. Like clockwork, a snarling, teeth-baring Doberman Pinscher would lie in wait, poised to ambush me as I gingerly made my way home.

---

One Year Later.

In life before Lulu, after a long day in the commissary kitchen, I’d sit at my computer or collapse onto the couch. In this new chapter, Lulu rushes toward the door, delivering an effusive greeting before I’ve even set down my keys. In return, I serenade her in a dog-appropriate, sing-song voice I learned from Emily: Youoooo’re suuuuch a goood girrrrl… who’s a goood girrrrl?

At 5:00 on the dot, I feed her, then take her for a long, slow walk around the neighborhood, patiently stopping while she inspects, sniffs, and digs her snout into every square inch of crabgrass along the way. If a rabbit or squirrel appears, fasten your seatbelt — Lulu’s Husky hunter instinct kicks in.

On weekends, while Emily and I linger in bed with coffee and our iPads, Lulu hops up and curls against our feet. When our home is full during the holidays, Lulu positions herself centrally so she can geo-locate everyone in the house. I’m told that’s the Border Collie in her blood — herding the family.

In a recent scientific study conducted by the Solomon family of Denver, Colorado, it was conclusively determined that the age-old belief claiming adult personality is primarily developed during childhood is, in fact, a myth.

Turns out, you can teach an old dog new tricks.

Jay Solomon is the owner and chef behind JAYS2GO, a Denver-based gourmet dinner delivery service. When he’s not in the kitchen, he writes about food, family, sports, growing up, and the highs and lows of restaurant life. His business website is www.jays2go.com.

But it’s never too late to see the folly of one’s ways. My own reckoning arrived in the form of an invitation from my wife (Emily) to join her at a launch party for Caron Blanke, a local mom and friend running for Denver Public Schools’ Board of Education. My attendance was rooted in one part marital obligation, one part civic duty, and one part heavy appetizer buffet.

When we arrived, the crowded historic Denver home evoked memories of smoke-filled parlors from another era, minus the smoke. Also, there was a dog roughly the size of a Shetland pony roaming the room and aggressively beckoning for belly rubs. I immediately budged my way to the charcuterie board and loaded up on cheese and crackers and a healthy dollop of guac. Emily was already amiably chatting with a noble-looking woman. She gave me a look that said Slow Down.

In most social gatherings, if I’m not the one behind the scenes cooking, I tend to trail behind my wife by one or two steps as she works the room. You’d think I was her bodyguard.

Emily introduced her new friend. “This is Dottie Lamm.”

Oh, wow. You don’t need Wikipedia to know who Dottie Lamm is. If you don’t know who Dottie Lamm is, you’re not a true Coloradan. The former First Lady of Colorado. Spent a lifetime championing women’s rights, early childhood education, and reproductive rights. True Colorado royalty.

Ms. Lamm, or Dottie to most everyone, regaled us with stories about raising a family in the public eye in the 1970s and 80s, when the Denver Broncos and mountain snow reports led the evening news. Also, when the city was selected to host the 1976 Olympics and Denver voters famously had the audacity to vote it down. A different, simpler time. (We skipped over the chapter when DPS was judged to be a segregated school district and was forced to institute court-ordered busing.)

I didn’t have getting chummy with Dottie Lamm on my Bingo card, but there it was.

Turns out, Dottie’s daughter, Heather Lamm, hosted the gathering.

Before introducing Caron Blanke, Heather gathered everyone together in her tightly packed kitchen and quickly lit the room on fire with her withering denunciations and disgust with the current school board. Her introduction wove in phrases like “we desperately need greater governance, more transparency, more accountability.” It felt like a Rage Against the Machine moment for civic-minded grown-ups. In short, the current DPS School Board was a dumpster fire of internecine bickering—badly in need of a fresh voice and a new direction.

Enter Caron Blanke.

This was a launch after all, not a pep rally (that would come later in the campaign). For the first time as a school board candidate, Caron took the floor. She spoke about her role as a parent with two DPS graduates and one DPS student, and her experiences as the director of the JCC Early Learning School. She has Master’s Degrees in social work and nonprofit leadership. For eleven years she’s been a tireless advocate for students and teachers, as well as a long-time parent volunteer. To my untrained eye, she checked all the boxes.

Then she dove into the nitty-gritty of DPS school board politics. She tackled thorny questions—when to close or consolidate underperforming schools, how to fairly compensate educators, and how to narrow the achievement gap. She didn’t shy away from the hot-button issues either: the perpetual debate between charter and neighborhood schools, and the ever-pressing conversation around school safety.

(Sorry, I didn’t bring a tape recorder. I came as a wingman, a night out with my spouse supporting a friend. But now my interest was piqued.)

At first, I felt lost at the train station. Granted, I’m not a stranger to Denver’s public education system. Our family (with four kids) has been continuously enrolled in DPS for twenty-plus years. Emily has been heavily involved in numerous Parent-Teacher Associations and is on a first-name basis with almost every teacher our kids have ever had. I even coached middle school sports for years. The Solomons show up.

However, this night was a crash course on big picture issues, not what happens inside the classrooms. Words like “governance” and “transparency” kept surfacing. As people spoke up during the Q&A, it became clear that nearly everyone in the room carried a grievance against DPS, the school board, or the District Superintendent. More than a few voiced deep-rooted animus toward specific board members, past and present. Caron was preaching to the choir.

There was one attendee in particular—let’s call her a “plant”—who clearly came spoiling for a fight. A professional provocateur, she peppered Caron with pointed questions about inequities in charter school enrollment and the “dirty” influence of outside money in campaigns. Honestly, half of it sounded like bureaucratic gibberish; I couldn’t track what she was trying to argue. Before Caron could even respond, Heather Lamm stepped in and swatted the questions away. Still, it felt like a sign of things to come.

We walked away that night impressed with Caron’s passion, earnestness and sense of purpose. As a newcomer, she was understandably an underdog and new at running a campaign. But as we would soon find out, she was a quick learner with a will of steel. As a friend alluded to, despite her veneer of affability and graciousness, she’s someone you’d want on your side in a street fight.

Now that three of our kids have grown and flown, Emily’s calendar — and mine — has opened up. We’re no longer spending weeknights driving carpools or sacrificing entire weekends to soccer games. I’ve spent decades in the restaurant business, convincing people to choose us over the place down the street, to dine with us, order from us, and believe in what we do. In a way, every meal, every night, is its own election. Might civic engagement be our next activity?

As a newcomer to local politics, Caron Blanke was embarking on an epic journey. She would need an array of volunteers, boots on the ground, a drumbeat of social media posts, not to mention fundraising appeals, and so much more.

A friend in need is a friend indeed.

Stay tuned.

Jay Solomon is the owner and chef behind JAYS2GO, a Denver-based gourmet dinner delivery service. When he’s not in the kitchen, he writes about food, family, sports, growing up, and the highs and lows of restaurant life. His business website is www.jays2go.com.

“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

- The White Queen, Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass.

Me: “Only six?”

Long before the crack of dawn, before your coffee maker sputters to life, before the rising sun blinds eastbound drivers, my commissary kitchen is ablaze and abuzz with magical activity.

In a traditional restaurant, chefs spend the day prepping and pacing before the night’s service. But in the Jays2go world of dinner delivery, the script flips. As soon as the lights click on, my crew hits the ground running—chopping, searing, roasting, slicing. There’s no time for leisurely scrolling, no pancakes or scones to nibble at—just knives flashing and burners roaring.

By the way, we’re not cooking for four tops or deuces arriving in an organized, staggered fashion. We’re cooking food in huge batches, which get chilled, portioned into hundreds of single servings, and packed for home delivery.

A weekday morning by the numbers looks something like this:

• Shrimp Scampi for 80: Thirty-five pounds of shrimp are sauteed with garlic, butter, and dry sherry in four massive rondo pans spread over sixteen burners.

• Salmon for 100: Fifty pounds of radiant pink fillets are drizzled with brown butter, a squeeze of lemon, a splash of white wine, and seasoned with paprika, salt, and pepper. They roast at 425°, trays rotated midway to compensate for oven hot spots, each tray of fillets rapidly pulled at 155° when measured with a probe thermometer.

• Grilled Meats and Vegetables for 200: Eighty pounds of marinated chicken breast are grilled over a blazing fire, followed by another fifty pounds of pork tenderloin, fifty ears of corn-on-the-cob, and two or three dozen scorched red bell peppers.

• Sides and Specials for everyone: Water is boiled for fifteen pounds of penne, twenty pounds of brown rice, and four pounds of red quinoa. For our vegetarian and gluten-free diners, thirty pounds of tofu are roasted, while twenty quarts of our signature polenta start their slow simmer on the stovetop.

By the time most people are buttering toast or letting the dog out, we’re well on the way to feeding busy people, on-the-go families, and active seniors through the metro Denver area. Before we know it, the sun is high in the sky, and we are coasting to the end of another day spent bringing our wild and ambitious culinary plans to life.

Actually, I’ve spent my entire career cooking in the wee hours of the morning. It started in the 1980s with my first business, baking and delivering 100 dozen cookies before dawn every day in upstate New York. In the early 2000s, my deli-café in the Lower Highlands featured the Brooklyn Fried Egg Sandwich for Denver’s early risers. After becoming a dad, I often arrived before sun-up at my Hot Ticket Café in the Denver Center for the Performing Arts—preparing for the pre-theater dinner crowd early so I could still make it to coach my kids’ soccer and baseball games.

Not every rise-and-shine shift has been filled with morning glory. When the pandemic hit, I strapped on a Superman cape and marched into the kitchen at 4:00 a.m. each day to nobly feed the shut-in masses. The cost, though, was steep—an exhausting, self-inflicted toll on both body and mind. Sometimes, too early is just too early.

Granted, this pre-dawn gig of mine hardly matches the image of the modern chef—flinging pans, artistically crafting plates, and downing beers deep into the night. And that’s okay.

What I didn’t mention: by punching my “time clock” before sunrise for almost 30 years, it also meant that I was on my way home before dusk. And that is equally magical to what happens before breakfast in my commissary kitchen. In the restaurant business, being home for dinner with family is pure gold.

Jay Solomon is the owner and chef behind JAYS2GO, a Denver-based gourmet dinner delivery service. When he’s not in the kitchen, he writes about food, family, sports, growing up, and the highs and lows of restaurant life. His business website is www.jays2go.com.

I like to say I grew up on a lake—but not just any lake. Cayuga Lake. Stretching 40 long miles from end to end, Cayuga lies at the heart of the New York Finger Lakes.

My grown kids, who grew up in Colorado, can rattle off the names of the 14ers they’ve climbed. My wife’s circle of friends can hike a different trail every weekend of the year. Where I’m from, I was surrounded by stunning lakes and gorges, yet I had zero interest in exploring them. For me, there was only one lake. Cayuga Lake was The Lake. I couldn't even tell you the names of the other Finger Lakes. (Okay: Seneca, Keuka, Canandaigua, and Skaneateles).

Cornell and Ithaca College campuses majestically overlook the lake’s southern tip. Perched high above the eastern shore is a tiny hamlet called Myers. In my early years, Myers was the center of the universe. The population was made almost entirely of my father’s extended family. Everyone was an aunt or uncle, a Tayta or Giddo, or a second, third, maybe even fourth cousin. The family tree was a gnarly knot.

When the lake’s waters were crystal-clear and the summer sun rose high in the sky, you could swim with minnows, sunfish, blue gills, and random perch. Any larger fish, say, a bass or trout, would send you to the docks in search of a fishing pole. Strands of seaweed, driftwood, and the occasional belly-up fish floating by were all part of the lake’s bohemian charm.

The gorges that fed into the lake were my version of a haunted house. If my dad was fishing, I’d hike up a gorge, turning over mossy rocks in search of squirming salamanders and worms, only to be scared shitless by a garter snake. The wildlife that roamed the leafy deciduous forest was fresh grist for my worst nightmares. Rumours of bobcat and bear sightings kept my ears and eyes attuned to every sinister rustling behind bushes. A porcupine waddling by, or worse, a skunk, would send me ske-daddling straight down to the safety of the lake.

Much has been said about life before cell phones, screen time, and social media. I'm not here to judge—but one thing’s certain: lake time moved at a slower pace. My childhood friends and I entertained ourselves with the simplest of contests. Skipping stones across the lake’s shimmering surface. Straddling the railroad tracks that hugged the shoreline. Seeing who could make the biggest cannonball splash off the dock. Holding our breath underwater? Everything was a contest.

The men would carry in card tables and play poker or pinochle while smoking cigars and sipping Rheingolds. They’d set up a makeshift grill and fire up shish kebabs and kibbeh (ground meat patties filled with bulgur and onions). Meanwhile, the women arrived with trays of stuffed grape leaves, bowls of tabbouleh, and cousa—light green summer squash filled with rice and meat. If there was a firehouse fundraiser up the road, an aunt might show up with Cornell BBQ Chicken bursting out of a styrofoam container. Life was good.

Once adolescence and puberty arrived, the lake became a hideaway to watch the sunset, warm up over a bonfire, and if the stars aligned, skinny dip under the moon. After grueling two-a-day pre-season football practices, we’d pile into a car and drive down the hill to the cinder beach, peeling off our sweat-drenched shirts before diving headfirst into the cooling waters.

Twenty-eight years ago, I left the lake and Myers behind. Newly married, my wife Emily and I packed up a 17-foot rental truck and headed west to Colorado. We built a new life and raised four kids in one of the most idyllic parts of the country.

When the kids were younger, we’d make summer pilgrimages back east, back to the lake. We’d walk down the hill from Myers, following the overgrown footpaths through cattails and pricker bushes, winding around the old pine trees, dodging poison ivy. I’d wade into the water—it seemed murkier now—and recycle tales of my childhood. Dunking friends under water. Reeling in sunnies. Scrambling down a gorge, certain there was a ferocious animal in hot pursuit.

Well, the kids thought the lake smelled funny. They thought my lake stories smelled even funnier. And what’s with the green slime on the rocks beneath their feet? I told them, Algae. It’s good for the planet.

The kids were not impressed. They much preferred the clean, chlorinated calm of our neighborhood pool in Denver. The quirks and perks of growing up in a small town nestled over a lake were lost on them. Honestly, they were probably too young to appreciate the lake’s mischievous charm and allure.

Over time, visits to the lake grew fewer and farther between. Sadly, many of my father’s people—and my mother’s—have since passed on. Distant memories have been subsumed by the ravages of time. (My embellished stories also grew fewer and farther between.)

Then, nearly twenty-five years after we moved west, two of my college-bound kids received acceptance letters from a certain university on the East Coast—one whose alma mater carried a familiar refrain:

“Far above Cayuga’s waters….”

That fall, while the new college students settled into their dorms and explored the campus, I took a slight detour. It was a good time to go for a walk, a trip down memory lane, you could say. A slow walk, down by the lake….

Jay Solomon is the owner and chef behind JAYS2GO, a Denver-based gourmet dinner delivery service. When he’s not in the kitchen, he writes about food, family, sports, growing up, and the highs and lows of restaurant life. His business website is www.jays2go.com.

Nine years ago, JAYS2GO — now a thriving hyper-local dinner delivery business — was born in a cauldron of wild ambition, personal upheaval, and a dash of wishful, unconventional thinking.

In 2016, I was at a crossroads. I had the ignominious task of shuttering one of my restaurants, a deli-cafe in the Highland neighborhood. After a successful 12-year run, my lease was abruptly terminated, thanks to an arrogant new landlord who had other plans for the building.

On my last day, I posted the hardest sign I’ve ever written in my life: Sorry, we’re permanently closed. I backed a rental truck up to the rear entrance and hauled out the well-worn ovens, grills, stovetops, refrigerators, kitchen sinks, and dining furniture. What remained was a hollow, cavernous shell—drainage pipes jutting from bare walls, cobwebs drifting from the fluorescent lights above, and floors blotched with a decade's worth of spills, splatters, and countless “Geronimo” drops.

After scrubbing the nooks and crannies, spackling the walls (the landlord still held my security deposit, after all), and making my umpteenth trip to the dumpster, I tossed the keys onto the counter and took one last look around. The mop sink, once discreetly hidden, was now in full view, an inglorious monument to the physical, financial, and emotional damage left behind by my restaurant’s sudden demise.

By a certain age, everyone in this business experiences a watershed moment when everything that came before is no longer, and everything that follows will never be the same. Put more succinctly, this rapid downfall was my line in the sand.

However, if this marked the end of my decades-long restaurant career, that was news to me. I wasn’t completely burnt out from the daily grind of food service—but I was a little crispy. But where do jaded chef-owners turn when they need a reboot? Former athletes move into coaching. Corporate types climb the ladder. Writers transition into editing. Most chefs move into management (or leave the field altogether). The problem is, I’m a maker, not a manager.

That summer, I felt like a castaway, drifting online searching for “restaurants for sale,” peering through dusty storefronts with “for lease” signs in the windows. Yet, the prospect of starting another place from scratch was daunting. Denver’s retail rents were out of control, and even locations in less-desirable neighborhoods came with ridiculous price tags.

Now and then, I’d bolt upright from a recurring nightmare: I’d taken a job—working for someone else. The idea of collecting a paycheck with somebody else’s name on it, of showing up to a business I didn’t build, was terrifying.

By midsummer 2016 the outlook looked dim and grim.

Then something remarkable happened—a spark of imagination, or in this case, full-blown fireworks. For centuries, restaurants have relied on the age-old model: customers come to you. But what if I flipped the script? What if, instead of waiting for customers to come to my door, I brought dinners to theirs? What if the menu wasn’t fixed and written in stone but changed every week? And what if, instead of serving meals nightly, we delivered a weekly spread—like a Super Bowl of food, every single week?

Ultimately, in 2016, this bold new vision hinged on two critical lynchpins. First, I needed a massive, well-maintained commissary kitchen with affordable rent. Second, I needed an e-commerce website simple enough for a non-techie like me to update with a fresh menu each week. For that, my high school son Noah built my website, which was a catalyst for it all.

It’s been nearly a decade since that pivotal moment, with 20,000+ orders, 450+ different menus, and hundreds of updates later. And www.jays2go.com is still humming like a well-oiled machine, with regular maintenance checks thanks to Noah (who now works for a huge tech company in New York City).

From there, it was all about cooking and delivering great food—and letting word of mouth do the rest.

Fast forward to 2025: JAYS2GO now brings gourmet meals to the entire metro Denver area, stretching from Central Park, Park Hill, Crestmoor, and Lowry to Wash Park, downtown Denver neighborhoods, the Greater Highlands, Lakewood, Applewood, and Wheat Ridge, and we continue to add new areas to our delivery zones.

Postscript: JAYS2GO started as a small neighborhood meal service, but when the pandemic hit in 2020, we were ready, and our customer base exploded. I made a heartfelt promise to our customers then, and it remains just as true today:

“In my 33 years in the restaurant business, the health and welfare of our customers have always been our #1 priority. Please know that JAYS2GO pledges to take care of you and your loved ones. It’s a promise I’ve made to my customers for over three decades, and I intend to keep that promise.”

Jay Solomon is the owner and chef of JAYS2GO, a gourmet dinner delivery service based in Denver, Colorado. In the 1990’s he wrote over a dozen cookbooks and hundreds of articles about food and cooking for magazines and newspapers. His website is www.jays2go.com.

Hard to believe it was five years ago when the pandemic shut down restaurants, theaters, and schools, grocery store shelves were stripped bare, and riots broke out over toilet paper. From Main Street to Wall Street, Michelin-starred establishments to mom-and-pop corner stores, COVID spared no one—it was a ruthless, equal-opportunity disruptor.

Social distancing, high anxiety and a deadly virus crushed the economy and damaged our mental health. But one basic need remained unchanged—people still had to eat. Aside from pizza delivery and Chinese and Thai takeout, the dinner options were few and far between. Real panic set in as freezers ran empty—no more frozen dinners, no more freezer-burnt leftovers, just mystery meat sitting in the back.

Ordering takeout from brick-and-mortar restaurants seemed like a viable option but proved to be a dead end. Most food places were trapped in a kind of bardo-dystopia, struggling to survive but unprepared to handle pick-up or online delivery orders. The idea of restaurants adopting user-friendly e-commerce platforms was months, even years, away.

Against this backdrop of a public health emergency and widespread turmoil, there was a sliver of hope: Fledgling meal prep and dinner delivery businesses were uniquely positioned to handle the flood of orders from housebound customers. With seasoned culinary teams and fully developed e-commerce websites, the meal kit industry found COVID to be a boon, not a bust.

In Denver, one such dinner delivery service was owned by a guy who also ran a neighborhood deli and pre-theatre café. A lifelong veteran of the restaurant world, he quietly launched a virtual, online-only eatery back in 2016—eons before the word pandemic became part of daily life, and an innocent sneeze could empty a room.

"Launched" might be too strong of a word. At first, he mostly delivered to nearby homes and friends of his wife. The business was an ambitious side gig, a work-in-progress, with weekly menus posted on a website built by his high school–aged son. It was never meant to be more than a modest supplement to his seasonal café, at best. He certainly didn’t imagine it would one day allow him to leave his more traditional 'day job’ in the restaurant field.

This is where my story, and the JAYS2GO story, truly begins. What began as a shot-in-the-dark idea, born from humble and unlikely beginnings, not only survived the pandemic, but grew into one of the most sought-after dinner delivery services in Denver. No one could have guessed that a guy who spent twenty-plus years making sandwiches, ladling soups, and pulling espresso shots would have the culinary chops to run a meal prep delivery business during a time of unprecedented upheaval. But like so many rules, some assumptions are meant to be broken.

Today, JAYS2GO delivers hundreds of gourmet meals each week to homes across the greater Denver metro area. Every Saturday, over 2,000 people receive our new weekly menu straight to their inbox—and that number continues to grow. We remain committed to our promise: to nourish and care for our customers and their families with every meal we serve.

To fully appreciate the sheer audacity of this local success story, you need to go back to June of 2016, when my deli-restaurant at the time, Jay’s Patio Cafe, lost its lease, thanks to a greedy new landlord. I spent a sweltering summer day loading up a U-Haul with the remnants of what had once been a thriving neighborhood spot—dining room furniture, kitchen equipment, tubs of utensils, and memories—all heading for the garbage dump.

That miserable day in 2016 was the absolute rock bottom of my 30-year career in hospitality. But the story of what came next—the reinvention, the resilience in the face of COVID, and the rise and redemption of JAYS2GO—that’s a story for another time.

Stay tuned.

Jay Solomon is the owner and chef of JAYS2GO, a gourmet dinner delivery service based in Denver, Colorado. In the 1990’s he wrote over a dozen cookbooks and hundreds of articles about food and cooking for magazines and newspapers. His website is www.jays2go.com.

When I meet a fellow chef for the first time, I look at their hands. A true chef’s hands are muscular, tight, and weathered like well-aged leather. A glance at their forearms will confirm my suspicions—burns and scars that resemble skid marks. Manicured hands are a dead giveaway. That’s a chef in name only.

As a young man fresh out of college, I was told New Yorkers judge a person by their shoes. My uncle believed a firm handshake revealed a person’s character—he proved his point by squeezing mine so hard my knees buckled. But in the restaurant business, your hands and forearms tell the real story. Even an executive chef bears battle marks forged in the tempest of a commercial kitchen, proudly displayed like a badge of honor.

Having established the proper credentials for "chefhood," we can now ask: what makes a great chef? In this age of media influencers and rapid-fire social reels, how can we be sure of a chef's OG kitchen credentials? Who is fair-to-middling, and who rises to extraordinary?

With over thirty years in the restaurant business, I’ve had the privilege of working alongside some truly exceptional chefs. In my experience, there are seven key attributes that define true culinary excellence—the qualities that distinguish good chefs from the chefs de grande.

1. People Skills Are as Important as Knife Skills. The days of temperamental primadonnas who barked orders and hurled insults (and rarely worked the line) are long gone. Great chefs inspire their team to become the best version of themselves, in and out of the kitchen. Great chefs offer instruction without a spitoon of condescension. Great chefs dole out compliments as well as critiques, always striving for the greater good. And great chefs aren’t afraid to roll up their sleeves and jump into the fray.

2. Ability to Improvise Under Pressure. Commercial kitchens are pressure cookers, and it is not unusual for things to go off the rails. When suppliers deliver wild rice instead of wild mushrooms, or the baker confuses salt for sugar, a great chef pivots and thinks fast. Sinks will clog, dish machines will overflow—so grab a plunger and channel Macgyver. There’s no crying in baseball, and there’s no time for whining in the kitchen. Great chefs reset and restart!

3. Learning Never Stops. One of the defining traits of this profession is its endless learning curve—new techniques, clever hacks, evolving flavor profiles—the constant collision of art and science in real-time. A chef who leads with questions and curiosity understands the power of shared knowledge and experience. A chef who speaks only in declarative sentences, rooted in supreme confidence in his or her vaulted intelligence, rarely asking and always dictating, lacks the inquisitive nature that defines true greatness in the kitchen.

4. Cook With the Best Ingredients at the Best Price. When it comes to scratch cooking, the challenge is finding the top ingredients with an eye on the bottom line. Any chef can serve an expensive boiled lobster with a jigger of melted butter and win applause. But can the chef prepare broiled haddock or tilapia and win high praise? It doesn't take a culinary genius to grill tenderloin to mouth-watering perfection, but can the chef elevate flank steak to Michelin level? Or the humble chuck roll? (Cue Beef Bourguignon.)

Making incredible food within a budget is an enviable skill set. Behind every thriving restaurant is a resourceful chef who transforms simple ingredients into menu headliners. It takes imagination, determination, and a willingness to think outside the pot.

5. The Tasting Spoon Is the Most Valuable Tool in the Kitchen. A recipe is like a treasure map pointing the way, but it's up to the chef to find where “X” marks the spot. A great chef understands the complex choreography of flavor, texture, temperature, aroma, and presentation. Developing a discerning palate takes years of training. It’s not only about their own taste buds but understanding their customers' tastes and preferences.

Meal prep companies talk about the importance of the “final mile”, the last leg of the meal preparation, packaging, and delivery-to-your-door journey. A similar process happens in the kitchen. A great chef stands at the ready to taste every sauce, soup, marinade, dressing, spice rub, complex butter, and vinaigrette. The chef is the gatekeeper and caretaker of the menu all rolled into one.

6. Promote, Promote, Promote! It was once common knowledge that the three most important factors in a restaurant’s success were location, location, location. An equally important factor today is the power of social media promotion. No one expects a modern chef to document every iconic moment on Instagram—there are other people who do that. But a great chef has to be camera-ready, media-friendly, and ready to “say cheese”. The surly churlish stereotype is as outdated as ashtrays and jello modes.

7. Nurturing an Enduring Passion for Food. There is more to a chef’s job than simply preparing meals for people. At its heart, professional cooking is a nurturing and nourishing act of caring. A great chef shares their love for food in the most quintessential nonverbal way. A well-plated meal artfully crafted, radiating with anticipation, speaks volumes. It is the ultimate expression of a great chef’s abilities and passion.

After three decades I don’t claim to be a great chef—that’s for others to decide. What I do strive for is to embody these essential virtues every day I step into my chef's coat with a spring in my step. These are the principles I live by, my daily mantras. (Unfortunately, my culinary skills don’t carry over into my private life. I can craft seasonally inspired menus and oversee the production of 500 gourmet meals each week, but when it comes to cooking for a dinner party for six, I somehow always end up with a bus tub of extra food.)

At the end of the day, I believe the pursuit of culinary excellence is not a destination but a lifelong journey—one that has been rewarding, challenging, redeeming, and deeply fulfilling. Now, let’s eat!

Jay Solomon is the owner and chef of JAYS2GO, a gourmet dinner delivery service based in Denver, Colorado. In the 1990’s he wrote over a dozen cookbooks and hundreds of articles about food and cooking for magazines and newspapers. His website is www.jays2go.com.

“The life span of an independent restaurant is seven years. Additionally, seventy-five percent of restaurants will fail in the first five years.”

Although I graduated from Cornell’s Hotel School in the last century, I vividly recall my professor's blunt but prescient words. The message was loud and clear: if you plan to open a restaurant, you better buckle up for a rocky ride. “This ain’t no picnic”.

Tone deaf and headstrong, a year after graduating I was determined to open a restaurant. My grandmother pleaded with me, “Why don’t you get a job where you can dress up in a nice suit and tie?” My late grandfather worked the salt mines, riding an elevator shaft a hundred stories below the lake, excavating rock salt. He worked hard, gambled hard, smoked cigars, and at the peak of his career — he rose to the level of a foreman — he died of a heart attack at 59.

In my grandmother’s mind, the restaurant kitchen was another version of the salt mine.

My parents were not thrilled either, like watching their kid ride their new banana bicycle over a cliff. “Learn on somebody else’s dime,” my father counseled. “I’m saying a prayer for you,” was my mother’s response.

I wasn’t a complete neophyte -- I’d worked in kitchens since I was old enough to drive and spent college summers apprenticing in Cape Cod, Boston, and D.C. I enjoyed the challenge, creativity, and camaraderie of the commercial kitchen. The problem was, whenever I left the bubble of my hometown, almost every executive chef I worked for was a condescending asshole.

I made up my mind. I had to go out on my own.

Dad: “Pal, you have to crawl before you walk and walk before you run.”

Me: “You have to spend money to make money”.

Dad: “You can’t throw good money after bad money.”

Me: “You’re confusing restaurants with blackjack.” Back and forth we went.

While my peers entered coveted management programs with Hyatt and Four Seasons, I bided my time and took a job at a bagel shop. Fresh out of college with an Ivy League degree, this wasn’t exactly a rocket-fueled start. If one of my old professors walked in and saw me behind the counter, they’d give me a “What the hell are you doing here?” look.

On my days off, I’d stop by a local convenience store for a bite to eat. The place reeked of mediocrity, but there was always a line of impatient customers at the deli counter, checking their watches and waiting for mediocre sandwiches and stale cookies.

Across the street was an office space with a “For Lease” sign in the window. In real estate-speak, the space was cozy and intimate with floor-to-ceiling windows and enough frontage for an outdoor patio. I stood outside the entrance and marveled at the full parking lot in front of the convenience store. A light bulb went off in my head.

“What are the three most important keys to a restaurant’s success?,” the professor asked the class. Hands shot up: “A good chef…quality food…attentive service…?”

The professor shook his head. “Location, location, location.”

I arranged to meet the building’s landlord to look at the space. Joe C. was a well-known developer in town and the owner of a prestigious steakhouse. He also was a crusty, cigar-chomping, no-bullshit guy whose words came at you like brass knuckles. As he briskly showed me around, I daydreamed of a bustling cafe with a chalkboard menu featuring wildly inventive sandwiches written in hipster cursive.

The wheels were spinning: I’d enlist my father’s Rat Pack of ‘cousins’ to build countertops and storage cabinets, run electricity and water lines, install sinks and floor drains. This was child’s play to my father’s crowd; they changed their car’s oil in the driveway, built ping pong tables out of scrap wood, and finished their basements to make extra bedrooms for their growing families. These no-frills guys would show up with a buzz saw, drill, and toolbox and tell me to get the hell out of the way. I couldn’t wait!

Me: “I like it. Can I look at the lease?”

Landlord: “You want it or not?”

Me: “I think so.”

Landlord: “You got money in the bank?”

Me (timidly): “Yeah, sure.”

Landlord: “Then put a goddamn check in the mail.”

And with that, my future landlord Joe C. escorted me to the door and showed me out.

I signed the lease and mailed the check.

There was one minor detail: To outfit the cafe with tables, chairs, a bakery case, a refrigerator, a meat slicer, and a coffee machine — I scraped together my leftover savings from graduation and maxed out my newly minted credit cards. When I stocked up on supplies - bread, eggs, meats, and cheeses - I learned my account was “COD” (cash on delivery.) The Sysco distributor wanted money upfront.

The issue was, by that time my bank account was depleted.

I had one more card up my sleeve. I was presently crashing on my grandmother’s couch. And why not? Every Sunday Tayta made large pots of Middle Eastern food and left them on the stovetop for whoever stopped by: cabbage rolls, spinach pies, stuffed grape leaves, and a one-pot dish made with rice, orzo, garbanzo beans, chicken broth, and pulled chicken. You grabbed a plate and served yourself straight from the stove.

For a kid just out of college trying to open a restaurant, this arrangement was pretty cushy. I had free room-and-board - NO overhead! And she did my laundry!

Reality was about to set in. Days before opening, I sat across from my grandmother at the kitchen table but didn’t have an appetite.

Grandmother: “What’s wrong Buster Brown?”

Me: I’m a little short on cash. My suppliers are COD — they want cash upfront.”

Grandmother: “How much do you need?”

Me: “Three hundred, maybe three fifty.”

Without a word, she disappeared from the kitchen and went up to her bedroom. She came back downstairs and handed me a wad of twenty dollar bills.

Me (sheepishly): “I’ll pay you back.”

Grandmother: “You are not paying me back.”

Me: “No, I promise, I’m gonna—”

Grandmother: “Don’t be a jackass. Now fix your plate.”

And with that quick cash infusion, I was on my way. My grandmother, along with my father and his DIY cronies, helped launch my 30+ year career in the restaurant business.

Jay Solomon is the owner and chef of JAYS2GO, a gourmet dinner delivery service based in Denver, Colorado. In the 1990’s he wrote over a dozen cookbooks and hundreds of articles about food and cooking for magazines and newspapers. His website is www.jays2go.com.

Preface: While popular culture glamorizes chefs and restaurant operators, the reality is filled with mundane issues that hamper (and demand) our daily attention. Food costs and rents increase unexpectedly, refrigerators break down, and sinks back up. Staff members go AWOL, and suppliers mistakenly deliver forty pounds of duck instead of chicken. The absolute last thing we want to deal with is a personal health crisis.

About a year ago, at 4:30 a.m., in an empty commissary kitchen, my right side suddenly went numb, and I collapsed onto the concrete floor. Motionless, I stared at the grimy wheels of a utility cart as a wave of panic set in. What just happened? Why can’t I feel anything?

Get up, get up, get up. I told myself. Just stand up.

After the most terrifying 30 seconds of my life, I pressed my left hand against the floor and forced myself to stand. My right side tingled as if it had fallen asleep. Trembling and disoriented, I cautiously put one foot in front of the other.

It was my first day back from a long-overdue vacation, with a daunting workload ahead and my staff still two hours away. I was determined to hit the ground running—no freak accident was going to slow me down.

So, like any obsessive, hyper-driven restaurant owner, I dusted myself off and got to work—firing up the grills, ovens, and stock pots. In hindsight, I was probably in shock.

It wasn’t until I retraced my steps from the past hour that the weight of what had just happened truly sank in. This had to be more than just a clumsy misstep. Was I facing my worst nightmare—a heart attack or stroke?

I texted my wife with the unsettling news. Something really bad happened. Long story short, she picked me up and we drove straight to the UCHealth emergency room.

From there, it’s a familiar story told by millions of stroke patients and their loved ones every year. Mention “stroke-like symptoms” in the ER and you’ll jump the line and get whisked to a room filled with doctors, nurses, and beeping medical devices. Stroke patients and their care team race against the clock— a quick diagnosis increases the chances exponentially for proper treatment and a better outcome. The longer you wait, the more damage a stroke can do. Every second counts.

After multiple tests, scans, and blood draws, my hospital medical team zeroed in on the likely culprit: atrial fibrillation (an irregular heartbeat). Also known as Afib, atrial fibrillation is a leading cause of strokes. When your heart beats irregularly, blood can pool up and clot as it circulates from your heart. The clot creates a blockage of a blood vessel or artery, depriving your brain of oxygen, and ultimately leading to a “heart attack for the brain.”

To prevent blood clots from forming, the cardiologist prescribed a blood thinner (Eliquiz). “How long will I be on it?” I asked. “Twice a day for the rest of your life,” he dryly responded. “And never, ever miss a dose.” There was no sugar coating.

Nothing in the world hijacks your attention more than a trip to the emergency room. My first ER visit dates back to high school when a ninety-mile-an-hour fastball hit me right between the eyes, fracturing my nose. Two inches either way would’ve blinded an eye. 

Having spent a lifetime in the restaurant business, I’ve exceeded my quota for ER trips due to gruesome knife cuts, ghastly gashes from meat slicers, and third-degree burns from scorching ovens, griddles and pans.

While this wasn’t my first rodeo, my latest ER trip felt different and more alarming. This time, the doctors weren’t stitching me up and sending me back to the kitchen. Instead, I was diagnosed with a lifelong medical condition — atrial fibrillation. Suddenly the ongoing stressors of running a restaurant seemed trivial by comparison.

After a night of monitoring and more testing at the hospital, I was cleared to go home. “Afib is not life-threatening,” the nurse kept telling me. “Millions of people live long and productive lives with heart arrhythmias. It’s very treatable.” My initial panic started to subside. As the owner-chef of a dinner delivery business, I began planning to finish the week’s food production.

Then, an unwelcome plot twist. I was changing from my hospital gown into street clothes when another team of doctors stopped by my room. They wheeled in a mobile computer which displayed an x-ray image of my neck and head.

“We’re from the UCH Spine Center. Your MRI detected another serious issue: cervical stenosis,” the lead doctor said. “The spinal canal in your neck, your cervical spine, is severely narrowed, compressing the spinal cord and nerve roots.”

“I don’t understand. My neck doesn’t hurt,” I bleated.

“Let me show you.” The doctor pointed to an image on the computer. Indeed, my neck and spinal cord were twisted forward like a bent spoon. You didn’t have to be a medical professional to see the problem. It didn’t look right.

Doctor: “If you fall off a ladder or bike, or even trip again, you’re at serious risk for a catastrophic spinal injury.”

Me: “Ugh. Does that mean surgery?”

Doctor: “You’ll need spinal decompression surgery. And we should also fuse your C-3, C-4, and C-5 vertebrae. We’ll have to wait at least three months ‘till after your stroke. But not much later. Cervical stenosis is a progressive ailment. It only gets worse.”

Me: “So did this happen when I collapsed from the stroke?” 

Doctor: “No, you’ve probably had this condition for ten years. It’s common for people who work with their heads down. Hairdressers, chefs, tailors…even surgeons.”

My stomach sank and my heart raced. I was crestfallen. My hopes of striding out of the hospital that morning with an easy fix (a prescription for a miraculous blood thinner) had completely dissipated. The discharge nurse and my wife noticed my deflated demeanor.

“You’re actually quite lucky,” the nurse said. “You had a mini-stroke. If your arrhythmia had gone undetected much longer, it could’ve led to a massive, debilitating stroke. And by diagnosing your cervical stenosis early, you might’ve been saved from a paralyzing spinal injury.”

“Well, if you put it that way, I guess I am fortunate,” I said meekly. 

“You had an angel looking out for you,” the nurse added.

“Thank you for talking him off the ledge,” my wife interjected.

Prologue:

I underwent neck surgery in November, 2023 at UCHealth. The procedure lasted almost eight hours. Side note: I had one of the best spinal surgeons in the country operate on me. I spent Thanksgiving week in the hospital and went home with multiple titanium brackets—and twenty-five staples—in my upper back and three fused vertebrae, along with 15 stitches in the front of my neck. I also carried home enough pain medications, blood thinners, and laxatives that could fill a cigar box

On January 8, 2024 I returned to the kitchen, and after being closed for eight weeks, JAYS2GO reopened. (Ironically we didn’t miss a single week of service during the three years of the pandemic). Our loyal and supportive customers came back in droves. Turns out, Denver is more than home to the Broncos and Nuggets. This city embraces and appreciates small business owners, through thick and thin. For the next several months, our dinner delivery menus sold out every week, and our email list grew rapidly with new customers. By late spring JAYS2GO was cruising, my long and painful recovery from neck surgery was in the rearview mirror.

Until April, when my mostly dormant Afib reared its ugly head. What began as an occasional bout of heart flutters turned into full-blown “persistent” atrial fibrillation. I experienced Afib’s common symptoms including fatigue, interrupted sleep, and shortness of breath. Medications failed to return my heartbeat to a normal rhythm, as did three attempts of cardioversion procedure in the hospital (electrical shocks are delivered to your chest, hoping to reset your heart.)

My only recourse was another operation: catheter ablation.

In Tom Cruise’s movie Jerry Maguire, Renee Zellweger’s character tells Jerry Maguire, “Let’s not tell our sad stories.”

I’ll save my next sad story for another chapter.

Chef and author Jay Solomon has been in the restaurant business for 30+ years. He owns JAYS2GO, a dinner delivery business based in Denver, Colorado. Check out his website: www.jays2go.com. His wife Emily contributed to this story.

We are living in the age of culinary enlightenment. Walk up to almost any destination restaurant or food truck and the menu will beckon with imagination and allure: pumpkin seed-cilantro pesto, creamy mascarpone hummus, cedar-planked wild salmon, rosemary scented ciabatta, beet risotto, rainbow chili wontons, cider-pear vinaigrette. Today’s flavors are as lit as the fireworks on the Fourth of July.

When I entered the hallowed halls of Cornell’s Hotel and Restaurant School in the nascent 1980s, imperious centuries-old French cooking was the gold standard for fine cuisine. You’d fail a pop quiz if you couldn’t name the five mother sauces (béchamel, velouté, Espagnole, hollandaise, and tomato). If your ultra-fragile consomme soup “broke” and turned cloudy, you got an instant F in the class. (For those wondering, consomme is a glorified beef broth.)

Then there was croquembouche, a labor-intensive ornamental tower of cream puffs and pastry cream spindle-wrapped in strands of caramel. C’mon now — the French invented the chocolate eclair - a masterpiece pastry for the masses. One sultry bite of a chocolate-frosted, butter cream-filled eclair, and it’s game over for doughnuts. The French should have stopped there, but no, they gave birth to the unfathomably complicated Christmas tree-like dessert, the notorious croquembouche.

Would you rather eat this tangled concoction…

Or this heavenly-filled chocolate-drenched pillow…

Julia Child made French cooking seem fun and accessible, but “Principles of French Cuisine 101” turned it into Robert’s Rules of Order. This triggered a bit of culture shock. Growing up in a rural small town, there weren’t many Francophiles showing up for dinner toting bottles of Pinot Noir and cave-ripened Camembert cheese.

Despite my ignorance of all things français, I still nurtured an appreciation for good food — namely, ethnic comfort food. Both my parents worked, but my immigrant grandmothers took charge and kept us well-fed. On Sundays, our Nana brought massive plates of veal cutlets, chicken cacciatore, and melt-in-your-mouth Sicilian meatballs. On Wednesdays, our Tayta Badia sent shish kebabs (laham meshwi), stuffed grape leaves, meat paddies filled with bulgur (kibbeh), and shanklesh (a feta-like cheese rolled in za’atar). My friends’ kitchens smelled of meatloaf and pot roasts, but ours radiated (or reeked, depending on your disposition) of garlicky marinara, cabbage rolls on the stovetop, and freshly-baked pita bread dipped in hummus.

Getting a driver’s license meant I could get a job on weekends. My culinary career was launched in the dish pit of the Golden Garter, a fancy candle-lit steakhouse overlooking the lake. (At the end of my shifts Leo (the owner) paid me out of loose change in his pocket, grabbed a wad full of dollars from the bar’s tip jar, and told me to pick out a raspberry parfait from the walk-in). I graduated to flipping burgers at Mickey D’s and slinging pizzas at Pizza Hut. During my first year of college, I bulk-cooked troughs of dining hall grub at night while learning the ethereal lessons of French cuisine by day.

At a young age, I was ready to say au revoir to a culinary career. I had zero interest in the corporate (but potentially rewarding) world of fast food chains. Meanwhile in mainstream America food scientists in lab coats (not aprons) were replacing your Great Grandma’s cherished dog-eared recipes with a wave of Jetson-inspired meals: Salisbury steak, instant mashed potatoes (just add water!), fish sticks, powdered milk, and spaghetti and meatballs straight out of the can. The country could send a man to the moon, but all we got was a lousy glass of Tang and soul-crushing TV dinners.

I was coming of age in the midst of a culinary dystopia. Majoring in Accounting was starting to sound awfully appealing. Something had to give.

The summer after my sophomore year I hit the road and landed a job at a 500-seat dinner-theatre restaurant in Cape Cod (my bedroom was above the cocktail lounge). I soon had a fantastic epiphany: seafood for dinner was more than a fish fry smothered in batter and buried in tartar sauce. Blast-roasting fish with a squeeze of lemon, white wine, melted butter, and a sprinkling of paprika and salt was a revelation. Shrimp scampi, seared scallops, broiled oysters on the half shell, seeing freshly caught cod and haddock sold straight off the boats at loading docks — just wow! I fell in love with the briny taste of the ocean.

I caught the travel bug, and the following summer I took a job at a Georgetown gourmet deli in D.C. The Silver Palate Cookbook had just come out and became the new bible for the next generation of chefs. (Bye-bye Joy of Cooking!) I was trained to make curried chicken and apple salad with golden raisins, asparagus quiche with prosciutto and Yarslberg cheese, and tortellini tossed with basil-laden pesto. The Silver Palate also gave the world the timeless classic, Chicken Marbella: chicken marinated overnight in wine vinegar, olive oil, figs, black and green olives, garlic, parsley, and oregano, then roasted and braised in the oven with white wine and brown sugar.

Maybe the culinary profession was the right path for me after all.

Right after college, my itinerant summer lifestyle continued, and I headed straight to Boston to work for a new bistro on swanky Charles Street. When I interviewed I had my eye on the open kitchen’s glamorous saute station next to the storefront window facing Beacon Hill’s tony cobble-stoned sidewalks. As pedestrians strolled by, the saute chef inevitably drew a crowd of gaping onlookers. I dreamed of performing my craft, double-fisting the skillets, taming the flames, strutting my stuff in front of a live audience, just like the street musicians and buskers in Harvard Square— that was me!

No, sadly, that was not me. The Executive Chef had other plans. My first task was deboning fifty ducks for — my worst nightmare — French pate. Ever had liverwurst as a kid? Well, pate is a ground-up meat paste made with animal innards. Yep. After that traumatic ordeal, the chef threw about five hundred pounds of potatoes at me and told me to start peeling. When I finished with that tedious exercise, a stinky, stanky dish room filled with stacks of dirty pots and pans awaited me.

After about two weeks and on the verge of quitting that uppity sweatshop, I was mercifully transferred to their deli outpost on Newberry Street (locals called it the Beverly Hills of Boston). Making sandwiches was more my speed and I went to work gleefully crafting gourmet sandwiches filled with arugula, brie, Boursin cheese, tarragon chicken, oven-roasted top round (roast beef), fresh mozzarella, and yes, pesto.

PROLOGUE

Looking back, I learned valuable life lessons in the Hotel School. For those willing to work hard (and smart), there were no ceiling limits on how high you could go. The school’s overbearing emphasis on French cuisine was a reflection of the times - I’m sure it is different now. Cornell has a beautiful campus, a welcoming community, and a vast network of supportive Hotelie alumni. (Two of our children are current Cornellians.) I wouldn’t trade those years for the world.

Today’s chefs are viewed as celebrities, artists, and cultural tastemakers. The culinary workplace is more diverse and less male-dominated than ever before. But, if we’re talking about coming-of-age in the restaurant industry, there is no such thing as the “good ole days.” Decades ago, far too many chefs and owners were egocentric maniacs. “Lifers” in the kitchen were often drunks and/or addicts. Racism and sexism were rampant. Granted, there was the rare altruistic mentor or Ph.D. student paying their way through school, but for the most part, the professional kitchen was a dysfunctional train wreck. This may not be new news, but it bears repeating.

If I wanted to do more than survive in the industry, but to thrive, the only future I had was to open my own restaurant. At the time, that sounded like a hilarious idea (especially to my family, haha.) A cutting-edge restaurant in Boston has just about kicked me to the curb, the culinary instructors at Cornell barely knew my name. I was 23, what the hell did I know?

Yet, in my bones, I felt like there was something in the wind, that things in the restaurant business were about to change. People were traveling more, moving away from home, and spending more money. This was a moment of cultural inflection; the traditional American palate was bored - and boring. Regional chefs across the country were making waves: Paul Prudhomme’s Louisiana Kitchen, Dean Fearing’s Mansion at Turtle Creek in Dallas, Chris Schlesinger’s East Coast Grill in Boston (and his seminal cookbook, Thrill of the Grill), and Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse in California were just a few of the early pioneers igniting the culinary revolution. There was a movement — and a mutiny— underfoot.

I wasn’t anywhere near the front lines, but their success gave me hope (and their cookbooks gave me inspiration.) Mild and ubiquitous ketchup and meatloaf might have represented middle America’s palate of the past, but the future was salsa, chutney, curry, pesto, and chimichurri. This was a future I wanted to be a part of.

Someone once told me that the door to opportunity doesn’t always open for you. Sometimes you have to kick the door open. Whether it was naivete or desperation, I was ready to knock the door down. The thought of working in another kitchen’s sweatshop, of having another executive chef scream at me because my curdled hollandaise sauce looked like cottage cheese — that ship had sailed. It might take a few years of ‘learning on my own dime’, as my father liked to say, but there was nothing stopping me from walking through that door.

POSTSCRIPT

In 1992, nine years after graduating from Cornell’s Hotel School, Jay’s cookbook “A Taste of the Tropics” was published. It stayed in print for over twenty years and sold over 80,000 copies.

Chef and author Jay Solomon has been in the restaurant business for 30+ years. He currently owns JAYS2GO, a dinner delivery business based in Denver, Colorado. In 1985 he opened his first cafe in Ithaca, NY, and in 1998 moved to Colorado. Check out his website: www.jays2go.com.