Alex Mestas

@adrianhong: “Be wary of the man who urges an action in which he himself incurs no risk.” – Seneca

It gets cold. Sometimes it snows. The moss grows everywhere. You eat and drink too much because you can’t get outdoors and do anything resembling physical activity or yard work. You get fatter and sleep a lot. Living in Oregon is like hibernating during the winter. You don’t see your neighbors because everyone has holed themselves up just as you have.  Like the groundhog awaking to see his shadow, your neighbors peek out when the sun rises and see how things can changed.

They get surprised about how big your child has gotten, while secretly you ask yourself just how big they’ve gotten during their own hibernation. You secretly  contemplate what you need to do to get back into shape. And get your yard in shape too. Because Oregon grows notoriously wild during the spring and given the large amount of trees that surround our houses, there’s always something to be picked up from the ground. There’s always moss to be cleaned from the roof and lawn. Always grass to be resodded and changed.

So we awake from our slumbers, crawl out of our caves and get to the yard cleanup. Hibernating bears scratching their ways out in the lawn.

Having few finances before my interest in food peaked beyond frozen dinners, I’ve since become versed in eating well, a fact demonstrated by both my increasing girth and taste for the more exotic and unexplored flavors of my palate.

I imagine for most that solo dining is either an experience to be relished or one to be feared and forgotten. I’m not the type to make a regular habit of solo dining, and have rarely done so as I’m married and on the rare occasion that we go out to dinner, it’s always with my wife. The solo dining experience I’m referring to of course is not going to McDonalds and grabbing a hamburger to stuff into your maw, it’s the seated dining experience with full service in a room full of couples and groups of friends. Under most circumstances I’d never dare venture out alone to do such a thing but this wasn’t most circumstances. Having found myself in London on business travel, I knew that I wanted to have dining experiences that were not available in the US. I thought of St. John’s restaurant. Where else in my sphere would I be able to eat bone marrow and heart? This year it was rated the 14th best restaurant in the world and was awarded a Michelin star. Under no other circumstances would I be able to go. Whether somebody was going to go with me or not, I had to suck it up and try it out.