Where My Inspiration Lives

After 35 years in hospitality — running restaurants in Washington D.C., feeding Presidents and senators, building dining rooms that became institutions — I still come back to one truth: the best ideas don't come from boardrooms. They come from markets, bistros, back alleys, and the kind of meals that make you put your fork down and just sit with it. France has always been where I come to remember why I do this.

This trip wasn't a vacation. It was a pilgrimage. I went looking for the things that made me fall in love with hospitality in the first place — craft, community, the ritual of a shared meal. I found them everywhere I looked. In a canal at dawn. In a market stall. In a hand-forged iron sign above a doorway. What I brought home became the blueprint for everything Longboard Hospitality stands for today.

Morning on the Canal, Annecy

Annecy is often called the “Venice of the Alps” and the comparison earns its keep at dawn, before the tourists arrive. The Thiou canal runs turquoise through the old town, fed directly from Lac d’Annecy — reputedly the cleanest lake in Europe. Restaurant terraces overhang the water, window boxes trail geraniums into the current, and the light at 7 a.m. is something a painter would kill for.

Standing on that canal, watching chefs carry crates of produce through low doorways and set tables that jutted over the water — I understood something I'd always felt but never fully articulated. Hospitality isn't about the food alone. It's about the moment you create around it. The light. The sound of water. The feeling that you've been let in on something special. That's what I want every guest at a Longboard Hospitality pop-up dinner to feel.

The Old Town: Stone, Water & the Palais de l'Isle

Sitting on a triangular island in the middle of the canal, the Palais de l’Isle has been, across its eight centuries, a palace, a prison, a courthouse, and a mint. What struck me wasn't the history — it was the permanence. There is something humbling about a building that has outlasted every trend, every regime, every reinvention of the city around it. It made me think about what we build in hospitality. Not the physical rooms, but the experiences and reputations that outlast the moment.

Beyond the Palais, the old town is a warren of covered arcades and narrow lanes. Every corner offers something: a cheese shop with wheels stacked to the ceiling, a boulangerie with a morning queue at 7:30 sharp, a tabac with a handwritten sign advertising the day’s lottery. This is what curated hospitality looks like at its most natural — not forced, not branded, just deeply intentional about giving people a reason to slow down and stay.

Market Day: The Philosophy of Fresh

Tuesday and Friday mornings, the old town explodes into market. The Marché d’Annecy is one of the finest in France — produce vendors, cheesemakers, charcutiers, flower stalls, fabric sellers, and at least three different stands selling rotisserie chicken whose smell alone is worth getting up early for.

I bought a wedge of Reblochon, a bag of apricots, and watched two women argue cheerfully over the last bunch of white asparagus. The vendor sided with the shorter one. Everyone left happy. That moment — the transaction, the theatre, the joy of it — is exactly what I want people to feel when they sit down at one of my pop-up dinners. Food isn't just sustenance. It's a story between a producer and a guest, and the chef is the translator.

This is the philosophy I carry into every Longboard Hospitality experience: source with intention, cook with passion, and never forget that the person across the table is why any of this matters.

Into Alsace: Where Craft Becomes Identity

From Annecy I drove northeast, through Lyon, through Burgundy, and into Alsace as the light was going golden. The Route des Vins threads 170 kilometers through villages assembled from a catalog of the picturesque: half-timbered houses in candy colors, storks on chimney pots, Riesling vines climbing every hillside. What stopped me, again and again, were the signs.

Alsace has elevated the wrought-iron hanging sign to an art form. Every winstub (wine tavern), every boulangerie, every fromagerie has one — custom-forged, hand-painted, depicting the business in miniature. A fish for the fishmonger. A crowned frog for the bistro. A giant pretzel for the bakery. I started photographing them obsessively around Colmar and couldn’t stop.

There is something deeply satisfying about craftsmanship that announces itself so directly — no branding agency, no A/B testing the font. Just a blacksmith, a paintbrush, and a clear sense of who you are. That clarity — knowing your identity and committing to it fully — is something I brought directly back to Longboard Hospitality. It’s why we have a name, a logo, a look, and a feeling that is entirely our own.

The food that stopped me in my tracks

Alsace cooking straddles French refinement and German hearty with magnificent results. I ate choucroute garnie (sauerkraut with about nine different pork products), tarte flambée — Alsace’s answer to pizza, thinner and better — and a baeckeoffe slow-cooked in white wine that required a nap afterward. The Riesling and Pinot Gris from village co-ops are extraordinary and a fraction of what you’d pay anywhere else. Every meal reminded me that the best dining is deeply rooted in place. You can feel the soil in it. This is what I aspire to bring to every Longboard table — food that could only come from here, right now, made by someone who genuinely cares.

What France Gave Me

A jar of miel de sapin (fir honey from the Vosges mountains). A bottle of Pinot Gris from a small producer outside Riquewihr. An increasingly heavy camera roll. But more than any of that — a renewed conviction about what hospitality is really for.

The Chez Famille pop-up concept was born on a terrace in Paris, over a meal that lasted four hours and felt like twenty minutes. The idea that you could gather strangers around a table, feed them something extraordinary, and send them home feeling like family — that was France talking. I just wrote it down.

The craft coffee philosophy came from watching Parisian café culture up close — the ritual of it, the slowness of it, the way a well-made coffee becomes a reason to pause and be present. That’s what our small-batch blends are about. Not just flavor. A moment.

France doesn’t just inspire me. It reminds me. Every market, every canal, every hand-painted sign above a doorway says the same thing: do the work, do it with care, and the people who need to find you will find you.