About the Author

                                                                  (Not the author...)

To tell you the story of the genesis of this blog, I have to tell you about Sarah. To tell you about Sarah, I need to tell you a little about myself.

        My name is Jesse Sutton, and I am a chef in Charleston, SC. I initially started cooking because my then-girlfriend, Christine, wouldn't loan me twenty bucks. I was a waste of space, I had no job, and I asked her to spot me some cash. That day, her roommate was hanging out with the KM of a local dive bar, and he intervened, as I was being berated, with the offer of a job, despite my total lack of credentials. Fast-forward 19 years, and I have cooked in diners, red-sauce Italian joints, 5-star hotels, and once did a 6-month apprenticeship with a Michelin 3-Star badass.

        I got my first (and to date, only) executive chef job at age 33. It was a wine bar with a wood fired pizza oven. My job was to make food that was elegant enough to go with their serious wine program (for instance, they had a 5-year vertical of Vega Sicilia Unico) but also bring in a Charleston bar crowd. It was irritating, trying to get large crowds of smoking hot 23-year-old chicks (less exciting than you would think) to get into serious food and wine, but I loved it. I gave that place everything I had and then some. It didn't last (more on that later), but I went down swinging.

        Before that, I worked at the badly misunderstood and never lucrative Tristan, right hand man to the intense, talented, and taciturn Nate Whiting. His food was beyond impressive. We got great reviews, and why we didn't make great money is something I'm not gonna touch right now. But it was during my time of playing Leo McGarry to his President Bartlet that I met Sarah.

        We needed a cook, and I saw that one applicant was from Louisiana, where I spent some time. Her resume wasn't all that well put-together, but it included a run at Bayona, where my wife worked post-Katrina. Susan Spicer is a really respectable chef, but more than that, she is a goddamn hardass, so I knew that this girl was at least worth talking to. I gave her a call. She was quiet and reserved on the phone, with a thick small-town Louisiana accent, and I didn't get much of an impression. We set up a stage for the following Tuesday.

That Monday, Nate was off so I was running the show. It was slow as balls, so when I saw Sarah's name on the reservation book, it jumped out. The girl was coming in for dinner the day before a stage. Very, very smart. Good sign. When she showed up (as part of a deuce, dining with a friend), I asked the hostess which one was Sarah.

“The pretty one!” the hostess replied.

        Sure enough, Sarah was a doll. Small, slightly built, pale skin and gorgeous dark hair, and a 1000 watt smile. Damn.  I hadn't counted on that. I used to get nervous talking to pretty girls. (Dealing with the wait staff at the wine bar cured me of that. All girls, all lookers! Our pastry chef called it 'the Hooters of wine.')

I went up to the table and introduced myself. I apoligized for Nate's absence, and asked if we could cook for them. I remember saying something about how we would see what she was all about the next day, so now was time for us to show her what we are all about. I don't rememer the wording, but it was a good line. To be honest, the real reason I went above and beyond was that Tristan didn't pay very well, and we really needed people, so I wanted to put our best food forward.

We cooked for them, she had a great time, total success. Even better was that she turned out to be an absolute sweet heart. Ken, the manager, said “She's never gonna make it. Way too pretty, way too nice.”

I went and saw them again at the end and she said,

“Now I'm terrified. That was the best food I ever had and now I'm so scared.”

“Don't be scared, be excited,” I replied. She took that advice to heart.

        The next day I was out fishing, and I got a call from Nate. He said “Dude, this girl you cooked for is awesome, I really want to hire her. Do you mind if I just do it?”

        I reminded him that he was the executive chef, and could do whatever, but that I appreciated him asking. And so little Sarah joined the team. She was very green, but wanted to learn so bad. And she had an ingenuity to her that belied her short-ass resume. One day, she was blanching asparagus, and she had them all laid out all over her cutting board. I asked what she was doing, and she said she was putting all the fat ones together, all the medium ones, and all the skinny ones, for even cooking. She did this without being told. It was a remarkable moment.

Sarah and I bonded almost instantly. I saw a little of twenty-year-old me in her, with the insatiable curiosity and analytical mind. But she was like a better version of twenty-me, because she lacked the arrogance, the swagger, and the devotion to partying above all other things. She had a fresh enthusiasm about her craft that was (and is) a constant source of inspiration to me, up until this day. During my last year at Tristan, I put a lot of energy into her. Nate and I loved her like a baby sister. I taught her as much as I could, and my wife and I befriended her on a personal level. I took her fishing, I took her to interesting restaurants (including her first tapas bar, which her stodgy and conservative father misheard as topless bar, leading to an awkward but hilarious conversation), we made family dinner together on holidays.

        When I left Tristan to take over the wine bar, she became my biggest fan. She would walk over after her shift (the restaurants were neighbors), sit at the bar, and try new dishes. She would accompany me to events when I didn't have enough help. She ran the kitchen for our staff holiday party. One of our bartenders fell in love with her, and was absolutely CRUSHED when I revealed her sexual orientation, and thus, his lack of a chance. (Oh, yeah, Sarah is gay, btw.) I offered her a sous-chef job something like 150 times.

        Sarah took to Tristan like a fish to water, but sadly, didn't do the same to Charleston. Her time here was marked by traumatic personal-life issues, and she was deeply lonely. She had moved to town following the dissolution of a relationship, and she never fully recovered from that. I tried as best as I could to be a good big brother to her, but there were wounds I could not heal.

        The situation was, she wanted her old girlfriend back. At first, I thought this was insane. I am of the opinion that when relationships end, its usually for a reason. And besides, they no longer lived in the same state. Well, long story short, the more I heard about the situation, the more I began to realize that she may have ended the relationship for the wrong reasons. And little by little, they started to thaw the ice. First, they texted. Then there were little weekend trips. Eventually, they were back together, and are to this day. I was over the moon to see the veil of melancholy leave my young friend, but I also knew this meant a very real chance of her moving away.

         Rachel, for that is her girlfriend's name, was planning to go to grad school. Her choices were U of South Carolina (two hours away in Columbia) or LSU (16 hours away in Baton Rouge). The plan was, if she went to USC, that they would live in Charleston, and she would commute (brutal but technically possible). However, unfortunately for me, LSU won out, which meant little Sarah was moving away. I was crushed.

        Don't get me wrong, I was, and am, absolutely overjoyed that she is in a committed relationship with a girl who is smart, pretty, funny, talented, and amazingly nerdy. (I'm a sucker for nerdy girls.) But I was losing my fishing buddy, protege, little sister, and source of endless inspiration. Who was I going to have gumbo contests on Fat Tuesday with now? There was going to be a void in my life and I needed to make sure we stayed in contact.

        That's where this blog came in. It was a medium for us to remain connected. A place where we could share ideas, learn together, challenge each other. We did it for about three years. I don't know why we let it die. I think partially it was Sarah's move away from the culinary world. There wasn't much in the way of good hospitality work in Thibodaux, LA, and besides, she needed to be a bread winner, due to Rachel's grad school. So she got a corporate yet blue collar job (she drives a forklift at a hardware store) and doesn't cook anymore. Which is a shame, because her experience never had a chance to catch up with her natural talent. I still fantasize about her getting back into the game, but I respect her choice. As for the two of them, they bought a house, they are doing great. They are my family and I love them. But that is how I came to have a defunct food blog, named after the chef-aliens from Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

        Meanwhile, my job status was also changing. The wine bar was a labor of love, but the space was too large and too high-rent to actually turn a decent profit. There was no day-time business whatsoever, and a shift in neighborhood demographics had curtailed our late-night business most nights. The place had limited daylight appeal. It was too dark, too clubby. The space needed to be busy for lunch and dinner every day in order to pull the kind of numbers we had to pull, so the owner (who also loved that place like a baby) pulled the plug.

        I kept my job in the company. They converted it into a barbecue restaurant, that I am perfectly proud of. I don't write the menu, but I develop recipes, and my job description hovers in that gray area between prep chef and systems analyst. I like the people I work with, and I have to say, the amount of success we have had is terrific. We just finished our first year and we are dominating the wine bar's numbers, which was a bitter pill to swallow at first, but it would be petty of me to complain about success, so I got over it.

        The problem is, I like making food. I like writing menus, I like technical challenges. Every once and a while, I get to fine-tune a recipe, but for the most part, my job doesn't include much actual cooking. I have always enjoyed food writing, but never taken it particularly seriously. I was banging my head on how I could get some ideas out, and I remembered this blog. I got Sarah's permission to change the direction a bit, and thus, The Dentrassi is reborn.

The name, by the way, referrs to the aliens in Hitchhiker's Guide that are chefs to the evil Vogons.

“The Dentrassi...let us on board.”

“Who are the Dentrassi?”

“THE best cooks, and THE best drinks mixers, and they don't give a wet slap about anything else.”