Joe Heitz at my restaurant in Nashville, TN
Adventures Of A Black Belt Sommelier
A doomed to fail wine event that somehow didn't fail
back to adventures of the black belt. So many. This is a really wild story. I promise every word of it's true. In the late 1980s, early 1990s, I owned a restaurant in National Tennessee called F. Scott's. It was just a neighborhood restaurant and a strip mall. And later kind of morphed into something pretty special. But at the time of this story, it was really just a neighborhood restaurant in a strip mall with, I think, very good food. I had a great chef. Her name was Barbara Braggle. We called her Shorty because she was about five one and probably weighed, I don't know, she might have weighed 100 pounds at the most tiny woman. And she was self-aged, self-taught. She had no formal training in the kitchen. She was also very angry militant feminist lesbian hated men. She worked for me for quite a while. She had to hand her a paycheck. She just turned him off. She never said thank you. But she was incredibly talented and I was thrilled to have her work for me. She just wasn't the most socially adept person in the world. But as I said, incredibly talented. And this is that's an important element in the story. One day, phone rang in this voice. I didn't recognize his hoit there. I said, yes, this is he. This voice said this is Marvin Overton. Well, Marvin Overton at that time was enormously the most important wine collector, wine lover in the United States. He was in Wine Spectator all the time for these incredible events that he hosted at his ranch in Fort Worth, Texas, where he would open a hundred advantages of first growth board over whatever the theme was that weekend for people to come from all over the country and spend the weekend and taste. One of the lessons in this story is to be careful what you wish for because it may come true. So Marvin, I said, how can I help you Dr. Overton when I realized that it was actually Marvin Overton. I couldn't imagine why he was calling me at my local restaurant in Nashville. But he said, I want you to help me with an event that I'm going to have that I'm going to donate to your wine auction there, your charity wine auction there this year. I want to have it at your restaurant. I said, well, what kind of event do you have in mind? He says, well, I'm going to bring a great California winemaker, winery owner, and we'll have a morning tasting of that person's wines, and then lunch, and then come back that night for dinner with large format bottles of the best, the great best wines that this person has made. And I'll provide, he said, I'll provide the wine and I'll have the people there, the winemaker there. But I need you to donate today, the food and the service at your restaurant. I didn't, that's a large I wasn't wealthy. You know, it was a large contribution to be asked to make to close my restaurant for a day and pay my staff and buy the food and everything else. But I didn't want to be the guy that said no to Marvin Overton for one of his events. So I agreed to do this. I said, well, do you have somebody mind? He said, yes, we're going to have it's going to be Joe Heights. And we're going to have a morning tasting of all every finish that's been made so far of the three. The Belloaks, Faye Vineyard and Martha's Vineyard Cabernet's and and then that in the evening, we'll have a dinner with the best menages of those wines. So I'll send you a list of actual list of the wines that we've been serving. You can write a menu if you go with them at dinner. So, and he said, and my, my guy Dennis Foley, who at the time was one of the most knowledgeable people about finding what collectible wine in the world were for Butterfield and Butterfield in San Francisco. He said, Dennis, we'll call you to talk about how to arrange the arrange things so that this will go well. Well, Dennis never called. I called Dennis once a day for probably three weeks leading up to this event to ask him to tell me what his idea of how to arrange this was, how to set this up was. He never called me back. Friday night before the Saturday event, Marvin and Dennis came by the restaurant just to meet in person and see this restaurant. So they kind of know what they're walking into. And Dennis said, so how do you have this arranged? And I told him and he said, well, that just won't do. And I said, well, you know, maybe it won't do, but you know, you never called me back to tell me what would do. And so anyway, he explained to me the right way to set things up. And he was right. If I, if I'd done what I intended, I don't think things would have gone very well. It might have taken three days to have the event instead of one day. So I stayed up all night, redoing everything. One of the things was, you know, when you're putting five classes of wine in front of someone with with a course at dinner, you need to tell them which wine is which I had to label the class. I had to write the labels and label the classes. And you know, anyway, there was a lot to do. But I just literally stayed up all night doing this. In the lead up to this, I forgot this is the key in the lead up to this, I had, you know, Joe Heights was famously a very, very difficult person to deal with. So there are lots of stories about his temper. So I had asked everyone I knew who might know something secretly personal about Joe Heights that I could use to help ensure that he didn't, you know, exhibit his difficult person health during the course of the day. And somebody told me that he was a door gun or on a on an aircraft in World War II called a night fighter. I think it was a P 58 night fighter. It was P something night fighter that he was one of those guys that kind of hung out the door of the plane with a machine gun and shot at other aircraft. So I had, I found a carver in Boston who carved a mahogany model of this aircraft and put it on a base with a brass black that said, thank you for your service, Joe Heights. So when Marvin and Joe and Dennis and all the other guests arrived next morning. Oh, by the way, we sold the charity that Auckland sold 30 seats for this event. I believe it was $1,000 a seat. So we would, you know, it was a pretty significant donation to cancer research around the middle of Tennessee. So anyway, when my Joe and Marvin and Dennis arrived the next morning for the event, this I had this model of the plane on the table in front of her, Joe was going to sit and when he sat down and saw it, he started crying. So I thought that I'd accomplished what I'd hoped to. Unfortunately, Marvin, Dr. Overton's daughters asked Joe about the eucalyptus and mint character wrist in his Martha's Vineyard cabinet, which he was famous for. And Joe just went berserk and was pounding the table and yelling. There was some profanity and ball. They called her stupid idiot. There's no marm. There's no eucalyptus in a minute. My camera name, my camera name is the only camera in California that tastes the way you have a fella camera, they should taste and it doesn't have anything to do with the eucalyptus. I mean, he just went on and on and on and on and it was really, really uncomfortable and Marvin was furious and his daughter was just completely humiliated. Eventually Joe ran out of steam and we finished the tasting and the tasting was incredible because the lines were incredible. I mean, we had the 85 Martha's Vineyard, which was the first one ever, American wine to ever to receive 100 points more from one spectator among a long list of other ones. Anyway, we got through that. It was not pleasant to say the least. We had lunch with some of the high screen ullino rosé, which was nice. And then everybody went home to take a nap and take a shower and put on their tuxedo and come back for dinner that night. I did the same. When I got back to the restaurant, about two hours before dinner, I was going to start to finish setting things up for dinner. The dishwasher, amazingly, I remember his name, Vanille Johnson came out and said, "We've got a problem." I said, "I don't know what's the problem, Vanille." He said, "Well, shorty, just quit. She's gone." My kitchen staff was four people. We threw us no way we could pull this dinner off without shorting. Plus, we had a written menu. We knew what we were serving, of course, but it was all in her head. We could not possibly have done this dinner without her. There was nobody to take her place. There was just her and a sous chef and a garbage and a pastry chef. Fortunately, I knew where she lived. I knew that she ran to work every time she didn't have a car. I untied my bow tie and took off my cup jacket, my tuxedo jacket. I don't know why I did this. I don't know why I didn't get in my car, but I knew where she was. I knew where the route was to her outside. I ran her down, literally ran her down, ran up. Fortunately, I could run faster than her, I guess. I ran up behind her and grabbed her by the arm. I said, "There's no way you can hide. There's no where you can hide that I won't find you. You've got to come back and finish this dinner. You're not leaving me with no chef on this day. I'm not going to accept it." I pretty much literally physically drug her back to the restaurant. We went in the back door in the kitchen door. I locked the kitchen door behind us so she couldn't leave without going past me in the dining room, which of course was a terrible fire violation. She just freaked out because there were really famous people from all over the country and a couple of people from outside the country coming for this dinner. As I said, she had no classical training, formal training. She just freaked out. She just panicked at the idea that she was supposed to pull off this dinner. My plan for the centerpiece at the tables that had been my pastry chef had made some bowls out of chocolate, and they were absolutely going to fill them with eucalyptus and mint for the centerpiece for the tables that night. Of course, that wasn't going to work. I just put some flowers on the table. So then we had the dinner. I mean, she was a barber braggle. She was a tremendous cook. She was incredibly talented. So the dinner was really sophisticated. I have the menu now. I look at it and I think how in the world we dream up those recipes, those dishes. In 1989 in Nashville, Tennessee, because there was some fat difference. It wasn't steak with bernaz sauce. Anyway, the dinner was wonderful about, I don't know, halfway through the dinner, Barbara Rhodes, Nobel Rhodes, who's she and her husband owned. I think they owned it. They owned the Martha's Vineyard, but they owned one of the vineyards that Joe Kites made these cabinets from, who was a cooking instructor in San Francisco at the time, and very well-known, stood up and said, "I really would like to talk to the chef." And I thought, "Oh, no." If she says anything negative, Barbara Shorty might just go off because there's no talent but she'll do it. Plus, she wasn't really somebody that she had in 1989. I think this is in 1989. She had lots of tattoos and piercings. She was not what you expected to be the chef in this restaurant. It's been she came out. People were just going to, they were going to faint. So anyway, I have brought her out and held my breath, hoping that the apocalypse didn't happen between Bell Rhodes and Barbara Braggle. Anyway, fortunately, Bell Rhodes had only tremendously positive praise for the cuisine, and she commented on the nuances in the cuisine that had enhanced the wines. Barbara, this little tiny girl, all of a sudden she was not so tiny. She just swole up with pride and joy. It was just such a special moment. And that was the perfect moment for me to tell everybody we were going to go outside for a few minutes. They kind of looked at me like I was crazy, but I said, "Come on, there's a reason." So everybody, the 35 of us or whatever, got up and we went outside. Well, I had gone to a nursery and bought a huge amount of eucalyptus in mint, and I had made a pile of it in the parking lot in front of the restaurant, which I shared with a Kroger grocery store. And I said, "Right now, right here, this moment, we're going to put them into the myth of eucalyptus in mint, and Martha's been here in your cabernet, so many old heights, Martha's been here in Cabernet, so many old, and I doused it with kerosene and said it on fire, and everybody cheered, and Joe was thrilled, and Marvin was thrilled, and everybody was thrilled, and it was a great moment, and it was a big flame, and it was a big fire, because there was a lot of it, and I doused it with kerosene, and we went back inside and finished dinner, and dinner was wonderful. Somehow, this dinner which was very doomed to failure didn't fail, and we pulled it off, and it was in spite of Joe's insanity. That morning, it ended up being a very, very special day. The next year, Marvin called me and said, "I want to do it again, and this time I'm bringing Robert Mondavi." I was obviously thrilled, and I knew that I could survive closing for a day, because I had done it once. When Robert Mondavi arrived at the restaurant that morning, well, bow back up, I wanted to do the same kind of thing for Robert Mondavi that I did for Joe, not because Robert Mondavi was difficult to deal with when he was very, very charming, charming Italian man, Italian American man, but I wanted to do something to recognize his import in the industry, and how excited I was to have him in my little strip mall restaurant. Again, I asked him, and eventually his secretary told me there was a picture of him on the wall at his office in Napa in his Stanford football uniform. It took her to work. I don't remember wondering how Robert Mondavi, who was not a very large man, could possibly have played football at Stanford, but I contacted the athletic director at Vanderbilt University, and he contacted the athletic director at Stanford and had a jersey with Mondavi on it and the right number and a helmet with the number on it. Then he had a football sign by all the members of the Stanford football team that year, and when Mondavi sat down, there was this jersey and helmet and football in front of him. He looked up at me and said, "What is all this football stuff about?" I said, "Well, your secretary told me about the picture on the wall on your wall on your office." He said, "I played rugby." Obviously made him a lot more sense. The funny thing, there are two more funny things about this day, is that when he arrived, there were four of us standing at the entrance of the restaurant to welcome him to the restaurant International to tell him how excited we were to have him join us that day. He walked right past us without even speaking, without even saying, "Hello," and went up to my head waitress, Susan Kemp, and kissed her on the mouth and said, "I am so glad to be in Nashville today." Susan was thrilled to be kissed by Rarvndavi. She was the least insulted or unhappy about having been kissed by Rarvndavi. She still talks about it today. She mentioned it to me a couple of years ago. Then we had a similar event. It was a huge success. At the end of lunch, my good friend Dennis Condrin, he passed away a few years ago, I missed him terribly. We were standing at the bar. We were actually having a drink and a beer after lunch. Rarvndavi came back in and said, "You don't buy any chance having a Pilsner Erkhel behind the bar." I said, "Well, that's actually what we're drinking." He said, "Sometimes you just have to get the taste of wine out of your mouth and a good Pilsner Erkhel is the perfect thing." That was a really fun moment. That was a great success. We raised probably another $30,000 for cancer research. The following year, we had the similar event with Marvin and Paul Draper from Ridge Vineyards. Unfortunately, I don't have any crazy stories to tell you about that event because Paul is such a gentleman and such a wonderful guy. The wines are wonderful, but he would never rant at someone for asking the question he considers inappropriate. He certainly would never kiss my head, which I saw in the mouth while arriving at the restaurant. That was a third. We had another great dinner the next year with Paul Draper and Ridge Vineyards. Then before the next year came around, I sold the restaurant to a guy from Atlanta to form the company that I worked for for a few years. Anyway, that's a story of the most food deemed to fail your dinner or event, wine event, maybe ever that somehow didn't fail. Thanks for tuning in to Adventures of a SELP-GOT-BLACK. Well, so may I really appreciate it. [ Silence ]