The Lost Recipe for Happiness - By Barbara O'Neal Page 0,33

who spent a lot of time outdoors and a lot of time traveling.

In addition, Elena wanted the local market. She wanted the Orange Bear to be a place people came to relax after a long day, to have a date with a new lover, to create traditions for their families. If they had visitors, they would bring them to the local icon, but not just because it was famous.

Julian had grinned at her over that. “Big plans.”

She shrugged. “Why dream small?”

Another standard they had to decide was cost. There were plenty of restaurants in Aspen in the high-end range, but Julian was known for creating restaurants for the creative classes—pricey but not stratospheric, which suited Elena perfectly. It gave her a lot of room to work with a variety of fresh ingredients without having to satisfy the upper echelons of the gourmet crowd. Not that Elena couldn’t do it—she could. She didn’t want to. Food should never be that serious.

Of course, cost also referred to food costs, which needed to stay below 30 percent to hit the profit margins Julian expected. As executive chef, this would be entirely Elena’s realm. She had to create a menu that was flexible enough to embrace seasonal ingredients as much as possible, with dishes that would economize by drawing from the same pool of ingredients.

She was stuck with certain realities—just as it was impossible to run a bar without margaritas and martinis, she couldn’t have a Mexican menu without avocados and chiles, in season or not. But they were also lucky in that much of the stock they’d require was very inexpensive. With Ivan’s help, she tracked down the best suppliers in the area, and she started working with the regular drivers and staff to develop relationships. It turned out that Ivan was a native of the area and knew just about everyone. A help.

Next, the food had to be possible to prepare in a restaurant kitchen, and the menu itself cohesive. Nobody wanted just another upscale Mexican, and that was where the work came in—they had to create a menu that was Mexican in spirit, but also delivered something zesty and exciting. Elena gave copies of her ingredients list to the entire kitchen staff, stocked the kitchens, and encouraged everyone to experiment. She had one quirk: no whole corn kernels.

“No corn?” Ivan had asked. “What’s more traditional than corn?”

“I don’t care. I don’t like the way it takes over. The texture is too much.”

He raised a laconic brow. “But we can use cornmeal. Corn bread.”

“Yes.”

“Whatever.”

Some days, several dishes passed muster—taste and presentation and consistency of preparation; other days, none did. But slowly, slowly, a menu began to emerge.

The days began early, when she arrived at six, giant Starbucks latte in hand, to unlock the doors. Alvin came with her and settled on the porch outside the kitchen door, where he stayed more or less happily until lunchtime, when Elena took him for a walk, both for him and to stretch out her stiffness. The whole staff loved him. Peter rigged up a baby gate to keep him on the porch, not wandering around the kitchen itself, as he was inclined to do. Juan brought him bones. Ivan saved him slivered bits of fat.

Elena liked to arrive before anyone else, to go over her plans—recipes for soups and small plates one day, experiments with main dishes another. When she had organized the tasks for the day, she’d pour another cup of coffee and wander into the dining room to see what work had been finished the day before. Construction crews were covering the walls with texture, and refinishing the floors with Saltillo tiles, replacing the crumbling bar.

Next to arrive was Juan, with whom Elena got along very well. He liked the fact that she was fluent in Spanish, even if he teased her that the version she spoke was archaic and funny to listen to. Juan would begin the tasks of opening the kitchen, getting things ready for the boys who would come in an hour later, two of them bleary-eyed from partying late into the night, the third alert and cheery. When the restaurant opened, prep cooks would do much of this work, but for now, they were all cooking everything so they could learn what worked and what didn’t.

Juan was turning out to be a cornerstone of her kitchen. Elena suspected it was Juan’s steadiness that had kept the original restaurant in business. A young husband and father from Mexico, Juan had