Stagnation

:/

Brick wall.

Work life has gotten kind of boring. I can keep on trucking along and doing what I’m doing, but I don’t really feel any satisfaction — I’m on a plateau, looking down.

All the experience I am compounding on in wine doesn’t seem to get me anywhere professionally. I have to live within a pretty tight budget for inventory, and these days our dinner menu is stagnant — new opportunities for pairings don’t come often. Studying tea is grinding to a halt too. The amount I have studied it has taken most of the personal satisfaction of drinking it away. It seems I can only derive happiness from making it for other people; but the time of day for people to enjoy certain types of tea (ie: Long Jing, Tie Guan Yin, etc) from our list doesn’t naturally present itself. Lunch is too fast, dinner is too late, I need to create an opportunity.

Hitting this wall is exciting for me, I know myself, this is the time for me to latch on to a new idea and run with it. My last idea — the making charcoal thing was .. well, the unfortunate other side of me, taking something to 80% and leaving it alone; next year! Tea ceremony never really stood out to me as something I should/would learn, until now I guess. I think that’s what I need to do to break the boundary of price for our list, and show people the side of tea that cant be understood without a first hand experience.

There’s a lot of special things about Q Haute, but for me one of the most noticeable is the tranquility when it’s empty. I probably know this better than anyone — I spend a lot of time alone there at night. The only other time it’s quiet is the very early morning. I’m not much of a morning person, but if I consider the situation I’m in, maybe I should change to be? A lot of my good customers work downtown, and surely a lot of them are awake at 5~6am, there are available free parking stalls, there is a gorgeous view of the park, and there is an eerily quiet restaurant with a really knowledgeable guy who would have nothing better to do than prepare an amazing pot of tea. Sunday sort of works too, but bleh, I’ll save that idea for later.

Furthermore, I never pay attention to the sunrise or sunset, such an beautiful part of each day. When Pokemon GO came out, I went for a walk at 430am near my house looking for things to catch, I remember thinking ‘hey, that sky is really nice’. I think the last time I had that thought I was eating a very late night dinner (almost breakfast?) with Cindy at U&ME. We ended up walking to find a taxi for her afterwards and I thought ‘hey, downtown is really nice when there’s no people in the street but it’s sort of bright’.

Doing some reading on the subject of tea ceremony (which is extremely codified) there is one type which really struck me as practical. ‘Asacha / Morning tea’ at the break of dawn.

Anyway, it’s all just a thought until I actually do it — but I like the thought.