“Writing books is a suicidal job” - Gabriel Garcia Máquez, July 1966, El Spectator, Bogatá

I first stood at the stove in 1972, just twenty, following a winter of building The Frog & Owl Café. With a new bride, Jerri Fifer, we embarked on an adventure that can only be described as remarkable. The trajectory of our lives would have been impossible to predict.

Jump forward to now, a mere forty-seven years in the flow of time. Standing at the stove is over and has been for ten years. My dance with Food, however, seems to be starting again.

Actually, I am at the place I thought I would be when I was twenty - taking up the practice of an artist. Until now I would never make that claim, it carries too much responsibility and can be fraught with too much ego. Certainly, beyond the practice of business and the craft of cooking, there is “art” in being a chef; in being a restaurateur. However, those things do not an artist make.

Forty-seven years to examine, to grow, refine, and mellow. And now, I am on a suicidal mission, undertaking a most challenging adventure - the inner journey of Food . I am guessing that most of this will not involve cooking nearly as much as running a restaurant.

Cooking professionally is a difficult metier. For every chef you can name in America there are hundreds of thousands of unknown workers, maybe even millions, if we consider as well the growers and the producers of our food. (I have always called them “heroes of labor”).

My metier has been filled with joy and suffering - that familiar dance we all participate. In the early ‘90s I was determined to quit. My brilliant idea was to write a book, it would propel me out of the kitchen into the fame and fortune of another place. I did succeed in writing the book - In Praise of Apples, published in 1996 and in print for the next sixteen years (a copy may possibly still be found in a Crackle Barrel somewhere). I can’t say it provided the exit I was seeking. Later, I started a blog - “The French Broad - Lessons from an Appalachian Table”. I stayed at it for a few years, wrote a few decent pieces - but again not the exit I was seeking.

It took the impending doom of the Great Recession of 2008 to push me to sell The Market Place and the punctuation of a mild stroke to confirm my decision.

So here I am, beyond the end of my restaurant career and at the threshold of a fifty year dream about to become manifest.

I have chosen the path of an artist, to write, to illuminate, and to find a clear voice for the telling of my story of FOOD.

A Suicidal Mission.

-Mark Rosenstein, June 2019 - on the day of the 40th anniversary of the opening of The Market Place, Asheville, NC