Brad Spurgeon's Blog

Again last night no music, just trying to write a new song, memorize a cover song and fix my toilet. Success on the last item! But today being New Year’s Day, I decided to put up a new menu area on this blog, to put up another rejected story in my series of rejected stories and to quote from another blogger’s blog. Heather Munro has a great blog, and her New Year’s message is a brilliant one, so I suggest you go and read it: It is about the two wolves inside us all.

My rejected story today follows on a theme from yesterday’s rejected story, but was actually written a few years before that. This story was written in around 1987 or 1988, and it was about Alain Passard’s restaurant called the Arpege. The restaurant was then a one-star establishment, I believe – or about to earn its first star – and it ended up having three stars, the top rating. Ten years ago, Passard decided to take a huge risk and he became the only three star restaurant in Paris – or perhaps anywhere – to focus entirely on vegetables, and drop the meat. He did not lose the stars, so creative is he as a chef. My restaurant review of the Arpege was, of course, rejected, no doubt for the same reasons as the Robuchon story would be a few years later, as I was not an expert and had no food writing gig.

The final new item today is the new page I have put up in the menu area of the blog which is simply a link to The New York Times web site with a search set up to find my stories there, which were written for and published by both the International Herald Tribune and The New York Times. Since I’ve been celebrating my rejected juvenalia, I thought I should put up a link to the published journalism that has formed the center of my career for the last 20 years….