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Tuttle’s Corner exterior, photograph ©2003 John Margolies

cf., corner legend

Fine Version Dining… (Notes)

restaurant: a place where people pay money to sit and eat meals that are cooked and served on the premises. ¹

How many times must a man quit or be fired from restaurants before he starts thinking about opening a restaurant of his own?

For me it was seven or eight, and until I met 5L4M, every potential chef-partner I consulted with laughed in my face when I told them that I wanted to create: Not a restaurant: An incredible simulation of a restaurant in a restaurant-like location; a place where people could come to eat in the company of others without being confronted with a need to make choices; a restaurant without a menu, where people could order anything they wanted and we would be able to supply it; and where as many as possible of the typical transactions between the restaurant customers and employees would be handled beforehand on the back-end, out of view of both the floor staff and the guests; where from table to table, customers could define in advance the level of service they wanted, and where the whole of the experience would be closer in spirit to attending a dinner party among other dinner parties than just going out to eat.

Admittedly, the whole thing started as a kind of an inversion of Kenny Shopsin’s idea, where he was prepared to cook his version of any of the thousand dishes on his menu [pdf | list]. The main difference between Shopsin’s and Tuttle’s Corner is that here you have to be prepared to order in advance.

charging cost plus $120 p/p

I needed to meet 5L4M to be able to make it happen.

My guests would have to be prepared to order their meals a week in advance of their reservation; to agree to their party all eating the same food (with limited substitutions at the chef’s discretion).

But this isn’t about that. This is about how I, and later, 5L4M and I made the menu bigger and yet smaller at the same time.

There’s no real reason for me to spend as much time at the restaurant as I do. I’m here on the pretext of keeping the front-of-the-house people on their toes, but the fact is that Tuttle’s Corner runs on-time and under-budget whether or not I’m taking part in the minute-to-minute operations; my employees don’t generally need me to do their jobs for them; my friends (and my friends’ friends) don’t need me to be here to make them comfortable, so I’m basically free to sit here all the live-long day doing whatever the hell I want. Working on this website, for example.

The thing is that I like it here [more on this]. I made it. I built it. I’m proud of it. It’s mine. I think back on all of the years I spent as a mendicant writer on the road and on the move, all of the neighborhoods and the villages in which I plied my craft and all of that mad-scarce coin I sank into tea houses and coffee houses and all-night diners so that I felt like I was justified in taking up a certain amount of space and oxygen while I caught up with my thoughts in my notebooks and journals. Now I have Tuttle’s Corner, and no one looks at me funny for spending all of my time sitting in this booth doing essentially the same thing. I’m a part of the scenery, and I think that people expect me to be here when they’re here, too. So I’m here, and everyone who comes in waves or nods or comes over to say ‘hello’ and that makes me happy, even if I don’t exactly know who most of these bright, young stars are anymore. I keep a couple changes of clothes in the office closet, and I built a little extension out in the back that has a nice tiled shower with jacuzzi jets in the tub. There are lots of places to sleep. There’s always plenty to eat. I’m a lucky man, but there was a time when my luck made me a little bit lazy, too.

lazy in the sense that my life became entirely taken up by work, work being the business of entertaining and feeding people. It was fun. It was easy. I stopped writing, reading, any kind of critical thinking. Every truth I’d gleaned from my travels was put to insidious use, capitalizing, parlaying. After not too long, I realized that this would not do.

DESCRIPTION OF SITES (EARLY BOARDING NOTICE):

- hobotrain.net/network (net/network), which describes the maintenance and status of all of the hobotrain network sites and catalogs changes and additions to their content.

- tuttlescorner.com (Tuttle’s Corner), which serves both as a graphical interface to net/network and as a receptacle for items which are related to the back-story and the aftermath of the events surrounding the monk’s fall.

- monkfalls.com (Monk Falls) contains the monk’s journals which are the substantive portion of the hobotrain network narrative as well as its reason for being.

- postdelete.com (postdelete), which is, among other things, the repository for items which have been deleted or otherwise disincluded from hobotrain network sites.

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