Way back before the two dynamos named Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger became nationally known as ‘The Too Hot Tamales” they were still somewhere pre-California. I want to go from just memory land here ‘pre Google’. The folks who were affecting the industry had to do it from a more grass roots place. No internet ‘phenoms’ yet. I believe the two women met at the luxuriously high end ‘Le Perroquet’ restaurant in Chicago in 1978. I was from north of the Windy City but then living in Key West. Naturally, still aware through friends and family of any new energy happening in the world of cuisine. When I really came to understand their collective talent was when I purchased the book I share in the video linked here. I had left Key West and taken a job as the Chef at ‘The Betsy Ross Hotel’ on Ocean Drive. I likely bought their cookbook at the ‘Books & Books’ store owned by the great Mitch Kaplan, which was located at a site on Lincoln Road then. I was at a place professionally where I was really on fire with trying to take in all this new energy found in the term, “New American Cuisine”. I had an unusual period of life in that I was so consumed with making a go of this I ended up living at least five days a week in the hotel. I was putting in crazy hours. My family gave me the space to do what needed to be done. After another 16-hour day I’d wake in that hotel knowing almost no one save for the other pirates on my crew accepting the terms of what it took to ‘go big or go home’. I had a small office (part store room) just behind the lobby of the Art Deco building. Most mornings I’d walk over to a funky cafeteria named, “Mappy’s” get a giant Cuban coffee and walk in a daze back to that office and pore over the newest cookbook to find inspirations from. Mary Sue and Susan’s book stunned me. They were bravely offering recipes that many restaurants just didn’t have the moxie to put on menus. I vividly recall making a list on lined legal paper of those that struck me as ones I wanted my crew to get fired up about. I sure as hell was! ‘City Cuisine’ was both steeped in the technical acuity of the finest French cuisine but with the jazzy energy of young Americans falling in love with the multiculturalism that is this sprawling, hyphenated, propulsive rodeo show we were born to run in.