On April 28th of 1991 I received a package in the mail. I recognized the handwriting on the brown paper covering what had to be a book. It was from Charlie. I was working in a restaurant that, though short lived was one of the biggest in my career to date not in size but in the attention it received from not only across America but was written about in other countries. I named it ‘a Mano‘ for the ‘by hand’ nature of the foods we pledged to make. ‘a Mano’ was in the Betsy Ross Hotel on Ocean Drive. I was living in the hotel most of the time going home to our family on Sunday morning and looking as beat as I have ever been. When I took the paper off this book Charlie had sent that day I read for the first time about an English chef named, Marco Pierre White. The Betsy Ross was a barely renovated hotel at that time. Like many of the Art Deco places on Ocean Drive, Washington Avenue and Collins the years between their initial hey day and the early ’90’s were ones of slow starvation and neglect by the public that had played in them back in the ’50’s. The man who bought it was shrewd realized that he could make a bundle with the demand that was coming. But in 1991 that had been only intimated thus far. He was not troubled letting me turn a shabby ‘hotel room’ into a combination of my office and a wine room for the two restaurants I was in charge of. I had a sorry little desk, a chair and a reading lamp where I wrote my menus for each service. On the day I received this book I suspended everything else and let my world widen as I turned the pages, What was so powerful about this book it that it blew the doors off of every other cookbook before it. It was the equivalent of punk rock but in the milieu of a restaurant. A restaurant run by a man who we could see via extraordinary black and white photography was as beat as many of us struggling to do justice to our respective visions for cuisine. Charlie not only saw that, he shared it with me adding an inscription I will hold dearly to forever.