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Last week Martha Bayne and I reprised an early 2006 visit to Schwa. Since its reopening the day before Valentine’s Day, we’d been trying to land a reservation for a mid-March, midweek seating, but had some difficulty. First she couldn’t get a call back, and then the answering machine was full. When I got through I didn’t have a dummy credit card handy to secure the date, and when I called back the machine said they were booked until early April. When I finally reached a human on the phone again–Chef Michael Carlson himself–it turned out we got the exact date and time we wanted originally. Persistence pays.
For me, what’s most fun about Carlson and his restaurant is not eating in the glare of his colorful (and unwanted, it seems) press–the catapult to national prominence, the mysterious disappearance, the redemptive comeback–it’s the opportunity to experience such furious creativity through the unfiltered, unpretentious perspective of the people responsible for it.
