The restaurant trade is a violent affair full of cutthroat competitors and palate-blind critics eager to pick at what to them is merely food. Like many artists before him, my good friend David Schoffman, fearful of the vegetative indolence most common at mid-career, has tossed his tattered apron into this tasteless ring of flames and opened up a bistro of his own.
Though he labors in earnest, Los Angeles tends to greet much of what David does with an undernourished apathy and a bitter, hostile extravagance of dismissive inattention.
This was not always the case.
There was a time when Schoffman was Southern California's darling, a spaniel among the curs, a toasted garnish on a glamorous gourd.
Feted by the famous and fetishized by the rich he was a bohemian trophy mis en bouteille in the chateau of grand celebrity.
It would have been nothing spotting him with some starlet on Opening Nite, flashbulbs bouncing off his bald head like fireflies in summer.
The cult of the artist maudit is all fine and good so long as the artist in question remains obedient to the proscribed règle du jeu. As soon as said artist sheds his gloomy hide and joins the well-adjusted he is no longer of any use as a bangle or a beard.
Unless of course his work is durable, strong and speaks for itself.
Which, of course, has never been the case for David.
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