Highland Park
I love setting people up. I love love.
Last weekend two friends, who I introduced, got married. It was the best feeling in the world — watching two people stand under a chuppah and vow to be together forever (hopefully…but in this case, trust me they will) and know that you played a tiny role in their story. Maybe it’s because the world is so dark that this is one of the few things that isn’t. Which sounds like something Hugh Grant said at Heathrow Airport long before me. I really love love and helping people find it. They think I gave them the best gift. They actually gave it to me.
I have dated the right people at the wrong time, and the wrong people at the right time. Some have been setups, some meet cutes, some…neither. And what I’ve learned is that the old-fashioned way — the cold, hard setup — is magical. It’s magical for the couple, and it’s even more special for the person who does it. It also may be easier to conduct love than to play in the orchestra. Consider a lifeguard who never gets her hair wet.
For a single person, asking to be set up is one of the more vulnerable things they can do. It’s essentially, “here are my specs, please don’t get creative,” but also admitting you could use some help. When I introduced this couple, I mentioned it to both of them and then forgot to actually make the connection. A week later, my friend Aaron gently followed up to remind me he’d really like to meet his now wife. I felt horrible. Not just because I forgot, but because I made him do the worst possible thing — follow up on an introduction that was already offered. It's mortifying.
Setups are an illusion of control disguised as generosity. It’s about trusting that people will remember to make them, but also trusting that good people are going to introduce you to similarly good people. The control piece is obvious — controlling who you ask and when, controlling who gets a yes or a no, controlling who gets a second look versus the reject pile (a kind anti-ghost text). It’s so easy to be offended by a setup. You might get irrationally incensed in your room as if the world wants you to procreate with someone who will do irreparable damage to your future gene pool. Which is, of course, not what’s happening. People want to help. People have good intentions.
I came home from a setup many years ago and called my mother in tears that her friend had set me up with the human equivalent of a warm bag of milk. It’s taken me a long time to trust, understand, that the person who introduced me to milk boy didn’t have bad intentions. Just different taste. They provided good ingredients. It’s just that, for me, one of them was lemon and that chemistry has a tendency to curdle. But she tried. And that’s the kindest act in the world. And he did in fact end up being a match for a woman in my building! Every lemon has its margarita.
I’ve spent a lot of this winter with my parents. At my behest, they decided to test out LA as their brief winter respite from the cold. I tagged along. It’s been a booming success. I assume those things are correlated.
For Amante, the northeast is rather quiet in the winter. As much as aperitivos have become more commonplace in all seasons, we’re still a largely seasonal category. Fewer spritzes, rather logically, consumed in New York and Boston when it’s cold. It’s been particularly fun being in LA with my parents because I didn’t get to do covid with them. We can blame an ex who refused to leave Manhattan even when people were lighting trash cans on fire and breaking into ATMs. I’m totally over it.
We’ve been a fun little gang out west. I take them to cool restaurants, I make them homemade pizza on the grill Sunday nights, and force them to explore new neighborhoods because who better to keep me company. I’ve taken them to RVR and Felix on the rare occasions we go to the west side and The Benjamin when my dad just wanted a great burger on a Sunday night. We’ve had, dare I jinx it, the best time together and I’m really dreading it coming to an end. While I won’t miss their unbearable tardiness as someone hell bent on being 20 minutes early for everything, I’ve gotten used to having roommates.
I made my way over to Highland Park, sans parents, to visit some new and some existing Amante accounts. I started off at Highly Likely — a prospect. It was a semi cold call, which is my favorite kind. A full cold call is when I go in with no point of contact, no meeting, and just charm the bartender until they ask what I do for a living and I have an opportunity to whip out a bottle I so conveniently have in my bag. A semi cold call is when I go into an account unannounced but already know who to ask for. I closed the account in about 90 seconds, which is not a flex — it’s just the job.
One of the things I appreciate most about my job is the control — and how rarely life outside of it allows for any. I can control who has us on their menu (to a certain extent) and I can control the experience people have consuming it. I like control, unsurprisingly. I believe I like it because it protects me from rejection. And, even less surprisingly, I’m not stellar with rejection.
One of the harder aspects of the job has been the trust part, or rather, losing control. I left a bottle with the beverage director. She wanted to play around with it and design a cocktail for the menu. I likely wouldn’t have a say. I personally designed our most popular cocktail — The Last Lover — and I made it something that I adored and wanted to drink.
A bartender may very well come up with a bestselling cocktail I fucking hate. But I have to trust they know their customer — because I chose them.
Highly Likely was such a vibe — indoor, outdoor — an 85 degree day outside, but a perfect 75 inside. I haven’t spent a ton of time in Highland Park but I deeply enjoy it over there. I like to think my visits to the east side of LA are warming me up to head back to my actual home on the east side of the country.
LA feels optimistic to me. Though I fear it might lose that luster if I actually lived here. Yes, it’s sunny and bright, the physical attributes of optimism. But the expansiveness feels commensurate to boundless possibility. There’s always more places to explore, and therefore more to conquer, more to achieve, new people and places to love. Though sometimes when I write about new places I’m exploring out here I worry I sound the same way someone who doesn’t live in New York sounds when they write about discovering a new magical place called Nolita.
Next I went over to Checker Hall, which I’m told is one of our best customers in LA. They use Amante in their most popular cocktail: “There is No Winter, There is Only Summer.” A name that fit my current mood and geographic strategy. I loved it there. The menu was insane. The wind streamed in through the wall of open windows, but it stayed dark enough to feel moody even midday. I love a restaurant with a bar in the center — tables encircling a literal watering hole where humans are the elephants. Minus the nose. Mine is semitically anomalous.
I knew immediately I wanted to bring my dad the following week. I introduced myself to the bartender and asked if the beverage director was around so I could say a proper thank you. I don’t take any placements for granted and I want every account to know that every bottle they order means the world to me. Personally.
Then I went two blocks over to Sam’s Place. I had wanted to go there for months. The interior is covered in arched blonde wood, floor to ceiling. There’s something psychologically different, easier, for me about traveling east vs west. I’ll go an hour and a half east before I go 30 minutes west. I find the food more inspiring on the east side. Chefs are doing cooler things culinarily and the hospitality scene feels so much more daring. People are also so damn friendly and I spent an hour chatting with the bartender about her wine list. I think that’s all of LA though. And that’s a welcome change of pace. Sunshine does incredible things to people. It makes you want to root for everyone’s success, even your mortal enemies.
My friend Brie is the most optimistic person I know. She is sunshine.
95% of the time it’s infectious.
5% of the time it makes me want to hit her in the face.
The latter feeling only further reinforcing why I’m very fortunate to have her in my life.
Anytime something goes off track, she reminds me “what is meant for you will not pass you by.” It’s a better take on the old “everything happens for a reason.” Because oftentimes the reason is hard to root out. But if you believe that the thing, the person, the moment that you’re meant to live is going to make its way to you no matter what, it’s a little bit easier to make it through the worst of days. And maybe the painful thing wasn’t a detour — it was the thing.
So if you go through a breakup you truly don’t understand, or maybe one you even regret, trust that if they’re meant for you they will loop back around. (More likely, though, they weren't meant for you, dear.)
“They will not pass you by” is all the reassurance you need to survive. It works on the hard days at work too — the term sheet, the PO, the chain retail placement, that’s meant for me will not pass me by. And when you’ve put your blood and literal tears into something, that’s less a consolation prize and more just... true.
The life that is meant for me will not pass me by. If we turn that on its head, maybe that whole eternity of torture wasn’t meant to pass you, or me, by either. Maybe it was supposed to beat us down, drag us out to sea with the worst undertow imaginable, and deposit us back on shore years later, finally readable.
There’s a scene from How I Met Your Mother that I’ve always loved. Ted is sitting in a car with his ex fiancée, Stella, a woman it was always clear to the audience wasn’t his person. She tells him an old joke: a cop pulls someone over and says, “Young lady, I have been waiting for you all day.” She looks up and says, “I’m sorry, officer, I got here as fast as I could.” Then Stella turns to Ted, the hopeless romantic who can’t seem to find his person: “I know that you are tired of waiting, and you may have to wait a little while more, but she’s on her way. And she’s getting here as fast as she can.”
It’s a perfect line that takes someone’s darkest day and injects some optimism into it much like Brie injects some oft annoying sunshine into mine.
All of this to say…
You can set people up.
You can pick the right person. More often the wrong one.
You can even see it before they do.
But you can’t control when it happens.
And what’s meant for you won’t pass you by.
It’s just still in the car, getting here as fast as it can.
❤️❤️❤️