As I spoke with the restaurant’s purveyors, the main thing that struck me was how many people had backed into their work—almost all of them had double lives. Charlie Akwa, a little dynamo of a woman who specializes in caviar and Mediterranean fish, first made a killing on Wall Street. Kathleen Weber, who bakes the French Laundry’s bread, was a nurse and then worked in women’s retail before she and her husband, Ed, built a brick oven in their backyard.
John Mood has lived a double life since he was a teenager and became infatuated with a neighbor’s banana tree. The infatuation blossomed into an intense love of tropical plants. He served in Vietnam as a pilot, and after the war, he continued to fly for the army. Then he quit the army, got a job as a commercial pilot, and bought enough land in Hawaii—about thirty-five acres—to turn his hobby into a business. His wife, Pat, became his manager.
