welcome

I would not blame anyone for assuming that this thing would never really happen because frankly I wasn’t that sure myself. That being said, we are here now and it is getting exciting. I would like to start with some background information to give everyone an idea of how this whole thing got started.

Rewind to August 2008. The restaurant that I had been working for was not going in a direction that I thought I could live with (seemed to be turning into a pattern) so I made a decision to leave and try my hand at opening my own joint. Jay Fanelli, who designed this website, was among the first few people that I confided in and he was full of encouragement. The first conversation that Jay and I had pretty much spawned the ground work for the concept that is now becoming a reality.

Within a few weeks of the announcement that I was working on something new it appeared as though everything  was in place and I started looking for a building. I looked at no fewer than ten or fifteen potential spaces and was not inspired by any of them. After a frustrating run of duds in Lawrenceville in late September 2008, a good friend of mine called me and said that he knew some folks interested in the restaurant business and they happened to own a really cool building. Enter Doug and Liza Cruze. I walked into 5523 Penn Avenue and before anyone said anything I had already decided that this was where Salt needed to be. And that was before we exchanged ideas and philosophies concerning food and design. I was smitten with where everything was headed. This is about where the economy crapped out and left us with no money. Slowly over the course of the following sixteen months everything came back together. The Cruze Architects went nuts designing an incredibly smart space that they insisted could really happen with our very limited resources. Along the way there have been many speed bumps as well as dramatic high points which I will expound upon as this new blog evolves.

The next two and a half months promise to be the most interesting of my professional life and I could not be happier about being where I am right now.