2011-2012. This project started off as a hobby. My wife and I worked in Park City. But, we lived in the neighboring city of Oakley, in a remote cabin. We only had one vehicle, and often worked opposite schedules. This left me with plenty of extra time every morning to walk the length of historic Main Street, ascending from its base to steep summit.
As a kid, I got entranced by the energy of the place. The shops and restaurants stuck in my mind. The wealthy locals lived a life inaccessible to me. Then, ironically, after a series of turns in my life, I ended up there 20 years later (minus the money).
I started bringing my canon to work with me, recording any moments that caught my eye, gradually collecting a volume of footage. I had no grand plan or intention to do anything with the material – I simply needed to engage in something different than agonizingly slow stop-motion animation. Yet, I managed to be there during a period of many reconstruction projects and developments. The neighborhood, initially built as a 19th century base camp for the silver mining boom, was getting another face lift.
In the winter, when my camera and fingers were to frozen to function, I’d retreat into Dolly’s Bookstore and pick up the same book for inspiration: ‘The Jazz Loft Project: Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue, 1957-1965.’ After that, I’d grab the best breakfast bagel sandwich I’ve ever eaten from a diner there.
These daily activities went on for roughly 6 months before I had the idea, and got the nerve, to ask the upscale restaurants for permission to shoot in their kitchens during peak hours. I thought I’d get roundly rejected, but surprisingly not a single establishment turned me away.
I’m not sure why, to be honest. I had no reputation in that city. No production company or crew. Not even a business card. I was a random guy with a camera, freezing my ass off in the street. To my strength, however, I’d done a 12 year stretch in the restaurant industry, with a background in sushi and asian cuisine. I knew my way around a professional kitchen. I knew how these guys worked. I had returned to my second home, with the rest of the pirates.
‘Well, shit. Now I’ve done it.’
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Ultimately, nothing happened with the project. It fell into a void. I felt like I blew it. My ambition exceeded my resources at the time, and I couldn’t execute the vision I had in my head. Disappointed, I moved on.
Now, all these years later, I went back over the documentary and immediately saw the real story, underneath all the fat. As I began cutting and reshaping it, I got energized. The spark found me, and I realized I had the means to help that younger version of myself out, and to finish this show right.
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Notes on the restoration:
The first order of business was to ditch the vague-ass title, ‘Above The Silver Mines’. I guess I fancied myself a poet back then. It didn’t work out. So, I gave it the much more specific name ‘Kitchen Stories: The Restaurants of Park City’. That immediately shifted the focus. Now that people would actually know what the hell it involved, I drastically hacked the runtime from 88 minutes down to 59.
After that process, every single second of remaining video and audio needed to be repaired. It looked and sounded awful. I had to remind myself that I made the whole thing with an early version of iMovie. It had no genuine color correction or audio editing capabilities. I found my groove during the shot-for-shot lighting adjustments, and after each completed sequence, I got elated with the end result. I’m super happy with how vastly improved the images became (the music concerts I restored were a cake walk compared to this).
Capturing good audio in a busy kitchen environment is next to impossible, unless you had a crew and high-end microphones. I of course had neither, which brought me to the next problem: I no longer had the separate audio stems of voices, ambient tracks, and musical score. It all got crushed into one file. I pushed my software as hard as I could.
The musical score also got rearranged. I added more pieces by Eric Rich, the bicycling pianist. It added emotional weight, especially during the segment for the sushi bar ‘Yuki Arashi’. I had barely ended my career in sushi, before I moved to the area. The craft had a special place in my heart. I learned a lot studying chef Paul Velo’s technique, the night I recorded his scenes. His knife skills were incredible. The muscle memory in his hands flawless. A great teacher. A few months after we finished shooting, he lost his life in a car accident. His vehicle swerved off a snowy mountain road, and fell into a ravine. Raise a glass for him.
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After I finished the bulk of the restoration, I had to admit that it wasn’t going to be a flawless production. Then, I meditated for a long time… Until I tapped into my headspace of walking through those restaurant doors each night, camera in hand; I would say to myself ‘It doesn’t need to be perfect. Just catch the energy’.
Good advice, sent to my future self.
I think ‘Kitchen Stories’ captures the immediacy of the dinner rush, when things get crazy, and teeter on the brink of failure. In that environment, unexpected things happen. But you adapt. You pull it together. You power through it. You make the evening a success, against the odds. You plate that last ticket, and you send people home with memories, confident they’ll return for more.