An Island in the Fire

A year built not by plans but by people.

One year.

We thought we had plans. Pages of them. Lists, diagrams, late-night sketches on napkins and plywood. How service would move, how the wine list would unfold, the way the dining room would feel when the lights dimmed and the first corks popped. We thought we could shape it all by sheer will.

But restaurants don’t bend to plans. They chew them up and laugh at them. I’ve learned that a restaurant is not a machine, it’s a living organism. It grows teeth. It spits out anything false. It’s the realest motherfucker you’ve ever met. And if you’re lucky, if you survive the breaking-in, it starts to reveal what it really is.

That’s the hardest thing but the greatest gift.

Because it means you don’t get to decide who you are. The guests decide. The community decides. Your staff decides. They show up, or they don’t. They sit, they stay, they leave, they return. Their presence carves the shape of the place. All the plans in the world are nothing compared to a room full of people willing to trust you.

And so much of this year has been about learning to give myself over entirely. To service. To the dream. To the mess of it all.

That surrender has also meant something harder: not being everywhere at once. It pains me not to be at Gnarwhal every day, shoulder to shoulder with the crew, brewing shots and talking shop at the counter. That café is the heartbeat, the place that made any of this possible. And the only reason I’ve been able to throw myself so completely into Companion is because the Gnarwhal staff have been holding it down with grit and grace.

But there’s also been an unexpected beauty in stepping back: the way absence makes room for others to step in, take risks, and create. In me spending a little less time there, Gnarwhal has started to bloom in directions I never could have forced. The staff and the regulars have built their own sub-communities, sparked events, and made the space theirs in ways that feel alive and surprising. It’s proof that Gnarwhal was never just mine. It belongs to everyone who shows up and breathes life into it.

We funded this place with every last penny to our names. There were weeks when the math equaled doom, when we were staring into the brink, asking if we’d make it another month. Rent due. Payroll looming. No cushion, no backup. Just the terrifying gamble that people would come in or would be excited about happy hour.

And when they did — when the room filled and the food hit the table — there was no other choice but to give everything. All of ourselves.

That’s the gift of service: you empty yourself so the guest can feel whole. You work twelve hours, sixteen hours, and at the end of it you mop the floor with a beer in your hand, back screaming, shirt soaked through. You lock the door and step into the night air, body broken, heart wrecked, but buzzing with the strange satisfaction that you carried people for a few hours. That you gave them something that mattered.

This year tested that devotion in every way.

The power went out, three times to be exact, plunging us into chaos mid-service and prepping in lantern light. Our water lines were cut in the middle of the night, stolen for copper scraps. The LA fires rained ash onto the patio, into our HVAC system, covering plates and glasses, and still we stayed open. Because even when the city is burning, rent will be due.

And then the drains. The floor drains backed up during dinner service, water rising fast. We almost evacuated the dining room. Instead, we became a flood brigade… plungers and squeegees in hand, pushing the water back like sailors in a sinking ship, while guests kept eating twenty feet away. Later that night, headlights lit up the street while we jetted the lines under the building, praying it would hold until morning.

And yet, the doors keep opening. Garlic still hits oil. The Faema still hisses (sometimes angrily). Wine still pours and guests still laugh. For a few hours each night, the world outside doesn’t win. I said this in my Substack last week and it stuck with me… If the tide is rising, we build an island.

One year of Companion has been nothing but that. An island built out of ash and copper theft, of sweat and broken pipes, of debt and devotion. Built out of the backs and hands of a team who gave themselves fully. Out of guests who let us stumble, who let us learn, who came back anyway.

And maybe that’s the through-line between Companion and Gnarwhal: neither place is what we planned. They’re stranger, rawer, truer. They can’t be controlled. They’re shaped by the people who choose to walk through the door and give themselves to it.

So thank you. To the Gnarwhal crew who’ve carried the heartbeat and made it their own. To the Companion team who’ve bled and sweated and laughed through the chaos. To the regulars and neighbors who let us fail in public, who trusted us enough to come back, who made this thing real.

It was never just mine. It was always ours. And if this is year one, then I can’t wait to see what’s next.

Cheers,

Nick