The First Name I Came Up With: Shroom Room

As one of my esteemed inaugural blog readers (welcome!) you may be wondering about my first post. Is Schwarma Queen a real restaurant? Where is it?

The answer is that no, SQ does not yet exist; instead, if you were to plot out the planning process that began maybe when I was given my first cookbook as a little girl (Fanny at Chez Panisse), and will end when I open the doors to my first cafe, this would be one freeze frame, or moment in time.

I believe that in life, the journey is just as important as the destination (namaste, yoga teachers), and in that vein I have created this blog as record to my journey of choosing a name for my cafe, honing its concept, and adding to that snippets of my life in food, which of course color the eventual end point.

So as I said before, Schwarma Queen is the third name I came up with that I really believed would be a good name for my cafe. The first name I came up with was Shroom Room, in 2003, which was the running name for my restaurant for about a year, my senior year in college.

Truth be told, it wasn't I who dreamed up that ingenious name- it was either my dad Randy or his best friend Howard, two creative, entrepreneurial 50-somethings who are very close to my heart. They had visited The Mellow Mushroom, a pizza joint in Charlottesville that apparently struck them enough to bring me back a menu. I proceeded to muse on that for a while and for the first time, came up with the concept for a restaurant in my head.

I have just fished the brainstorming document I wrote on December 22, 2003 (apparently a little personal activity for my Christmas break) from my "food" file folder- it pays to be a packrat! The Shroom Room concept is all coming back to me. It's amazing how much of this concept has endured and will be part of the cafe I open soon: the order-at-the-counter and stay-as-long-as-you-want kind of service; the pitchers of beer and a nice little wine list; the element of choice in the menu (for Shroom Room it was pizza and salad toppings; presently it's yogurt and falafel accompaniments). I have fond memories of driving down to southern California in the back seat of my friend Kim's old Benz and debating whether we would grill our pizzas at Shroom room, or discussing the importance of portion uniformity.

When Shroom Room was conceived of I hadn't yet travelled to Morocco, or Israel, or Sweden (or Vietnam or China or Australia for that matter) so I'm not surprised my concept has changed considerably. Still, it's been fun revisiting the original dream.