My Mentor Was Captain Epicure
August 23, 1979
My primary mentor pilot in my new corporate pilot job was Captain Ken K. In my inexperienced view, Ken was also an authority when it came to epicurean dining on the company expense account. Ken grew up in an affluent north Chicago suburb and also served in the Air Force, so he was well-versed in fine dining and ethnic cuisines. Thus Ken also became my authority and my mentor on layover dining.
I remember one early trip to Newark that I can't document by a logbook entry where we stayed overnight at the Sheraton. We had dinner at the hotel restaurant, that if I remember right was called Daphne's (the logo pictured below that I found on Google looks familiar), where the waitresses were attired in evening gowns and fancy headwear. This was all an eye-opener to me, because a former brown-bagging charter pilot was more familiar with peanut butter sandwiches and granola bars.
The logbook entry pictured above is for a trip to Little Rock, the fourth RON on a six-day "round-the-horn" trip (described in another story), where we dined at a well-known local restaurant located on the banks of the Arkansas River called Cajun's Wharf. If I remember right, the house specialty had something to do with alligators. It was also fun to take a day trip to Chicago with Ken when we landed at Meigs airport. We took the bus or a taxi into downtown, and we had lunch at some Hungarian restaurant on Wabash street that makes me drool to remember the food, but I can't remember the restaurant's name and I doubt if it's even there any more.
Ken went on to become the Chief Pilot of a startup airline that evolved from our corporate flight department, but not before I blamed him for my increasing weight....
03-12-2023
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References for Non-Pilots:
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