All You Feed Is Love&emdash;
Shortly before the official opening of Formaggio, the new restaurant at the Marriott hotel in Rancho Cordova (at Highway 50’s Sunrise Boulevard exit), Chef David Boswell treated my longtime pal Karen O’Brien and me to lunch there. While I’d like to believe he did this because Boswell knows I write this column and he wanted a plug&emdash;or that he knows O’Brien is a marketing exec with Superior Vision, the national eye-care benefits company headquartered down the road from the Marriott, and he needed a new pair of glasses&emdash;he didn’t know us from Adam (or Eve). He treated because he was annoyed that the food&emdash;calamari salad for me, vegetable soup for O’Brien&emdash;wasn’t delivered to us as quickly as he’d intended. We had neither complained nor noticed. The following week, Marriott’s PR guy David Ligon introduced me during lunch to Boswell, a trim, rugged ex-Marine with a fondness for California cuisine, surfing and tattoos, whose previous chef gigs included Tra Vigne (in St. Helena) and the Delta King Pilothouse (in Old Sac). I told him how surprised and pleased O’Brien and I had been by his gesture a few days earlier. He grinned and walked away. Then the waiter popped by and said Boswell had just treated Ligon and me to lunch. I’d go back and thank Boswell again but I’m getting pretty full.
J Amuse&emdash;Jason and Justin Wister are 36-year-old identical twins and longtime business partners in PAIR Design, a graphics studio based in Rancho Cordova. They got their start working for another pair of identical twins whose names also start with the letter J: Jack and Jeff Gernsheimer, who own Partners Design in Philadelphia. Jason and Justin’s parents are Jim and Jan Wister. (I’d planned on riffing a lot more about this apparent J fixation but realized I have no room to talk: My late wife’s name was Jane, her only sister’s name is Judy, and Jane and I named our only child Jessica.) I asked the younger Wisters if there were any particular advantages to working with their identical twin and both said, almost simultaneously, that each had a business partner he could thoroughly count on and trust. I said it also would be nice to have someone that you could send to client meetings in your place when you didn’t feel like going and that the client might never be the wiser, but this only made the guys stare at me. Jason and Justin own homes near each other in El Dorado Hills. Jason’s wife is Amy; Justin and his wife, Tara, have a 2 ½-year-old daughter, Ryan. Apparently, they’ve halted the family tradition of J walking.
Unmarried to It&emdash;Once upon a time, Dane Henas and Wendy Eaton were married and worked alongside each other in a design firm. Then they got divorced. But they still work together at the same firm (Dane Henas Design) in a stylish building they own at 18th and Q streets. We still have lunch together every day, Eaton says. And we still know how to push each other’s buttons when we argue, Henas says. Both consider the current arrangement more relaxing (Eaton’s word) than the previous one because we can go our separate ways to our separate homes at the end of the day (Henas’ comment). So what do formerly married designers who still work together argue about? Mostly typefaces, Eaton says, breaking into a long&emdash;and relaxed&emdash;laugh.
Tête Offensive&emdash;I think I speak for a lot of men when I ask: Why do summer breezes always blow in the opposite direction of my comb-over?
