Erik and I are excited to start this blog. Over our last 6 years as restaurateurs we always get asked several recurring questions. 1. How did you end up on Gotland? 2. How do you make your...BBQ Sauce, tortillas, salsa verde, margaritas, fried chicken?.... and 3. When are you opening in.... Stockholm, Malmo, Nörrkoping, Gothenburg, Holland?...
We hope through this blog we can share with you how we got started on our journey to Gotland, where we are going from here (a.k.a. "what we've got cooking"...new menu items, possible expansion, or volunteer as a test taster for Vanessa's newest creation etc...) and quite possibly sharing a few personal recipes along the way. We hope you'll follow along on our journey and engage with us in the comments. So, let's get started. How did we get here?
It all started Friday, October 3rd 2014. Erik and I were in the midst of planning for our wedding in the city of Visby, on Gotland to occur in May 2015 when we had also discussed possibly buying a summer house. That's when Erik had started casually searching Swedish real estate websites. We were living in West Palm Beach, FL and I came home a little early from work as we were meeting dear friends in Fort Lauderdale for dinner. Erik was nearly giddy when I came through the door and had something very important to show me. He took me over to our TV and showing on the screen was the images of Gothem Magnuse 278 in Gothem, the Gothem's Fiket to be precise. Rows of tidy red cabins and a large summer restaurant in the middle of a cow pasture greeted me cheerily while I looked questioningly at Erik, as this was clearly NOT a summer house on Gotland!
We had begun speaking of late of the challenges our current jobs were having on both of us and what the future held so I had expressed to him my dream of having a cafe one day. Of course the challenge of this kind of dream in the U.S. makes this nearly impossible, especially when many of the benefits (health insurance, retirement, vacation etc...) are tied to your job. For the self-employed these can be difficult things to get and with nearly 50% failure rate of restaurants in the first 5 years, and with me at nearly 40 years old the risk seemed too high and thus would likely remain a dream. What I didn't realize is that Erik too had a vision, to be financially and economically independent and no longer have to work for anyone else. This brings us back then to Gothem and what would eventually become our first restaurant at the end of the universe! To be continued...
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