Popination Ensh*ttification

a series of unhinged personal essays disguised as pub reviews. Today: The Kitchen.

I grow old, I grow old / I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled…

~the Love Song of Jenn Zuko Prufrock

Exterior sign yoinked from Globalphile website, discussing Boulder restaurants. I didn’t get very many snaps on my own phone of The Kitchen, as I was pretty bored by it. I was that ready to move on to someplace more friendly.

Okay listen: I know that Boulder has become a hub of bigtime tech people, and aligned with such, some of the most famous celebrity chefs and foodies have places here. And I’ve talked about what I call ‘Posh Row’ on the Pearl Street Mall before, too. What I have not done is visit those in said row. But the other day, I went down to my stylist to have a very long and involved salon visit to pop out and extend the natural silver in my hair. I figured, as long as I’m in Boulder, I may as well do a fresh Popination, someplace I hadn’t been yet. So I chose The Kitchen.

As you know, there’s no research allowed in Popinations—they’re meant to be personal essays first and personal impressions of the pubs I go to second. Sometimes one more than the other, but a historical or otherwise researched overview of the place? That’s not a part of these ‘mess’ays. However.

I do wish I had done a little research before I plunked down even the small amount of money into The Kitchen, because it turns out The Kitchen Group of restaurants is co-owned and co-founded by Kimbal Musk. Sigh. I didn’t know, okay? All I had was an old fashioned and a cup of tomato bisque, anyway, so it’s not like I gave them too much money. It was good. The old-fashioned was a little sweet. And I tipped well. That’s it. Please don’t ‘at’ me…

I was writing last week (or, at least, re-posting) about my own hair, and my unnatural personal obsession with redheads in my life (Red). I chose that one as a placeholder because my actual near-entire Friday was to have been taken up with a hair appointment. Now, I had been going black for many years before very recently, when it suddenly occurred to me that my 50-something complexion can no longer sustain such a harsh contrast (between my very pale skin and the very dark hair). I’m getting too old for that particular Goth shit, in other words. And so my stylist and I planned how I could somehow get down to what’s fast becoming naturally mostly silver. How we handled that was: first we started going lighter and lighter brown, one shade at a time, as the color faded in the intense and continuous Colorado sun. Then, once my roots started looking more silver than brown, I was to grow them out at least 3-4 inches. Which I did. And then this was the culmination of all that patience: i went in at 9am, and my immensely talented stylist proceeded to separate out all the silver and to strip the latent color from the rest of the length of the tresses, leaving the brown as is. Then she overlaid the whole with an ashy/grey color so it didn’t look blond or brassy. By the time 2pm rolled around, I had the most gorgeous, silvery ashy streaks as highlights all down my hip-length hair. It’s lighter than I’ve ever had it, and it looks so cool. More importantly, it looks better on my middle-aged face than the black was beginning to. Dare I say it’s age-appropriate? I don’t know if I like that sentiment, but it is.

But a hair salon is not a pub!

Even though they do have sparkling water, tea, and coffee available for their clients, Voodoo Hair Lounge is still not a pub.

There’s a specific path with a few stops that I always take on foot once I’m done getting my hair done. As my salon is a couple blocks East of the pedestrian part of the Pearl Street Mall, and so whenever I have an appointment there, I take a moderate walk all the way down Pearl until I stop at whatever Popination I’ve chosen for the afternoon. First stop is usually a little record store right kitty-corner from Mountain Sun. Then (whether or not I stop off for an FYIPA), I go to a little crystal hippie-dippie shop that I’ve frequented since I was a teenager, and where I still supply the household with incense from. I also look at their bracelet collection, to see if they have cool stones on offer. After that, Sometimes I’ll go to posh kitchen boutique Peppercorn, especially if anyone needs fancy chocolate or we’ve broken one too many wine glass. After that, this time I popped into Boulder Bookstore, where my book is shelved under Recommended Local Authors. Then, I was hungry. And wanted a cocktail. So I decided to stop off at one of the bars in the restaurants on what I call Posh Row, just a block down from the bookstore.

Outside, The Kitchen looks pretty basic: clean lines, the classic exposed brick of most places on Pearl St. Inside, brick and good wood and red leather and brushed steel. Classy without being too formal, which is totally on brand for Boulder—even more than Denver, nobody in Boulder seems to get that dressed up for anything. Some combination of a hippie thing and a nouveau riche thing, maybe? Or is it old money that’s rougher around the seams? Let me know.

The menu was surprisingly tiny, which I didn’t understand. I thought The Kitchen was known as this very high quality gourmet bistro, not like, a cocktail bar with some limited snacks just to keep you up with your drinking. But the menu was extremely small: a few starters, a couple entrees, soup and salad, but the whole thing didn’t take more than a half-sheet of paper. But maybe that was because I was there at a sort of happy hour time of day, just after lunch and not quite dinnertime. But I don’t know—I didn’t research.

I enjoyed my bisque and my old fashioned, and it was a nice enough ambience, but there was something about it that was boring. The bartender was cordial enough, but there was no warmth in the place. It didn’t quite feel human enough for me to stay for a second drink. Soulless and pretty. It puts forth a presentable front but there’s no depth. I guess that makes a bit of sense, doesn’t it.

I decided to go wait for my uber over at Post Brewing, and that was such a more comfortable place to wait. Even though just a chicken and beer joint. Though, what do I mean, ‘just,’ anyway? This is a word I’ve been hearing a lot lately, when folks online are discussing things like AI-created art, or the new Harry Potter TV series¹: soulless.

People are searching for the soulful these days more than ever: the human, the artisanal, the warm, the slightly flawed, the wabi-sabi, the handcrafted…now more than ever, we humans are craving, well, the human. I’ve talked about wabi-sabi and this concept of an artistic patina or flaw before, in Chapter 8 of my memoir:

The concept of wabi-sabi is one such aesthetic that’s famously hard to define, let alone translate into English and Western culture. The basics of what wabi-sabi means has to do with an appreciation of an imperfect beauty—a beauty that comes from rustic flaws, perfect imperfection, and the patina of the natural passage of time. Art types will talk about the earth tones and sepia palette of a work done with a wabi-sabi sentiment, while sculptors and potters will tout the non-symmetry of works as being the most beautiful. I love the story of what many think was the first iteration of wabi-sabi: that of a gardener to the emperor combing and arranging a zen sand garden to mathematical perfection, and after? he shook the branches of the cherry trees above it, scattering the petals across his finished product haphazardly, making his work even more perfect.

And I went and spent a whole day (and a chunk of change) to make my hair look less slick, new, fake, or polished. I went in and got a meticulous session of wabi-sabi done to my hair, and now my look, though no less punk, is warmer, realer, more human. That’s what The Kitchen didn’t give, and what I strive for in every live show I produce.

And actually, my hair looks a lot prettier this way.

1. Seriously, like: why? Literally nobody wanted this.