Casual Elegance

Maureen says:
If you live in the Manchester area, pick up a copy of the Manchester Daily Express and read the page one feature about Z and its aim for casual elegance.

(As of this writing, the Daily Express's Web site had not yet updated its PDF link to the April 6th edition, but you can check back on your own; please note that the PDF version is usually available for one day only, but today being Friday, once its up, it might remain until Monday.)

This time, Tom knew the Daily Express was coming and he neither caught a cold or got caught by the camera wearing a baseball cap. The bad photo curse, it seems, is broken (amen to that).

The article does a great job of explaining an important aspect of our concept in a way that's easy to understand: pressed linen on the tables doesn't have to mean a stiffer, more formal atmosphere; neither does a staff dressed in jeans and t-shirts equate to flimsy flatware and paper napkins. Besides, the cost for new tabletops? Utterly ridiculous.

But I do feel compelled to say that while I've wondered what life would have been like if I'd met Tom at the turn of the century, fact is we didn't know each other then. We met in late 2003 when he was working for The Catered Affair and it was in June, 2004 that we moved to California where he GM'd for an independent restaurateur in Carmel.

We made the decision in July, 2006 to return to Manchester because what we saw happening downtown from afar was exciting to us. We didn't just want to partake in the transformation, we wanted to contribute to it. So we moved back...from CA to Z.