Taking an Overdue Time-Out with Taste
That Summer in London, When Taste Controlled the Clock for Just a Few Hours, I Finally Wasn't a Hedonistic Hot Mess
graphic by author
In the handful of times I’d been to London, I had always done it on someone else’s clock and someone else’s dime. In the summer of 2023, I finally got to see it my way.
An invitation to speak on a brand panel at Cannes was the perfect excuse to treat myself to a long weekend in a city I had long wanted to explore all on my own.
2023 was the year I was promoted to Head of Global Brand at Wilson Sporting Goods. That year for me was a tumultuous, happy whirlwind. Even though I was personally a hedonistic hot mess. I was traveling like crazy for work and pleasure, blending the two modes with such ferocity that I can’t help but look back and question, Zhuang Zi, style: was I a brand executive who traveled or a traveler who happened to be a brand executive?
The answer, of course, would become obvious in time, thanks first to a layoff, and then to the self-determined efforts of my own self-guided self-discovery.
Extra emphasis, yes, and then some on self.
As I approach the two-year anniversary of that fateful reorg, which they’ve since all but unwound, for the sake of my health and mojo, I’m done crediting that date and decision for my personal transformation. It’s a significant and not-so-subtle revision, not to mention an overdue reappraisal of my work and worth.
But back in 2023, I happily and unquestionably identified as a brand executive who traveled. I was thrilled to have a seat at the senior leadership table and get a chance to prove myself.
And where, among other places, did I start?
It seems once I had the job I always coveted on my business card, I took to achieving United Airlines’ Global Services status like it was the final rung atop the corporate ladder. For years, I had been a click-below at United 1K (100,000 miles flown a year), but had never come close to feeling like the mysterious bump up to Global Services would ever be bestowed upon me. Until around this time.
Between the travel “requirements” of my new role and my bump in pay, I surmised I might actually be able to make this bougie tier a reality.
I was a hedonistic hot mess, remember?
I not only never got it, I never came close.
Though in retrospect, my calendar does suggest I had given it my Type-A, plan-it-into-the-ground all. So much so, in fact, I had to do a double-take on my iPhone’s photo timeline.
This 2023 trip to London had been smushed between two other jaunts to Europe. ‘Flanked’ and ‘bookended’ are verbs much too docile. Just two weeks before, I had been in Paris for Roland Garros. And two weeks after London, I had flown to Mallorca for the real rest and relaxation.
It was the latter trip that, ironically, became one to remember for all the wrong reasons. I memorialized it in Tessera Edition 60 as the only trip I had ever taken in my entire life where I can’t remember a single bite in all the time I spent moving about there.
All of this being said not to solicit misplaced pity, but to say that this trip to London has all the makings of a revelatory travel retrospective gold mine.
Among other things I’m hoping it will, with every can of worms it opens, reinvigorate and inspire a renewed and much healthier perspective on basically, well, everything. I can’t help but have noticed in these last few months as the self-doubt and uncertainty have rushed in, that an unproductive, unbecoming bitterness has too.
Perhaps it was even evident just a few paragraphs earlier?
I want reliving London, a destination I wasn’t meant to revisit according to my content calendar until next year, to write the discontent and the ugly disillusionment away. I want my hunch about its superpowers to be right.
And then I want my silver-lining, one-foot-in-front-of-the-next Hero’s Journey optimism back.
With that attempt to wrestle free from underneath my wet blanket in mind, I flash back with Taste to London’s Two-Michelin-starred The Clove Club. Here, I’m certain a shamefully expensive but standout tasting menu experience holds the passkey to unlocking Tessera Edition 84’s momentum and meaning. While I can’t remember a single meal in Mallorca, London’s gastronomic adventures have been preserved to near perfection.
Despite being categorized by the culinary gods as a fine-dining restaurant, The Clove Club seemed to me like it was more a supremely accessible, utterly charming and elegantly cheerful supper club. It was fun. It was deeply not daintily delicious. And it was an incontestable bright spot in my travels through London.
I can recall being truly and simply happy sitting at its counter tucked away from the suffocating ambition of it all. In fact, from the moment I walked into its bright-blue-accented dining room to the moment I took my last sip of a definitely-didn’t-need-that nightcap, The Clove Club had distinguished itself as one of those rare taste-led therapeutic encounters.
Given all that was going on in my career in 2023, my dinner there had felt like a sanctum of sorts. It had been gratefully cordoned-off space and time where I could regain, albeit only for a few hours, a waning sense of order and composure. It was just me and just one unforgettable plate after the other.
By letting Taste carry me off and away, I had reminded myself that it could be, as it already had been that night and so many times before, both time-out and rest stop.
The rest of my time in London, however, would go on to be spent in restless fits of consumption and over-compensation. I was frustrated to discover that when I finally had the chance to explore this magnificent city on my own terms, I chose to do it with very little curation, soul and curiosity. I didn’t poke my head into a single museum or spend any dedicated amount of time strolling any number of London’s beautiful gardens and green spaces.
Worst of all, I treated the city like I’d been there before.
And so, it’s not surprising that today, I feel like I’ve no more done London than I’ve done Rio or Nairobi: two cities I have never set foot in and always dreamed of tearing through in thoughtful, exacting co-collaboration.
But London, however I had botched it, had a lesson lurking below the surface.
What had made London, weeks before Mallorca, so different was that Taste had controlled the clock for those few hours at The Clove Club. And when it did, it blissfully narrowed my focus, sharpening my attention in the most undemanding, nurturing kind of way.
Without realizing it, I had opted in those moments to merely be present. And by doing so, I had found myself surrounded by soft and easy-to-come-by joy. The kind we can often overlook when excess, wanting and posturing cloud our viewfinders.
And there was yet another way, still, that explained how Taste had come to move me.
When I invested my energy, in its most integral form, in something I was indisputably passionate about, in this case the instinctive, circular pursuit and cultivation of my taste, I was able to move my mind, body, gut and soul in visceral, even catalytic, harmony.
While I didn’t register any of this back in 2023, it was clear by the shape of my memories in London that I had felt its impact. And today, I finally understood its implications.
Taste, simply, begets more taste.
Follow the unplanned moments that make travel matter.
Read Collisions, a weekly Encounter Series by The Untethered Traveler.
