Of Birthdays, Books, Cakes and Toasting to the Best Job in the World

I turned 35 today. My son guessed that I was now 73, so he was close.

It was a delightful day, as days at the Pfister tend to be.

I started with Eggs Benedict in the café. It’s one of the few meals where I’m never too full to enjoy every bite and then mop the plate clean.

Then a friend sent me over a birthday martini, so I drank this delicious confection at 11:30 am. It tasted like cinnamon and spicy chocolate.

I spent the afternoon writing and reading in the lobby lounge.  I’m forever scouting out books to recommend to members of our Pfister book club—today I was entrenched in a creepy tale of Tangier in the 1960s and a beautiful short story collection.  (When do I have time to sit and read this way, minus a plethora of children, dog, and dirty dishes?  My birthday.  At work.)

The Pfister midday is calming. People around me were lunching with their mother, reading a novel, clicking away on a laptop, shaking hands heartily. The bartender reminisced about her almost four decades here, serving presidents and celebrities and her beloved regulars.

A man at the table next to me gushed to his friend, “This Pfister is the place!  I never realized.  This place is amazing.”

I observed it all from my fireplace perch and felt very grateful.

In the afternoon, I hung out with Travis Martinez in the pastry department, peppering him with questions about desserts and cakes and birthdays.

He told me about his newest venture, making wedding cakes like mad and preparing to be able, for the first time, to offer Pfister brides beautiful in-house options for their weddings.

My favorite of Travis’s creations are what he calls “composed desserts”, artistically plated to play complimentary or surprising flavors and textures off one another.  This allows him to display his creativity in a dessert that has a flow and a story, the kind he’s been dreaming up for our Pfister Book Club, and I could eat them all day.

In a recurring theme of today’s day-drinking, Artist in Residence Margaret Muza and I toasted my birthday with champagne, which because I’m a word nerd and think in quotes, always makes me remember Dom Perignon’s “Come quickly, I’m tasting the stars!”

Since collaborating with Margaret is absolutely my favorite part of the Narrator position this year, it was fitting to spend a piece of this birthday with her.

You know you really love your workplace when you want to spend your birthday there.  Happy day.