You Almost Had It
Pretty Ugly almost had it. So did I. So have you.
Most people can handle a disaster. A kitchen fire, a relationship ending in a police report, a total career collapse. Those things have a certain dignity to them. They’re final. They provide a clean break and a clear story to tell at the bar.
What’s harder to stomach is the “almost.”
It’s the quiet, nagging realization that something had the potential to be great and simply decided to settle for “fine.”
It’s the job that looks perfect on a business card but leaves you hollow by 4:00 PM.
It’s the partner who is kind, stable, and “correct,” yet you’re still looking for the exit while they’re talking about vacation plans.
We tell ourselves that “good enough” is just being a goddamn adult. It’s a lie.
“Almost” is a slow-motion car wreck. It is a placeholder that eventually becomes a permanent residence if you aren’t careful. I know, because I have spent half my life decorating placeholders instead of looking for the exit.
My own version started by accident.
A culinary school placement. One summer. A yacht on the St. Croix River in Minnesota, where I was the chef’s assistant, not the chef.
I was just a guy who happened into the job and happened to be decent at it.
The morning I woke up in the Gulf of Mexico, I stood on the bow watching flying fish land on the deck, in turquoise water that didn’t look real, and I thought: this is what I’m going to do with my life.
I meant it. Every word of it.
What I didn’t know yet was what it would eventually cost me.
Years in, I’d lie awake at night, exhausted enough to sleep but unable to.
I’d run through every way tomorrow could finally be the day I failed.
I was manufacturing a scenario where someone would look at what I made and tell me it sucked. (Spoilers: They usually didn’t, but my brain was too busy hosting a panic-themed rave to notice.)
The people I cooked for could be mean and ruthless. They didn’t care about feelings, and I have an abundance of those.
Every day, as I prepped for dinner service, that anxious dread would well up.
Even when the final dish went out, I couldn’t feel the relief. I was just waiting for a crash that never happened, wondering if it was scheduled for the next morning instead.
I wasn’t tired of cooking. I was tired of performing. There’s a difference.
The performance had turned my passion into something that no longer belonged to me. That’s not burnout. That’s what “almost” costs when you stay too long.
I’ve done it in my personal life too. Stayed in relationships that were good on paper but lacked the soul because I didn’t want to admit I was settling.
Now, with my husband, I have the “it.” I know the difference between a placeholder and the real thing.
The years that followed the yacht life were their own kind of almost.
I started writing. Memoirs, personal essays, life on the road in our little Casita trailer.
All of it honest, most of it good. But I kept circling around the one thing readers kept responding to: the yacht years. The standards. The stories.
I treated it like a dirty secret. Something too complicated or too painful to explain.
Meanwhile, the readers were quietly telling me that I was hiding the most interesting part of myself.
This is Ungarnished is me deciding to stop doing that. The name is a chef’s term. Nothing added that doesn’t belong. No pretension. Completely honest.
So I stopped hiding. And went to dinner.
Pretty Ugly, in Portland.
They’ve only been open since January, which explains the “new car smell” haze.
The name is a lie.
The place is actually beautiful in that dark, “I hope nobody sees me eating this burger” kind of way. Low light, candles, and a 90s soundtrack that actually had a soul.
Service was clunky at first. We were waved toward the bar like an afterthought.
I know the difference between a staff that doesn’t care and a staff that’s still finding their feet.
These kids cared. They caught the mistake and moved us to a booth in the back, right next to the kitchen door.
Then the food arrived.
The Big Daddy burger cleared the bar. It wasn’t yacht food, but it was executed with the same level of obsession.
Here is the thing about execution: people think “loaded” means better.
In the culinary world, “loaded” is usually code for “we’re hiding something.”
If a chef is serving a dry patty, they’ll bury it in bacon and house sauce. If the fries are old, they’ll dump cheese on them.
At Pretty Ugly, the chili-lime slaw wasn’t decorative confetti. It was balanced acid.
And the Loaded Fries held their crunch. That’s a minor miracle.
If you want to know if a kitchen is actually good, look at the stuff they can’t hide.
If the fries under the toppings aren’t a soggy mess, they’re paying attention. Look at the foundation, not the garnish.
I was genuinely happy. Then I went to the bathroom.
The bathroom was a crime scene. Trash on the floor. A used rubber glove in the corner. In a restaurant, that is a special kind of “fuck you” to the guests. It’s the one space they think nobody’s grading.
What a place does when they think no one’s watching is the most honest thing they’ll ever show you.
At Pretty Ugly, every other signal was right.
That’s why the bathroom landed the way it did.
For a place that had nailed the aesthetic, the food, and the warmth of the staff, it landed like a wrong note at the end of a song you’d been loving.
You almost had it.
I spent twelve years in professional kitchens where the margin for error was zero. The principal on a yacht doesn’t grade on a curve. You learn to read the signals because you have to.
So here’s what I’d suggest: before you order, look around.
Check the staff. Are they moving with intention or killing time?
Are the menus clean?
Does your server know the food or recite it?
Then find the bathroom. Not to be difficult. Because a kitchen that takes pride in the space nobody grades is a kitchen that takes pride in the space everybody does.
Excellence isn’t a department you visit when you have time. It’s the baseline.
It lives in the corners you think nobody’s checking. It dies the moment someone decides a detail is someone else’s problem.
That goes for restaurants. And for the rest of us too.
Pretty Ugly is a good restaurant.
The bones are there. The food is genuinely above average. The team is warm and they showed up when it counted.
Because a place that’s almost there deserves to get there.
Because I know what it’s like to carry a story you aren’t telling.
For a long time, I let the yacht years take the passion out of the room.
I treated the best and worst years of my life like something to be ashamed of instead of the very thing that taught me how to see.
I learned what real standards look like and what it costs to hold them.
I learned to cook with whatever was in front of me, in ports I couldn’t have found on a map a year earlier.
The “almost” was everything I wrote before I finally let that chapter back into the room.
It’s in the room now.
--R. Michael
Pretty Ugly is located at 1317 NW Hoyt Street, Portland, OR. Average cost is $45 to $60 per person for a burger, side, and drink. Reservations via Resy recommended.
R. Michael is a former luxury yacht chef, a food and travel writer, and a reliable source of opinions nobody asked for. This is Ungarnished.
From the Archive
One story pulled from the shelf. These were written under a different name, on a different road. The ink is older, but the voice is the same.
Some people move through the world with a quiet certainty that makes everyone around them better. Emily is one of those people. This is what I had to say about it.
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This was my first read this morning, and it is excellent. Thank you. Now I'm going to check the unseen corners of my life and my house...