Between Meetings & Meals — Episode 019
A glass of Chef Chris’s own label at 10:15 in the morning, a taquiza that turned into a living-room dance floor, and why close beats convenient every time.
The two best moments in this one had a few things in common.
Neither one was on a calendar. Neither one cost anything extra. And both of them only happened because somebody closed the distance.
One happened at 10:15 on a Saturday morning. The other happened after a dinner that was never supposed to be a party.
Here’s this week’s Between Meetings and Meals.
The Pour
This week’s bottle didn’t come off a shelf, and I didn’t scan it first.
I drove to Weslaco on a Saturday morning to deliver a website. Chef Chris runs Uncle Chops, and my media company, Triggers Media, had just finished building him one — unclechopsfoodcourt.com. He’s been open eight years. The food is the kind people drive for, the reviews are stacked, and everybody in the Mid Valley who knows, knows. He just never got around to the website part. Eight years of running a restaurant will do that.
Walking in was the strange part. I’ve eaten there plenty of times — lights on, dining room full, the whole place humming. This time the gates were locked and the dining room sat dark and quiet. I came in through the kitchen, which sits offset from the main room, and found Chris and some of his team already deep into prep for the day. After all those lunches out front, it felt like peeking behind the curtain.
I pulled the site up on my phone and handed it over.
First word out of his mouth: “Niiiicceee.”
The second thing he did was try to share it. We hadn’t even connected his domain yet and he was already ready to send it out. Eight years without a website, and within a minute he was showing it off. You can’t buy that reaction.
We ended up sitting next to his bar and wine area, and I brought up my wine journey. Turns out he’d just hosted a wine dinner, so we went down the road — including the cheap bottles that are perfect for a random Tuesday night. I made my case for my 1924. His pick? The Costco box wine. Smooth, easy to drink, cheap. A chef who hosts wine dinners and still keeps box wine in the rotation. My kind of wine guy.
Then he mentioned, almost in passing, that he has his own label. His private collection, a partnership with a winery down in San Luis Potosí, Mexico — not Napa, not even Valle de Guadalupe, but the part of the wine map most people never think to look at. He showed me two whites from the partnership, and then he did the most Chef Chris thing possible. He walked behind the bar, pulled a bottle of the red — La Causa 1881, the 2024, a fifty-fifty Malbec and Syrah, black label that reads “Limited Release, Private Reserve” — opened it, and poured me a glass.
At 10:15 in the morning.
Smooth, with an aftertaste that hung around long enough to make its point.
I came to drop off a website. I left having had the best breakfast I’d had in a while.
The Table
Taquiza night.
It started with nothing more than me wanting to handle dinner. Alanah and I ran to our favorite meat market for the supplies, and on the way through she reminded me to grab the Mexican Cokes. Glass bottles. They just taste different, and they’re delicious. She was right.
Everybody had a station. I’ve been training Deven on the Blackstone for a while now, and this time I let him loose: al pastor, pork and chicken, all his. Having a second set of hands outside changed the whole rhythm of the cook. I ran fajitas over the fire on the pit next to him. Anisa made her famous beans — famous enough that Alanah made a whole video on how she makes them. Baked potatoes out of the oven, corn and flour tortillas, store-bought salsa for speed (around here, even the store-bought is somebody’s homemade). And my parents walked across the street and pulled up chairs.
That would have been enough. Good meat, good beans, everybody around the table.
But then dinner ended and nobody wanted to leave. So we didn’t.
The dance floor was Deven’s idea. He’s headed into tenth grade with a fair share of quinceañeras and school dances behind him — he loves music and loves to dance. We pushed the tables and couches against the wall, turned down the lights and turned up the Hue lights, and put on country and Tejano. Deven grabbed his grandma and the two of them danced the night away. Anisa was teaching Addy. I had Alanah.
We called it a night at midnight.
Nobody woke up that morning planning any of it. All of it random. All of it locked in the memory banks.
The Edge
Everybody Has a Private Label
The wine wasn’t even the best part of that morning. The part I keep coming back to is how close I came to missing it.
On paper, Chris is a food court owner. Eight years in, great food, stacked reviews. That’s the whole file. If I’d emailed him the login and moved on to the next thing on my list, that’s all he ever would have been to me.
But we were sitting next to his bar, and I offered up one personal thread — my wine journey. And the file got a lot thicker. He’d just hosted a wine dinner. He has real opinions about cheap bottles for a random Tuesday night. And he has his own label, a partnership with a winery in San Luis Potosí. The man has his own private reserve.
I meet business owners all week. It’s most of the job. And I keep relearning the same thing: the surface read is never the whole person. Everybody is carrying something that never comes up in a transaction. A partnership. A craft. A collection. A plan they’ve been quietly working for years.
A private label.
You don’t get to see it by being efficient. Transactions don’t surface it. It only comes out sideways, when you offer a thread of your own and give the conversation room to wander.
That’s the whole move, honestly. Lead with something you love and see what comes back. I brought up wine. He brought out a bottle.
And if I’m going to ask you to go looking for other people’s private labels, it’s only fair to show you mine. It’s this. Daniel on Purpose — my experiments in life, shared with friends, family, and I’m guessing a few strangers who wandered in here. I’m documenting it here and on my pesonal website www.danielgrivera.com. If you and I had only ever talked business, you’d never have known it existed.
One more question. That’s usually all it costs.
The Lesson
Everything good in this episode happened because somebody covered the distance.
I could have sent Chris a link. That’s how website deliveries work now — an email, a “you’re live,” maybe a thumbs up back. Instead, I gave up a Saturday morning and drove the thirty minutes to Weslaco. And because I was physically in the building, sitting next to his bar instead of behind my screen, a delivery turned into a wine conversation, and a wine conversation turned into a glass of something you can’t buy anywhere, poured by the guy whose name is on it.
Same with taquiza night. My parents didn’t get an invitation. There was nothing to get invited to. They live across the street — in the house I grew up in. We moved there when I was fifteen, the same age Deven is now. These days I live across the street from my own childhood home, and nights like this are the payoff: they walked over for dinner and ended up watching their grandson — fifteen, same as I was in that house — pull his grandma onto a dance floor that didn’t exist an hour earlier.
You can’t schedule any of that. There’s no calendar block for “chef opens his private collection at 10:15 AM” or “family cumbia lesson after dinner.”
But you can control one thing: how close you are when it happens.
Show up in person when a link would technically work. Live near your people, or act like you do. Stay after dinner longer than you need to. Sit next to the bar instead of near the exit.
The moments aren’t plannable. The proximity is.
Close beats convenient. Every time.
Between meetings and meals, that’s the one this week.
Send the link if you have to. Walk it over if you can.
If this resonated, the newsletter is where it continues — one honest email at a time.