A dear friend and I patronized Joon’s Art Bar near the end of October, and I have been trying to write an article about it ever since.
They’re a café styled restaurant in Linden that offers creative experiences and workshops along with a main attraction of canvases to paint while being served food, coffee and what have you.
The conundrum or at least hang-up preventing my usual sulphuric flow is that I didn’t leave hating the place. The atmosphere was nice, hell, it was downright conducive to what a restaurant is all about. The music not too loud so guests can actually conversate, kind but unobtrusive hospitality and an owner present and involved with the running of things yielded a high opening score on my not-shit-o-meter.
Their bohemian aesthetic performed by way of being artist owned and run. While you do pay to play, it’s not overly metered. You get your canvas and brushes and instruction to help yourself at the paint station—no anal manager to police and divvy.
Managers, easy to hate like the people who hire them: Serial restaurateurs who spend as much time in their restaurants as they do at their court sanctioned AA meetings.
Grant on the other hand, the owner of Joon’s, is a man with a face and a charming demeaner. As quick to compliment my pencil sketch as he was to compliment my ruining it with too many pigments and not enough direction. Then, after explaining who I write for he was quick(er) to let me know the space was at Strange Fruit’s disposal—no charge of course. To top it off he’s handsome and has a cute dog named Kody. I’d be swooning if I hadn’t caught him smoking at the end of the evening.
Painting while spending time with my dear friend was wonderful but the food sucked. Another challenge I faced while trying to remain commending in tone but good lord, if “southern chicken” means stale oil flavoured rather than spicy then what’s the point?
The rhetorical question referring to the need for this article’s existence of course. It will be the third in a series I intend to continue for many instalments. However, if every piece is some or other flavour of using scatological similes and morbid metaphors to ascribe substandard restaurant cuisine to the dissolution of society as we know it…
Then really, like the number of burger options on an already over-crowded menu, one or two is enough.
(See past formats and articles Vaguely Asian Vastly Vulgar and Banging Burgers)
Then again, the column is called Discontent, and everyone needs a gimmick. Not to say I go in with hopes to be disappointed, quite the opposite in fact. I suppose, drama queen that I am, it is why I throw such a tantrum when presented with unseasoned beige slop.I wouldn’t go so far as to condemn Joon’s for fucking up fried chicken though. Unlike other restaurants I’ve covered, they not only have a strong identity but also succeed in what they set out to do: offering a creative space for people to connect and unwind in.
I suppose my confliction and struggle to write is nothing more than wanting to be nice by way of fitting in…and invariably failing on both accounts. Joon’s falls under the creative umbrella quite neatly, as do I and because of this we are meant to scratch each other’s backs.
‘I’ll write something nice and floury and in return you’ll do something for me.’
It’s expected as a part of hustle culture. But to scratch where the other can’t reach is more than lending a hand, it’s having someone’s back. Holding a stranger like a brother or committed partner simply for not fitting the aesthetic of the mainstream, call me a prude, but the barrier for intimacy is too low.
Discernment would inform well-meaning and let me add successful entrepreneurs like Grant that his business and my worldview can never mesh in a way that is beneficial. For him at least.
But I don’t hate the player—playa? I just find the game excruciating. It’s common knowledge that to get ahead in an office you gotta pucker up and blow smoke up your superiors’ arses, but it’s a mistake to think that creatives have it any different. In fact, it’s worse, it’s a crapshoot of limp wristed hand-jobs and ego stroking strangers in hopes of hitting a jackpot without getting mess on your well-put-together outfit. A uniform to tell others you’re not part of the system you participate in everyday just at different hours to that of a corporate slave.
Go for a late afternoon Paint n’ Sip, skip the food menu if things progress well to invite them back to your place for a light homemade meal and a movie marred with heavy expectations instead.
Leave it to me to take what was overall a very enjoyable evening and turn it into an existential crisis. But I’d take honesty over pretty much anything else. Happy G20 and to the pilots flying jets over my house: Go fuck yourself.