The sting of rejection, the bliss of burgers

It's a hate, love kind of week.

I hate rejection.

Period. End of sentence. New paragraph.

Early on in my newspaper career, there was a bit of it.

Me: What if we write this review from the perspective of the smoked mullet dip — in plural first-person?!!

Editor, colleagues: (silent, studying their notes, not making eye contact)

Me: Hahaaa (blinks back tears), I was kidding (stifles sobs)

Somewhere around year seven at The News-Press, I no longer had to pitch stories, I just wrote them and we ran with them. I learned what worked and what didn’t. I learned when to push and when to hold back. I figured it out.

And then, in 2019, I started writing a book. People tried to prepare me for the abundance of rejection that is inherent to this process, but it still hit hard.

Back when this was a vaguely Filipino cookbook/multiracial essay collection set in Robert E. Lee County (I may as well have written it from the perspective of fish dip), I sent it to exactly four literary agents. Three of them ghosted me. One responded with a nice email that was more or less a flattering way of saying, “Huh?”

I could have pushed. I could have tried to get someone, anyone to see the brilliance of my multi-genre, seafood-perspective, not-quite-a-cookbook essay anthology. Instead, I figured it out. I removed the recipes (there weren’t many at that point), I connected the essays, I realized the odd beauty of our childhood fruit trees and their parallels to my life.

I wrote “The Mango Tree.”

And an agent found me, and together we found a wonderful editor, and in a year or so this book will be in the world.

Still, there has been rejection at every turn. I’ve been rejected by workshops and writing instructors and many other editors and every single writing residency to which I’ve applied. Each one stings. Even though I know it shouldn’t. Even though I know this is how it all works.

I’m trying to learn how to harness this fear of rejection to motivate me and not stifle me. With “The Mango Tree,” those early ghostings could have sent me back to the safety of my cubicle, where rejection would never again darken my door. Instead, my fear pushed me to create something flat-out better, something I hoped would be unrejectable. Which is neither a thing nor a word.

As I continue in this space (books two (and three!!!) are in the works), I know I need to embrace rejection for what it is — not an ending but a pivot point for possible improvement.

Not a place to stop, a place to push.

Restaurant of the week: Only Doubles

This isn’t a restaurant, it’s a food truck, only it’s not really a food truck either, it’s more like a traveling griddle under an orange tent where spatula-wielding owner Kyle Cravo works his burger magic.

If you miss BurgerQue (RIP Mr. Mankin and thank you, thank you for your work), Only Doubles will bring you back to those heady days when it felt like great burgers could solve all our dining problems.

There is nothing fanciful or tricky to Cravo’s doubles. He starts each by caramelizing onions on that well-worn griddle. Once the onions are soft and sweet, he smashes wagyu patties atop them. He presses the beef till it’s desperately thin, till every millimeter gets crisply charred, then tops each with “melty cheese.” True to the not-really-a-restaurant’s name, every Only Doubles burger gets two cheese-crowned patties and a pillowy soft potato rolls that tastes like bread and also like triumph.

Most days, the OD menu offers three options: the ODB (all of the above with mayo-based OD sauce), the RZA (all of the above with ketchup, mustard and pickles), and for non-beef-eaters, a classic grilled cheese.

Every now and then, Cravo goes wild: crafting surf & turf doubles topped with shrimp, truffle-speckled Gouda and gochujang mayo; infusing his ketchup with the fermented spice of kimchi; layering his creations with habanero-jack and Zapp’s VooDoo chips.

I hit up Only Doubles when it was at Palace Pub & Wine Bar in Cape Coral earlier this month, when these genius wine minds were pairing OD’s beefy offerings with juicy grenache blends from Australia and the Côtes du Rhône (*chef’s kiss*).

But the beauty of this burger tent is its mobility. You’ll find Only Doubles at Ceremony Brewing in Bonita, at markets and bars and barbershops in Naples, at tattoo parlors and pubs in the Cape. Cravo, who went to high school in Naples, posts his schedule on OD’s Instagram page each week.

It’s been almost a year since Only Doubles launched. I am late to this party, but I can’t wait to see it grow.