Issue #132 Why a Simple Lunch in France Turned Into a Life Lesson I Didn’t Expect

Last week, Kelly and I spent a morning moving through the vineyards of Alsace. We were with a small group of close friends, stopping at small family domaines tasting Riesling and Pinot Gris poured by the people who grew the grapes. 

The landscape had a particular quality to it; gentle slopes terraced with vines, the Vosges mountains rising behind everything, the light coming in crisp and golden the way it does in wine country in the late morning.

Between stops, we drove a short distance to the charming medieval village of Riquewihr, renowned for being one of the best-preserved villages in the region. Its cobblestone streets and half-timbered houses, painted in warm ochre and deep red, were adorned with flowers spilling from every window box.

I had booked a lunch reservation at a small nearby restaurant with solid reviews, expecting little more than a pleasant meal to follow an already wonderful morning in the wine region.  What we experienced instead was extraordinary. 

After asking us a few simple questions about our preferences, the chef quietly returned to the kitchen and began preparing something entirely tailored to us. Every dish felt carefully considered, layered with remarkable attention to detail, and it quickly became one of my best and most memorable meals.

What I did not realise at the time was that I was not just about to have a fantastic lunch but also I was about to step into someone’s life story, 

The Chef Who Came Home

The Chef’s name is Serge Burckel, and together with his wife Sabine, he owns AOR, La Table, le Goût et Nous, tucked along the edge of the village of Riquewihr. From the moment you walk into the space, it is immediately clear this is not going to be a conventional fine dining experience.

As we spoke with Serge, he explained that he had consciously set out to rethink what fine dining could be. He proudly called it “Fun Dining,” an encounter built around exceptional food, but approached with creativity, humour, and surprise. It is very much his own concept, and you can feel that spirit in every part of the restaurant.

The environment Serge and Sabine have created, reflects that philosophy perfectly: eclectic sculptures, paintings collected from different corners of the world, and unexpected textures and details layered together unapologetically. Rather than feeling carefully staged, the restaurant feels personal; less like a designed interior and more like stepping inside the mind of someone endlessly curious and well travelled.

But it was his story that stayed with me.

Serge grew up in Alsace, but he didn’t stay. For decades he cooked his way across the world, through Europe, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Doha, and beyond, carrying the discipline and flavour of Alsace into every kitchen he entered while absorbing everything those kitchens had to teach him in return. Along the way, he became a highly awarded and widely recognised chef, earning respect across the international culinary scene. In the French tradition, he is what is known as a chef voyageur, a travelling chef whose identity is shaped as much by the distance he has covered as by the place he comes from..

And then, after all of it, he came home.

Not to recreate what Alsace had always been, and not to serve regional classics to tourists with guidebooks. He came back to build something that only the full length of his journey made possible; a kitchen where Alsatian terroir meets Asian technique and California instinct.  A place where the menu shifts with feeling and the cooking is driven by emotion more than tradition. 

Serge described it as abandoning rigid gastronomic codes and returning to essentials, and sitting at that table, I realized I was not just having a great meal; I was eating the summary of a man's entire life journey.

(Pictured above is Serge, in the pink shirt, alongside one of his staff members and two of our closest friends at the table that afternoon.)

The Treasure at the End of the Road

As I have reflected back on the extraordinary meal and conversation, Serge's story reminded me of The Alchemist.  Paulo Coelho's novel about a young Spanish shepherd named Santiago who dreams of treasure buried near the Egyptian pyramids. 

He leaves his familiar life in Spain, crosses deserts, survives hardship, meets mentors, and eventually reaches the pyramids, only to discover that the treasure was buried back where his journey began, near the church in Spain where he first had the dream.

It is easy to read that ending as a kind of cruel irony, as though he travelled so far only to end up where he started. But that misses the point entirely. Santiago could not have found the treasure without first taking the journey. 

Not because it was hidden from him, but because he was not yet the person capable of recognizing and receiving it. The wandering was never a detour; it was the substance of the story itself. The transformation happened along the way, and the return only carried meaning because of everything that came before it.

Similarly Serge left Alsace to find mastery and found it in Hong Kong, California and Doha, in the accumulated wisdom of a thousand different kitchens.  He then brought all of it home and built something he never could have built without first going out to explore and in turn to become someone different. The treasure was always tied to the place he started, but he needed the journey to finally be able to see it.

T.S. Eliot captured the same truth in a single sentence.

 “We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”

Coelho told it as a story; Eliot compressed it into a statement; Serge lived it as a life. 

The Same Is True For All of Us

I believe most of us are somewhere in the middle of our own version of the same journey.

As aspiring founders, we set out chasing what we imagine the treasures of life will be. Along the way, we cross deserts (many of our own making.) We endure difficult partnerships, navigate relentless setbacks, and survive business challenges that nearly bring us to our knees.

We push ourselves through trials and experiences that demand more than most reasonable people should ever have to give. We collect the wins, absorb the losses and somewhere in all of it, we are quietly being changed into someone our younger self would not entirely recognise.

I know this from the inside.

In 2006, I started my first toy company and grew it aggressively for a decade, convinced that growing harder and faster were the answers.  It ended in bankruptcy, a humbling and costly education in what I didn't yet know about myself or about building a business. 

But in 2009, I got a chance to start again in the same industry, and that second company went on to become something significant. The principles of the industry hadn't changed, but what had changed was me.  I had been shaped by failure, tempered by loss, and clearer about what actually mattered and why. 

Those years of struggle were not wasted; they were the making of the person who could finally do it right.

Serge left Alsace and came home a different chef. I entered the toy business twice and came back a different founder. The road between those two versions of ourselves was not a detour; it was the point of the journey.

And then, if we are paying attention, something starts to shift. The restlessness that once drove us forward starts pointing in a different direction; not outward toward the next milestone, but inward toward something we left behind a long time ago.  A relationship we let drift, an idea that got shelved during the building years, a value that we believe in but we lacked the time and effort to develop. 

Perhaps it might even be a version of ourselves that looks less impressive on paper but is more connected to our essence and somehow makes us feel more alive.

For most of my life I interpreted that feeling as a problem to be solved, another deficit to address, another thing that I need to fix. What I have come to discover is that it is actually just the beginning of the return to where I had started and knowing the place for the first time. 

Every difficult season, every hard lesson, every version of myself that I had to outgrow; all of it was preparing me for something I could not have received any other way. Not the treasure itself but the eyes to finally see it.

What the Vines Already Knew

There is something worth noticing about Alsace as a place. The same grapes that grow here — Riesling, Pinot Gris, Pinot Noir — also grow in the Okanagan, where I live. Same varieties, similar latitudes, shared origins, and yet they express themselves differently. 

The Alsatian versions carry something the Okanagan ones do not, and the reverse is also true. Same grape, but shaped by different soil, different history, a different passage through the ground.

Winemakers here call it terroir: the idea that a place reveals itself through what it produces.  And as I think about it, that idea also applies to each of us. The family we were born into, the early setbacks, the mentors who appeared at just the right moment, the ventures that succeeded and those that did not. All of it leaves an imprint, shaping the flavour of what we create whether we are conscious of it or not. And none of it simply falls away with time; it accumulates, refining the expression of who we are becoming. 

Serge did not stop being Alsatian when he cooked in Hong Kong. In many ways, he became more fully Alsatian, because experience across different places gave him an expanded perspective on what that identity meant.

The point is not to slow down or step back from building a life. The drive that brought you here matters, and it has already produced things worth being proud of. But alongside the familiar question of “what’s next?”, there is another worth asking. 

Not only what you are doing, but what you are being shaped into as you do it. Not only what you have built, but what history you are carrying forward in it. And not only where you are going, but what you are beginning to recognise now that you have travelled far enough to see your starting point more clearly.

Exploration does not end, but at some point it begins to turn us inward as well as forward. An opportunity to revisit the relationships, values, and parts of ourselves that were never fully developed. Perhaps they were really lost, only unseen. The journey does not take us away from them. It teaches us how to finally recognise them and the treasure that they can become.

So this week, ask yourself:

What part of your earliest self, before the building and the striving, is still waiting to be reclaimed?

Where in your life are you still searching outward for something that might only be found by looking back?

And what would change if you allowed the full arc of your journey to finally bring you home?

If this landed for you, pass it along to one person who might need to read it today.

If someone shared this with you and you'd like to receive it directly, subscribe here.

Curious about what it looks like to explore these questions inside a community of accomplished leaders who are asking the same ones? Learn more at fullspectrumlife.com.

And if your travels ever bring you to Alsace, do yourself a favour and book a table with Serge and Sabine at AOR in Riquewihr. You will never forget it!

‍