Why bother?

A personal note from our founder.

I feel I need a little reintroduction. When I founded Rebel Rebel in 2018, Trump was President, I was single, and I had absolutely no idea what I was about to get myself into. I planned to work more or less alone in my tiny, 16-seat bar—I figured I’d have one, maybe two employees if I wanted to go on vacation—and my whole business model was to try to make $500/night. I just wanted to have a nice neighborhood wine bar that reminded me of my favorite, unfussy haunts in Paris and London. I wanted to pour wine and talk to people. I wanted to keep it simple and keep it honest.

Five years, three James Beard Award nominations, one marriage, one baby, and fifty current and former team members later, I’m not the person I was when this thing took off. I’ve won big, lost big, made waves, fallen on my ass, caused hurt and been hurt. I’ve been asked to weigh in on wine and the industry for New York Magazine, Bon Appétit, Food & Wine, Elle, and the Boston Globe. I’ve been on television, podcasts, and magazine covers. I’ve been inducted into the Heritage Radio Hall of Fame, and I’ve received the YWCA’s Outstanding Woman of the Year Award. My businesses have made Best Of lists from the New York Times, Bon Appétit, Food & Wine, the Globe, Esquire, and more.

All of that has been far, far beyond what I ever envisioned for myself. All of it has changed who I am and how I see and want to work in this industry (and in this world). And so, I think I want to give a little context here, in the interest of setting some expectations (I’m big on setting expectations. It’s something I learned the hard way in the falling-on-my-ass period.)

Being someone people other than my friends and family know exists has been an odd and sometimes painful experience—it makes sense, though. Social media leaves a lot of room for mismatched expectations. I think a lot about often, especially when I feel like I’ve let someone down—when I can tell their idea about who I am didn’t align with who I really am.

I can’t solve for every variable. But I do think putting a little (long) bio here feels right. This is who I am. Everything that surrounds me also comes from this. And while not everything we post in Unruly will come from me—our goal is for our team members to be able to feed their creativity here, too—I started the whole thing, and it would be dishonesty disguised as humility to pretend I don’t influence what all of this looks, feels, and sounds like.

Maybe this is unnecessary, but it feels necessary to me for some reason, and putting it all down here won’t hurt anybody.

So here you go! Here’s what makes me tick, why I’m here, why I care, and why I bother. Read on at your own risk.

I grew up in Sunapee, New Hampshire. We were relatively poor until I was a preteen, when my father’s business started improving and we moved south, where the kids had less practical winter coats and more emotionally available mothers. We moved out of our tiny 1860s cape into a hideous 90s new build that my driving school instructor would announce to the class was modeled after the Barbie Dream House (it wasn’t). That house was full of all the trappings of a 90s childhood—margarine, sunflower decor, and explosive tempers. The cops came once or twice. 

As a kid, I was largely in my parents’ way, though I was raised more by the woods behind our house and less by the television. My parents would call themselves hippies, but synth usurped the tambourine well before my birthday, and as a mother myself now I can recognize them simply as two imperfect people who loved partying more than parenthood. (One of my first experiences with booze was as a two year-old: I was the last one standing after a big party, knocking back the remnants of Cape Codders after the adults passed out. I know this because my father tells the story often, laughing when he gets to the part about how sick I was. Ever the complicated product of Irish Catholicism, he also stirred all the bubbles out of my ginger ale in the middle of the night on the occasions when I was sick from too many chicken fingers and not too much vodka. So, I feel conflicted about that relationship.)

I left home as soon as I could and moved to Boston for college. I spent a few miserable years pursuing journalism until I almost got caught making up a story I’d been assigned to cover for a 301 class—I justified this initially because the story I fabricated was more interesting than the actual one, but of course this is not what journalism is for. Luckily for the integrity of our news media, I self-managed that accountability process and dropped out (although today it seems I’d be in pretty good company sticking it out as a lawless journo). I re-enrolled in a creative writing program—where being true to reality was considered artless and shameful—and spent a few good semesters obsessing over the Oulipo and various other postmodern literary mechanisms before a professor promised to read my manuscript and tried to fuck me instead. This was not devastating to me at the time, as I’d gotten a job as a cocktail server on the opening team at Eastern Standard and was making more money than—I assumed—God. 

I dropped out again and made bank selling Old Cubans to cocaine-fueled service workers every night until one very nice day when I had to choose to go to work or go kayaking with my boyfriend. We were already in the kayak, so that was the end of that.

Since then, I’ve worked as a cheesemonger in Julia Child’s favorite butcher shop, as a busser in a Harvard Square dive bar, as the Wine Director for multiple James Beard Award-winning restaurants, as a beverage consultant for Michelin-starred chefs, as the national sales rep for the single-origin tea company preferred by Rene Redzepi, as a cellar rat (among the actual rats) in a North End natural wine shop, as a food and wine writer who mostly wrote copy for a refrigeration e-commerce site, and finally as the owner of a few natural wine bars that mean a lot to me. They were all good, hard jobs, and I’ve been lucky to have all of them. 

I think the laundry list resume is important—if boring—because I’m attached to this industry like someone who’s seen it from all sides and chooses to remain. This is the longest relationship I’ve ever been in. I’m not still here because of the glory this work has bestowed upon me—if I’m being generous, things have been more or less 50/50 for me when it comes to pleasure and pain working in hospitality. But no life has felt as real as this restaurant life. My colleagues have been 60 year-old butchers from Quincy, 16 year-old busboys from El Salvador, white collar junkies and nursing students (some of whom were white collar junkies), poets, musicians, painters, and acupuncturists. 

Inevitably, someone reading this is currently thinking, “But this industry is so toxic!” And it is! It’s a horrible way to earn a living! It destroys your body and breeds addiction, and the power dynamics are troubling at best. But here I’ll take a risk and say: Humanity is toxic. Before someone calls me an abuse apologist, I’m not here to excuse what line cooks or women or people of color or queer folks endure in this industry, which is still mostly built on the pillars of exploitation, extraction, and thinly veiled servitude. I’m only pointing out that you can come up with all the accountability systems and HR protocol and short-lived mental health support organizations you want; at the end of the day, it’s all a little smoke-and-mirrors when human beings are still willing to slaughter each other over religion. 

So why have I bothered to stake my reputation on trying to leave this little corner of our dumpster fire better than I found it? 

Honestly, I have no idea. It’s certainly not for the money, which I haven’t made in any real form since 2019. It’s not for notoriety—despite the magazine covers, I remain extremely uncomfortable having my photo taken and mostly understand that “putting myself out there” is necessary for the health of my businesses, because this is the way the world works. I will say that I am one of the most stubborn, contrarian, risk-aligned people I know, and there is absolutely a part of me that just wants to prove that it’s possible. Blind will motivates me as much as anything these days, and since it’s worked for me thus far, I’m not going to investigate it too much. (Feel free to psychoanalyze any of this and come up with your own conjectures/personality disorder diagnoses. I’ve heard them all already, though never from a professional.)

There’s also this: At the end of the day, this industry is full of complicated, mostly traumatized people who will absolutely thrash themselves to help you. That’s true of any restaurant, in any city, anywhere. Even the people who act like they hate you will water your plants while you’re out of town if they know you don’t have anyone else to do it (they will still act like they hate you when you return). What’s more hopeful than that? 

Anyway, that’s how I got here. Somewhere on that timeline I also escaped a very dangerous relationship in which I almost lost my life. It’s at least 50% of why I do things the way I do them, because surviving something like that tends to annihilate your notions about what you thought mattered and ensure you are very clear about what you want out of your new life. So I created a little world where women and queer people have a lot of power, and I fight like hell for it every day. I’ll probably touch on that relationship here at some point, but it’ll come with a warning if I do. Not trying to ruin anyone’s day who’s just hoping to read about chardonnay or whatever. 

With all that in mind, here are some rules for this space:

I expect to evolve, which means I expect to change my mind. I expect to learn, which means I expect to allow my mind to be changed. I expect to get some things wrong along the way, or to decide a previous version of myself was wrong. I don’t intend to tolerate an intolerance for these patterns of thought, or to be called a hypocrite or whatever. Unwavering adherence to ideas regardless of new discovery is fascism. Whoops! 

I expect you to disagree with me at some point, because there are 8 billion people on this planet and it is logically bananas to think everyone should consistently agree about anything. I don’t mind being corrected when my facts are wrong, but I do mind being corrected about obvious typos and personal opinions. If it’s difficult for you to see the difference between these potential interactions, I have one question for you: What’s it like to be so insufferable?

I intend to swear and swear often. 

I just turned forty, which means I’m an Elder Millennial knee-deep in midlife, just beginning to pick up the signals that, as a woman, I’m Too Old to be speaking, breathing, thinking, or trying. If ever you’re reading something here and think to yourself, “Gosh, she’s out of touch,” you might be right! Someday, you’ll be out of touch, too. Just let me write my silly little internet letters in peace. We’re all going to die someday, and, really, none of this matters. Promise.

And finally: I am kind, but I’m not often nice. I feel strongly that our recent cultural shift toward inclusivity has had the unintended consequence of making women feel as though they must inhabit this pseudo-Earth Mama demeanor that values maternal softness and a lot of vague references to spiritual journeys in order to be “good.” I believe it’s declawing our ability to know when we’re enduring a bunch of bullshit, and I think it makes us more susceptible to being “nice” when we should be standing up for ourselves. So while I do have a chemical-free home and an acupuncturist, I’m also not interested in being friendly with nonsense.

If you’ve made it this far, INCREDIBLE. You’re a real one. Now let’s do this thing.

XOXO

Lauren