Louisville Magazine

NOV 2012

Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.

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Te previous day I had filled out three online surveys, the most interesting of which determined my top five strengths (strategic, adaptability, competition, positivity, relator) out of 34 possibilities. In the main room, we sit in the La-Z-Boys and Winter interviews me for seven hours straight. Happiness, she says, is to achieve a "state of flow," which she describes as "when time goes away and you're so com- pletely immersed you don't even know what the (expletive) is happen- ing around you." We achieve this by playing to our strengths. (When she gets to my results on the "love languages" test, she asks if I'm a swinger. I say no. "Me neither. Relators usually aren't," she says. She goes off on a tangent that ends with this thought: "Women can learn to fake an orgasm at a very young age. Tis probably shouldn't be in an article, but if a man can find the clitoris before 30 it's a goddamn miracle.") Without getting too technical, here was her assessment of me: I need a boss who gives me a lot of freedom. I am highly sensitive to negative people. I can see patterns where others don't. I should trust my instincts with stories. I don't see the future as a fixed destination and generally don't like plans. I love to be the funniest person in the room. I would be a terrible manager. "Am I right? Maybe? I know I'm right," she says. And she is. I wonder, though: Winter says she does this to help others be happy (I do feel good) but also because it makes her happiest. Is it a selfless or selfish pursuit? A little of both? I also learn a few things about her: Since leaving home at 17 she has lived in 22 places, including a 5,000-square-foot house in the Highlands with one of two former fiancés. After he moved out, she spent one three-month period in a tent on top of the detached garage. "Luckily the neighbors were cool," she says. Eight years ago, she start- ed living in Los Angeles for part of the year in a 200-square-foot room in the Claremont Hotel while attending UCLA. "I just pursued the love of my interests: film, graphic design, writing, neuroscience, math, linguistics," she says. "I could have taken (the courses) for a grade and gotten a great grade, but I didn't because I wasn't going for a degree. I would probably have two master's degrees by now." She flies to confer- ences about science and writing and design for fun. Toward the end of the night, she asks if she should read aloud a chapter from Te Birth of Swirl, a children's book she wrote. As she does, the standout line is about the most eccentric pear alive. Before I leave, she says, "Whether I'm successful at my own happiness is a question." Ten she lets me borrow the book Te Years With Ross, about the man who headed Te New Yorker for more than 50 years, and a "mobile digital guitar" so I can try a new creative outlet. "t he one thing I can say for sure," Winter says, "is that my en- tire life has been spent eating out since I was two." Winter's father, Cliff, grew up in Chicago. Her mother, Louise, an orphan at 13, was the daughter of a Prohibition booze runner who owned an amusement park and rubber-tire company in Pittsburgh and lost it all in the Depression. Winter's parents, who've been mar- ried 62 years, met at the Cincinnati Bible College ("I'd asked God if I believed in God," Winter likes to say) and eventually ran their own building-supply company. "Drywall, ceiling tiles — everything I hate," Winter says. Winter's first home was in Camp Taylor, then St. Matthews, where today she lets one of her employees stay in her childhood home. Her mother says, "Lynn would sample everybody's stuff. She wanted to taste everything." Winter says, "My dad came out of the Depression. 'You have to eat everything.' It was a constant battle between our wills." When asked about his daughter, Cliff Winter says, "She always had an artistic touch inside of her psyche." She says her father only let her read one book at a time. "For someone like me? With my mind? Jesus," she says. "Tat caused me a lot of unhappiness as a young per- son. I never realized how much information I can take in." When she started traveling as an adult, she'd bring suitcases full of books. [62] LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 11.12 Te family (Winter has a younger sister named Kim, who lives in Lawrenceburg, Ky.) moved from Louisville to Chicago and back to Louisville. Ten Lexington, where she got a job at 15 at a restaurant called Alfalfa's and graduated early from Tates Creek High School. She took woodshop as a high-schooler ("I had a W last name and by the time it got to me I could pick between that and Shakespearean trag- edy," she says) and became a professional woodworker, which took her to Europe, followed by an apprenticeship in Mendocino, Calif. Here's how the New York Times, in 1996, explained how Winter ended up working at nearby Fort Bragg's Home Style Cafe: "One day, the owner of her favorite cafe suffered an asthma attack, threw her an apron and asked her to take over." Eventually, Winter landed at Cafe Beaujolais in Mendocino, where she put in 80 hours a week with owner Margaret Fox, whose father-in-law was the founding president of the James Beard Founda- tion. When asked if she remembers Winter, Fox says, "You don't forget somebody like Lynn." Fox, who owned the still-open Cafe Beaujolais for more than 22 years, adds, "Lynn was always crazy and a lit- tle loud in the kitchen. I'm not surprised she's done something that's so out there." One time, Fox went to dinner at Winter's house in California. She can't remember what she ate. "It didn't matter what it tasted like," Fox says. "It was all about the experience." Winter returned to Louisville in late 1990 and, with $60,000 from her parents' retirement fund, opened Lynn's Paradise Cafe on Frankfort Avenue in Clifton, in the building that now houses the restau- rant Cubana. She crashed in a sleeping bag upstairs. Craig Kaviar, whose forge and gallery is farther west on the same street, was there when Winter opened. "Te neighborhood was dangerous at night," he says. "People were mugged and murdered and raped." At that time, Melissa Mershon represented the neighborhood on the board of aldermen. "It was a magnet," Mershon says. "It made the whole corridor come alive." Almost from day one, people asked Winter if she wanted to turn Lynn's Paradise Cafe into a chain. "Never. Because what would my job be now? It would be replicating. I absolutely am the antithesis of a replicator," she says. Sometimes Winter won't physically go into the restaurant (other weeks she'll be there 80 hours or more), but she can't think of one day over the last two decades that she wasn't in touch. She says restaurant owners who say they haven't thought about getting out of the business after more than 20 years are lying. "Look, I feel so

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