I’m on vacation but by the time a friend texted me this morning to see if I’d seen the news, I was already all over the latest devolution of the Charlie Trotter Story. You know the one I mean. The one in which he reportedly ordered some high school photography students to clean the toilets, hollered and cursed at them when they declined, and offered at least one teenaged girl $500 to get a “Charlie Trotter’s” tattoo before he, allegedly, threw the students out of his now-shuttered restaurant. He also (allegedly) flipped off a bemused WGN-TV reporter.

The facts are still sketchy and schadenfreude is ugly — and the comments on this Sun-Times story are even more so. But it was enough of a news peg to get me to do something I’ve been meaning to do for a while: namely, free my 2002 Baffler essay on Trotter’s business philosophy from behind the MIT Journals paywall.

This piece was the thinkier followup to a 2001 Reader feature I wrote in the wake of a confounding meal at the restaurant, but as the Baffler ceased publication shortly thereafter so too did my piece drop unmourned from the cultural conversation. I was happy to find it a few months ago archived along with other pre-digital-explosion content at the journal’s new MIT Press home.

It’s here: Charles the Excellent (Baffler #15, 2002) (pdf)