Avery Kincaid
Fearless Leader

Bio: After a misspent youth, Avery surprised family and friends by opening the Stardust Restaurant and Lounge in 1998. (Jeez, finally.)

Qualifications for opening a restaurant: Misspent youth; a couple of years of psychotherapy; background in bartending, serving and restaurant design.

Misspent youth: College, traveling, training dolphins, archaeological excavations, living on an Indian reservation, and restaurant jobs. Her misspent youth came to an abrupt end when she decided to apply her 'perch theory of parking' to her own life.

Perch theory of parking: Okay, lets say you are in Adams Morgan. There is this really great restaurant on 18th Street, but you can't find a parking place. So you drive around and around and around and end up parking 12 blocks away from where you really want to be. According to Avery’s 'perch theory' of parking, if you just 'perch' for 5 minutes, voila! A parking place becomes available. You end up exactly where you want to be. (This theory does not apply at football games or rock concerts.)

Moral of the story: Avery thought that if she continued to travel around and around and around, she'd end up metaphorically 12 blocks away from a great restaurant. So why did it take her so dang long to apply her brilliant theory to her own life? She had heard story after story of people that 'woke up' at age fifty, suddenly quit their jobs, sold their houses, left their families and moved to the islands. Not wanting to live with any regrets, she bypassed the job, family and house and headed straight for the islands. It didn't take long for her to realize that if she stayed there, she might wake up at age fifty with no job to quit, no family to leave, not a house to sell.

Avery is now in her fifties, awake and parked at a great restaurant.