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By EILEEN GUNN

Bored with management consulting, Gabriel Turner turned his love for his native Uruguay’s beef into a passionate, more entrepreneurial career.

Mr. Turner, who was born in Uruguay but moved to the U.S. as a toddler, started out at a large consulting firm after college. After a few years, he found he wasn’t getting the breadth of experience he’d expected. “I wasn’t passionate about it, and it wasn’t something I saw myself doing forever,” he says.

By March 2007, he was having serious second thoughts. Around the same time, he also had a steak dinner that would seal his second act. The San Francisco restaurant where he dined had posted a sign saying it served Uruguayan grass-fed beef from a company called Estancia.

Mr. Turner had vacationed on his uncle’s Uruguayan cattle ranch, and held his native country’s beef in high esteem. He’d also taken classes in food science and international food policy as an undergrad at the University of California at Berkeley, sparking his interest in sustainable food. He believed Uruguay’s free-range ranching techniques fit that trend; he’d even brought the idea up to his dad, seeking fatherly advice. But his father said he couldn’t see the concept working. So when Mr. Turner saw the restaurant’s sign, he was intrigued that someone else had found a way to do it.

He spent the next several weeks trying to track down Estancia’s owner, Bill Reed, leaving numerous voice mails in the hopes of landing a meeting. Finally, Mr. Reed agreed to meet for coffee in early April. Amid a conversation touching on everything from Mr. Reed’s expansion plans, to their mutual interest in eco-food writer Michael Pollan, to sustainable food, Mr. Turner became convinced that he wanted to work with Mr. Reed. “He told me he didn’t have a job [open], but I walked away thinking if I pushed, maybe there could be one,” Mr. Turner recalls.

The two kept in touch. And a month later in one of their chats, Mr. Reed mentioned that he wanted to persuade customers that beef from free-range cows in South America had a smaller environmental impact as beef from industrial U.S. farms — despite the greater shipping distances. Mr. Turner offered to crunch the numbers for him free.

Mr. Reed was impressed. “I finally realized that his understanding of the industry and our product would help him sell our program to often skeptical butchers and chefs,” Mr. Reed says. In July 2007, Mr. Reed offered him a job in Los Angeles. Saying yes meant major changes for Mr. Turner — including a 60% pay cut and leaving behind his life in San Francisco.

He set to work peddling beef to restaurants and gourmet grocery stores, while also staging cooking demonstrations, talking with the local food press, and helping to organize educational trips to Uruguay for chefs. In consulting, “I didn’t get to know the big picture of what a department or company was doing,” he says. “Here, I have my hands in everything.”

He visited butchers to learn from them so he would be able to speak more knowledgeably about different cuts of meat. He read up on sustainable agriculture. And he had to learn how to crack a new market. That wasn’t always easy; after a particularly bad day chasing fruitless leads, he recalls thinking, “I’m not a good salesperson.”

Today, 30 Los Angeles restaurants and specialty markets carry Estancia beef, says Mr. Turner. Meanwhile, Mr. Turner has enrolled at Harvard Business School to hone the skills he needs to continue on his career path and to learn about sustainable business more formally.

He is keeping in close touch with Mr. Reed while he is at school. For starters, he is expanding on the first project he did for Mr. Reed, developing a detailed carbon-footprint report for Estancia. And when Mr. Reed brings his product to the East Coast, something he hopes to do in 2009, Mr. Turner plans to help with the marketing and business development.

Mr. Turner, now 25, says he might stay with Estancia, but “could see starting my own company,” after graduation. “The more I think about it, the more I’d like it to be in the sustainable foods industry and working with Uruguay if possible.”

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page D5

Of all the major branches of human endeavor, the one that figures least prominently in serious fiction may be music making. I doubt there have been more than a dozen English-language novels of indisputable significance in which one or more of the central characters was a professional musician, and fewer still in which those characters were portrayed in a way that other musicians would find convincing.

Why is this? One reason is that most writers aren’t musicians (and vice versa). Music, after all, is the most profoundly nonverbal of art forms, so much so that it’s difficult to describe or discuss in words without resorting to technical language. Music critics constantly wrestle with this problem, which they “solve” by employing high-flown metaphors, something that musicians rarely do. When they talk to one another about music, they do so in their own professional shorthand, a little bit of which goes a long way in a novel.

Even so, a handful of novelists have taken on the challenge of portraying the everyday lives of musicians, and some have done it with fair success. Yet I often get the feeling, even with a book as fine as Thomas Mann’s “Doctor Faustus” or Willa Cather’s “The Song of the Lark,” that I’m reading the fictional equivalent of a high-class piece of journalism, one whose author has gone to the trouble to learn just enough about music to pass a quiz.

I can think of only two novelists who wrote about music as though they were musicians, even though they weren’t. One is Patrick O’Brian, the author of the series of adventure novels about Jack Aubrey, an early 19th-century British sea captain, and Stephen Maturin, his ship’s surgeon and best friend. Both are devoted amateur musicians, and Mr. O’Brian brilliantly suggested the rough gusto with which they made music in between battles on the high seas.

The other novelist is Kingsley Amis, who threw critics off the scent by making the antihero of his first novel, “Lucky Jim” (1954), a culture-hating philistine who claimed to despise all forms of music, even going so far as to refer to the greatest classical composer as “filthy Mozart.” Needless to say, nobody who truly loathed Mozart would bother to hurl such abuse at him, and you can’t read far in “Lucky Jim” (which will be reprinted later this year by New York Review Books) without sensing that Jim knows quite a bit more about music than he’s letting on.

Mr. Amis wrote two more novels in which he revealed himself completely. “The Alteration,” published and set in 1976, is the story of Hubert Anvil, a boy soprano who lives in a parallel universe in which the Protestant Reformation never happened. Not only is Western Europe entirely Catholic, but it is still common for talented young male singers to be castrated so their voices will never change, and Pope John XXIV, a Yorkshireman, wants Hubert to become the soprano soloist of the Vatican choir. . . permanently.

Even more striking is “Girl, 20″ (1971), whose principal character, Sir Roy Vandervane, is a Leonard Bernstein-like conductor who is in the throes of a midlife crisis that has led him to lust after a 17-year-old hippie. When not chasing his teenage mistress, Sir Roy pursues his trade, and everything he says about it is squarely on the mark, even a chapter in which we watch him rehearse Mahler’s Fourth Symphony: “In the passage in general, the woodwind balance is much better now, excellent, in fact, but I’d like just a shade more from third and fourth clarinets and a touch less from first flute.”

No one familiar with these books will be surprised to learn that their author was crazy about music. Two years after “Girl, 20,” Mr. Amis wrote an essay in which he declared that “only a world without love strikes me as instantly and decisively more terrible than one without music.” That may explain why he liked to write about it, but not how he got all the details right, above all the fact that professional musicians almost never gush about what they do. For them, making music is a way of making a living. It is, in other words, a job—the most wonderful of jobs, to be sure, but a job all the same, which is why they speak of it not in tones of starry-eyed romanticism but with utter matter-of-factness.

Compare Mr. Amis’s approach with a passage from “The Song of the Lark,” in which Thea Kronborg, the Wagnerian soprano who is the novel’s heroine, talks about her art: “What one really strives for in art is not the sort of thing you are likely to find when you drop in for a performance at the opera. What one strives for is so far away, so deep, so beautiful, that there’s nothing one can say about it.”

Uh. . . yeah.

Perhaps because he was himself a passionate believer in the virtue of literary craftsmanship, Mr. Amis, unlike Ms. Cather, recognized and appreciated the same hardheaded attitude in the working musicians whose craft he understood so well. That’s why his musical characters, no matter what other kinds of mischief they may get up to, are never more serious than when they get down to the business of making music—and that’s why, in his hands, the music they make rings so true.

—Mr. Teachout, the Journal’s drama critic, writes “Sightings” every other Friday.

By LETTIE TEAGUE

Although New Jersey residents shoulder the highest property taxes in the nation, at least they rarely have to pay restaurant prices to drink wine. That’s because very few New Jersey restaurants have liquor licenses, thanks to antiquated state laws that limit the number available: They are allocated based on the population of the town (one license per 3,000 residents).

Some residents (presumably those who don’t drink wine) may argue that this is small compensation for those sky-high tax bills, but as a wine-loving New Yorker turned New Jerseyite, I’m certainly grateful for the unaccustomed benefit. Not only does it mean I can drink whatever I want, wherever I want, but I don’t have to pay extra to do so—not even a corkage fee—something that’s virtually impossible in New York.

Rob Shepperson

And yet, because I did live in New York for so long—and still dine there quite often—I know how much I’m gaining, and how much the restaurant is losing. Wine sales contribute mightily to restaurant bottom lines—not to mention waiters’ income. While I can’t do anything to improve the fortune of the restaurant, I can show my respect by bringing a good bottle and tipping as if there were a bottle of wine on my check. It’s generally about 30%.

It’s a practice that my New Jersey-born husband and friends regard as eccentric or worse. No one does that here, they’ve said to me more than once. Even wine collectors who bring several bottles and sometimes their own glassware to restaurants have told me they don’t tip more than 20%, though when I told one collector, Mark Scudiery, about my tip practice, he decided it was a good idea and said he’d likely adopt it himself.

I met Mr. Scudiery at Divinia Ristorante in Caldwell a few months ago thanks to Calabrian-born chef and proprietor Mario Carlino, who likes to introduce wine lovers to one another (and he sometimes brings each party a taste of the other’s wine). Mr. Carlino himself has a great passion for wine—in fact, among chefs he’s one of the most impassioned and knowledgeable wine lovers I’ve ever met. (His is the only restaurant in New Jersey where I don’t think only of my wine-drinking preferences but also take into account those of the chef.)

Mr. Scudiery told me he does as well. “I usually bring a Barolo or Barbaresco or Amarone. Mario really likes Amarone,” he said. “He makes a great papparadelle with walnuts and gorgonzola that pairs beautifully with Amarone.” The chef is also a great fan of “orange” wines (dry white wines that have been macerated for some time with the skins, giving them an orange hue; they’re quite in vogue now), so Mr. Scudiery will bring a couple of those, especially wines from “Radikon or Gravner,” he said, naming two very fashionable (and pricey) winemakers.

For his part, Mr. Carlino is flattered by the consideration and the occasional offer of a glass. He’s especially happy when his customers bring Italian wines, though of course many do not—including my friends, who brought a Malbec from Argentina along to dinner the other week. When I remarked on their selection (as regulars, they knew the “rules”), they defended their choice by explaining that they’d done their research and found out the winemaker, at least, was Italian.

A chef that cares so much about wine may sound a bit daunting to some, but to me it’s a pleasure to take wine to a place where the proprietor cares as much about what’s on the table as in his kitchen. Sometimes I even end up learning something about new wines from Mr. Carlino. Take, for example, when he told me about an amazing Trebbiano from the cult producer Emilio Pepe that he’d bought from Shop Rite—a wine shop across the street. It was a remarkable wine, he said, and though it “not cheap” he’d bought several bottles. He thought there might be one or two left.

Right after dinner, we went over to the store. Sure enough, there was a single bottle of 2007 Emilio Pepe Trebbiano on the shelf (without a price tag). “Mario loves this wine,” the sales clerk said, as he rang it up. It came to just over $70. “Seventy dollars!” my husband exclaimed. “That’s a lot of money—are you sure?”

It was, I agreed, but added: “Mario will be so pleased when he sees it.”

A version of this article appeared May 4, 2012, on page A16 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: One Joy of New Jersey: B.Y.O..

By LEE LAWRENCE

Gainesville, Fla.

With the opening of the 26,000-square-foot David A. Cofrin Asian Art Wing, the University of Florida’s Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art is adding a conservation laboratory for Asian art and devoting almost 7,000 square feet—about one-sixth of its total exhibition space—to works from China, Japan, Korea and South and Southeast Asia. Designed by Kha Le-Huu & Partners of Orlando, the wing retains the Harn’s characteristic openness, including floor-to-ceiling windows that look out onto a new rock-and-water garden. But the new galleries feel different. Here, mahogany floors, ceilings and columns impart a warmth well-suited to the works on display.

These include selections that came to the Harn at its founding in 1990—most notably Korean paintings and ceramics from Gen. James Van Fleet (who commanded the U.S. Eighth Army and United Nations forces from 1951 to 1953) and a variety of Indian paintings and sculpture collected by Roy C. Craven (whose 1975 “Concise History of Indian Art” still features regularly on many Asian-art syllabi).

Asia was thus a primary focus from the start, a commitment the Harn has now deepened at a cost of $20 million. Original funders and consistent contributors to the museum, David A. and Mary Ann Harn Cofrin gave $10 million that the state of Florida was to match under its Major Gift Challenge Grant Program. When budgetary constraints forced Florida legislators to suspend the program, the university forged ahead anyway, taking out loans it hopes the state will eventually reimburse. “The goal is to make students citizens of the world,” museum director Rebecca Nagy explains, “and the arts are central to that mission.” Given Asia’s prominence, she adds, “the better students understand it, the better prepared they will be.”

With nearly 2,000 Asian works in its permanent collection, the museum can now display some 680—almost four times as many as before. For its inaugural installation, curator Jason Steuber stops mid-20th century (more recent works are included in the contemporary-art wing). Most visitors, he discovered, associate Asia with ceramics, which is one of the Harn’s strengths. So, starting in a gallery of the main building renovated to match the new wing, he surrounds us with bowls, ewers, vases, dishes and the occasional figurines, tiles and plaques, arranged by country and displayed in tall mahogany units.

A wall text alerts us to the role trade routes played in disseminating materials and designs. Thus primed, we notice, for example, that blue pigments achieved with cobalt pop up in Syria, China, Vietnam and Japan; that the green and orange glaze of 15th- and 16th-century Chinese Ming figurines echoes that of a 12th- to 13th-century platter from Afghanistan; that ancient Chinese forms recur at different points in China’s history when ruling dynasties looked to the past.

From here we move seamlessly into the new wing, where there is enough space for us to absorb, undistracted, the Buddha figures and undulating pagoda rooflines carved on a sandstone pillar from 11th- to 12th-century China; the dynamic gestures and multiple symbols in a 10th-century relief of the Hindu goddess Durga as she simultaneously spears a buffalo and strangles the demon emerging from its mouth; or the elaborate headdress on a late sixth-century Bodhisattva’s head from China.

“The Harn Museum has deepened its commitment to Asian works at a cost of $20 million.”

What makes the installation work so beautifully is that it alternates from this kind of sparse configuration to dense clusterings. Surrounding the airy central space, intimate alcoves showcase masks and Tibetan Buddhist objects while display cases variously teem with carved Chinese jades or a smorgasbord of Indian reliefs, statuary and ritual objects from the third to the 20th centuries. This open-storage format proves highly effective. With more objects on view, we see connections and shifts in technique and design, and movable shelves create cubbyholes perfect for small bronzes and reliefs.

Overall, wall texts frame rather than explain displays, occasional didactic materials help decipher a sculpture’s gestures or symbols, and information on the labels is kept to a minimum. This has the advantage of keeping our attention on the objects, but at times the information is frustratingly sparse. Finding the right balance is tricky, and success will depend on how plans proceed to develop the means to allow visitors to access supplemental information through tablets or other media.

Sometimes, though, the balance is just right. Text in the north gallery invites us to explore how artists negotiated the tensions between tradition and modernity. Discrete groupings then focus on women painters in 17th- to 19th-century China, prints made in postwar occupied Japan, and works by Jamini Roy, an artist in newly independent India who is prominently represented in the Harn collection. In the Korean gallery, a 17th-century Bodhisattva showcases not just its own compelling beauty, but the science that reveals some of its story. Across from the seated figure, displayed with scriptures that were once housed in the sculpture’s abdomen, CAT scans and X-rays show that the artist carved the body from a single piece of wood, using a protruding branch for the right arm. A practical choice—but also a spiritually resonant one, since the statue thereby preserves the flow of the tree’s energy. The scans also show that the artist hid more scriptures in the statue’s head.

We will probably never see these—just as the general public will never see the conservation laboratory and other hidden working areas of the new Asia wing. It will, however, benefit from the research, conservation and continuing acquisition programs taking place behind the scenes.

Ms. Lawrence is a writer based in Brooklyn, N.Y.

The David A. Cofrin Asian Art Wing

Harn Museum of Art

www.harn.ufl.edu/asianartwing

A version of this article appeared April 5, 2012, on page D4 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Asian Expansion in Florida.

Beachfront homes $6 million and under, in Dana Point, Calif., Osterville, Mass., and Loveladies, N.J. Juliet Chung has details on The News Hub.

DANA POINT, Calif. $5 Million

A 4,000-square-foot home, with four bedrooms and five bathrooms, on a 0.2-acre lot

DETAILS: This two-story, Cape Cod-style home has a master suite that runs the length of the house and has a double-sided fireplace and a terrace. The property also has a fire pit, outdoor fireplace, lawn and patio. 2011 property taxes are about $88,700.

BY THE SEA: The beach is sandy and is near Dana Point Harbor.

HANG TEN: Stewart Surfboards, six miles away in San Clemente, offers handmade custom surfboards and also rents out boards.

FRIDAY’S FORECAST: Chance of rain, high 67 degrees.

SOURCE: Doug Echelberger, Echelberger Group, 949-498-7711, doug@echelberger.com; Realtor.com

OSTERVILLE, Mass. $5.5 Million

A 3,400-square-foot home with seven bedrooms and four bathrooms, on 2.2 acres in Cape Cod

DETAILS: This beachfront Colonial was built in 1935 and renovated over the years. The L-shaped property fronts a saltwater pond and also has a tennis court. It’s about a mile away from the center of the village. 2011 property taxes are nearly $46,000.

BY THE SEA: The private beach fronts Nantucket Sound. The area is popular for biking and walking.

HANG TEN: Boarding House Surf Shop is eight miles away in Hyannis.

FRIDAY’S FORECAST: Windy, high 52 degrees.

SOURCE: Jack Cotton, Sotheby’s International Realty, 508-957-5500, jack@jackcotton.com; Realtor.com

LOVELADIES, N.J. $6 Million

A 4,300-square-foot home with five bedrooms and five bathrooms, on 0.7-acre on Long Beach Island

DETAILS: The home has a double-height family room, an elevator, plus a screened porch and several ipe decks. There’s also a pool. The home is being sold furnished; 2011 property taxes are $34,000.

BY THE SEA: The property has 125 feet of beach frontage. Grassy dunes lead to a sandy beach.

HANG TEN: Ron Jon Surf Shop, seven miles away in Ship Bottom, offers surfboards and apparel.

FRIDAY’S FORECAST: Clear, high 52 degrees.

SOURCE: Benée Scola, Benée Scola & Company, 609-494-0077,

benee@beneescola.com.

—
Juliet Chung