Every day was the same. In a bleak and nasty winter there were no highs or lows. Just flatness. When friends would ask me how I was, I always said that I was fine, and I was. Anything new? No. Work, home, work, home. And it was fine. My life had gone off track somewhere. Not to a bad place, but not to where I wanted to be.
I remember when I first started the job, I told people that it was great working alone. I never had to deal with secret Santas or signing birthday cards for people that I really did not give a shit about. The downside was that I never saw anyone. The only people I saw were the dregs of society that ride public transit. Most of the time I was alone in a big drafty warehouse with no natural light. I was baking, but using mass production machines which basically took away the tactile joy that I get from baking.
I realized all of this when I went on vacation with my family in Sicily. Nothing like two weeks of bliss and bonding in my favorite place on earth in contrast to what my existence was.
I had been to Sicily many years before, with my ex-husband. It was where I had discovered that there was a culture that cooked the way I did. I had found my culinary roots, even though my ancestry is not Italian. One year later my husband and I split and I went to cooking school which was the beginning of a new life.
It was time to go back now.
I woke up on a sunny morning in Taormina. Stepping outside on the balcony that overlooked the royal blue Mediterranean Sea, breathing in the air that smelled only like Italy does, and nowhere else in the world. I had my first moment of joy that I could remember in a very long time. I outstretched my arms toward the sun and said,
"Buon giorno, motherfuckers!"
I had ten days stretched in front of me to spend with my grown children, daughter's boyfriend and my cousin. A dream I had for so long was now being enacted.
The trip was magical and nourishment for my soul. Climbing Mount Etna, walking and shopping in the open markets of Catania, Cooking pasta con le sarde at home for the five of us. Laying in my bed at night looking at the moon shining down on the sea, listening to the sounds of my daughter and her boyfriend playing the guitar and singing, and of my cousin bonding with my son over many glasses of wine. Peace and happiness flowed through my being.
Then I came back to New York in mid-March with grey blobs of icy, dog-piss, dirty snow still on the sidewalks. Dorothy, we were not in Sicily anymore. There were some days when the only person that I would have a conversation with was my doorman.
I started to have panic attacks that came from the isolation, lack of sunlight and from boredom.
This life just was not the one that I wanted to be living.
.
So when an opportunity arose, I jumped.
A former colleague of mine, Chef V, had occasionally reached out to me during the three years that I had known him, about opening a business. We had originally met at the vocational culinary school where we were both instructors. Whereas we had shared backgrounds of being restaurateurs who had to shutter our doors prematurely, I had moved on, he had not. He was still hungry to find that perfect spot and to have another shot at it, like the gambler who believes that the next roll of the dice will be the winning one. Over the occasional beer we would meet and I would entertain the thought but never enough to really pursue it and it usually faded away.
As fate would have it though, this time he caught me at the perfect moment. He did have an actual venue and really was in the process of trying to open it. Was I interested in coming on board and possibly even a partnership? After a meeting in Manhattan with my boss that had a decidedly sour tone about it, it was becoming clear that my misery was affecting the job. I saw the writing on the wall of what the future would hold. I went to meet with the Chef V and see what it was all about. I was much more open to his offer now.
It seems that Chef V was not only working at his corporate job full time but doing construction and trying to get the place open. I was taken aback by the way he looked. He was a pale, sort of wimpy type to begin with but now he was emaciated to boot. He had worked himself to the bone, literally and had suffered with a serious UTI. He was getting desperate.
The place was a dump. A former pizzeria on the Upper East Side. There was potential though. I saw total discombobulation at the site. It was not very pretty, with a lot of orangey-brown tones. It was a small place that was taken up by a few ugly standard pizzeria type tables and counters. Part of the operation was in the basement which was accessed through a back door, and a creepy, narrow staircase. If the upstairs was a mess, it was complete order in comparison to the basement. There was used equipment everywhere, tools all over, it was dark and a haven for water bugs.
I asked Chef V if he had a business plan, which is the first step for any enterprise. He shrugged and gestured to the mess around us and said, "this is it".
He explained that his father owned the building, a small walk-up where the pizzeria was and a pharmacy that he also owned. They had complete access to everything, including a vacant apartment in the back that even had a patio. The patio is where we sat (surrounded by tools and a hacksaw) and talked turkey.
Would he match my salary? Yes. I was not afraid of long days and early morning starts. I could continue teaching my Saturday baking class and take Sundays off.. I would be the Manager/Baker and run the place when he was at work.
I knew that it was risky, and in my gut I knew that they didn't really have their shit together. But I had to steer the vehicle that was my life back on to the road that I wanted to follow. I needed disruption and I wouldn't even have to miss a week's pay.
Alrighty then, I checked my parachute, put on my goggles,said yes and jumped.
The Shitbag Cafe
I finished my job at the warehouse on Friday and started at the cafe on Monday. The place was in total disarray which I attributed to Chef V and his wife Mrs.Chef V both working full time jobs while trying to get the cafe up and running.
I set to work immediately trying to get the place jump started. I interviewed potential employees and lined up purveyors, I cleaned and tried to organize. Chef V's father liked to hang around and help too. He "helped" to fix the used convection oven that was for my baking. He had taken out the control panel and it hung by some wires. The doors did not close completely and had to be jeri-rigged with a piece of foil.
I worked longer hours than I had been doing, but I liked joking around with Chef V's nutty father and working on the upper east side was a much more pleasant commute than my trip through the Bronx had been. I was pretty happy for a while. It was good to be around people again, and to get my hands back in the dough.
Every time I made some organizational headway though, it seemed as if my work would be undone the next day. There were endless piles of stuff that needed to get put away or God forbid- thrown away. You see, what I learned about Chef V and his family was that they were hoarders.
One day as I was making my way through more tools and cords and junk, I found an old FedEx box with tape around it and holes in it. I shook my head as I tossed it in the trash.
The next day, Chef V asked me, with panic in his voice if I had seen that box. When I told him that I had chucked it, he got pissed because that was what he used for a knife kit.
A knife kit for a vagrant, perhaps.
Any piece of junk that I intended to discard, they would take because they said they could "re-purpose" it. Their drop cloth that they used for painting was the awning from their old restaurant. They had boxes upon boxes filling the back apartment, so that one had to walk through a narrow path to get through. These boxes were filled with years full of restaurant equipment from their old place and stuff picked up at auctions. Apparently there was even more stuff in Chef V's mother's garage in New Jersey.
One day I was to make a run to Restaurant Depot in the Bronx. I had to stop by their apartment to get the keys to their car. The hoarding thing was no joke, because their apartment was the same as the restaurant! Boxes of crap, magazines and stuff that only was useful to them filled the place. Then, when I got into the car, the trunk was full of mechanical stuff! (Where was I to put sacks of flour and cases of vegetables?). The inside of the car was not much better plus it was dirty.
Anyone who knows me, knows that I am a minimalist. I purge constantly and abhor clutter. Both of my own restaurants were sleek and beautiful. This was not me, but it was them and so I forged onward.
I set up a bakeshop for myself in a corner of the basement. It was my happy place. I brought my tools (kept appropriately in a toolbox and a sterilite container, not an old shabby box), arranged my spices, labeled my flour bins. I set up a great, efficient station so that I could make my scones, muffins and cookies.
After my day off, I came back to work only to find a huge, dirty, used air conditioner sitting on my work table.
Basically, this is how it went.
One step forward, two steps back.
They decided to open the doors for business one day, in a willy-nilly type of way. We sort of had a menu that we kind of had priced-out. We didn't really have a POS sytem because the one that they had bought second hand did not work. They picked up a little el-cheapo cash register at Staples and kept a calculator underneath it and there was our POS.
Wherever I am, I will take pride in my work and do my best to make the business succeed. I knew pretty early on that I would not invite anyone that I knew to come to this place. It was embarrassing. It was so ugly and so half-assedly put together that I did not need to mar my reputation. I opened up every morning, arriving around 6am. I baked my beautiful scones, muffins and Danish. There was nothing to display them on, we had paper plates and a couple of mis-matched china dishes that looked like they were from an old lady's post-mortem tag sale.
As paranoid as Chef V was about the health department, he would not run that kitchen in a way that was anywhere up to code. There was a walk-in box in the basement but it was inoperable and was basically another closet for even more junk. He had found at some sale, a few soda refrigerators, the type that say "ICE COLD BEVERAGES" or "COCA-COLA delicious, refreshing!". We had them in the basement and used them as reach-in boxes. These machines are meant for SODA and not for eggs, milk, and other temperature sensitive foods. Nevertheless, I kept my mise in place in my soda fridge.
The half-assery continued on. The prices changed every day, so of course the few regular customers that we did have would complain. We had one lovely young lady who worked the counter and other than her it was a revolving cast of characters. In any business, finding good labor is always the hardest part. So, it was me who had to pick up the slack when someone did not show up or was too slow to keep up for those very few and far between rushes that we had. There I was, making egg sandwiches and being a short order cook. Running up and down those creepy stairs to the soda refrigerators when we needed something. We did have one refrigerator near the line. It was a deli case. The kind where all of the deli meats and cheeses are stored, like at the grocery store when you want to buy a half pound of turkey and a pound of roast beef. We kept much of the prepped food in there. Again, this is a machine that is not meant to store so much food and the air does not circulate properly. We overworked the thing to death and it had a habit of the breaker popping off occasionally. Mr. and Mrs. V thought it was a good idea to paint the front of it with chalkboard paint to hide the ingredients and to write the menu on it. The menu that had spelling mistakes and prices that were never the same two days in a row.
Chef V got mean. Working at his job till late afternoon he would come to the cafe and shit on me. He'd call me during the day with all kinds of instructions in a very nasty tone of voice. I did not like it but I dealt with it. I felt kind of sorry for him. I had weekends off and was making part of my salary in cash so it was tolerable. The last straw for me though, was the pizza guy.
It had always been Chef V's intention to make pizza at the cafe. The previous tenants had left a double pizza oven and he wanted to make that a big part of the business. So far egg sandwiches, cappuccino, baked goods, weird salads and burritos were not doing much. Chef V tried working on some dough recipes but nothing that he was happy with. Well, he wasn't happy with anything pretty much at that point. So one weekend when I was off he brought in the pizza guy.
Pizza guy did not believe that women should work in a kitchen. From the beginning he was condescending to me, that is when he even acknowledged my presence. He baked some awful cake to show that he was a better than me, and some hideous burned biscotti. I was sure to tell the customers who were big fans of my stuff that I had most definitely not made them. It was his way of peeing on my tree. He took over my station when I was not there, left flour all over the place and got into my tools. I took to keeping my toolbox locked. He insisted on opening the door which left flies inside, he played loud heavy metal music on his phone speaker, regardless if we already had music playing on Mrs. Chef V's i-pad. He would speak in Spanish to the cook that he was training and say disparaging things about me, not knowing or for that matter, caring that I understood what he was saying.
His arrogance even spilled over to Chef V. He would talk about how shitty a place it was, how they didn't know what they were doing and be rude right to Chef V's face. Chef V would in turn dump on me. I tried to bond with the guy, I stood outside with him one day and let him talk about his favorite subject (himself), but it was to no avail because he was just a hateful man.
Chef V was a total wimp in this guy's presence. He stood there like a spineless schnook and took it, under the misguided notion that pizza guy was going to teach him the secret to making the best pizza in the world. While I would be admonished for accepting a delivery of some $10 item and facing the embarrassment of calling the purveyor back all day to pick it up, pizza guy spent literally a thousand dollars on cases of unnecessary food that we did not need.
The crooked shelves were sagging under the weight of #10 cans of artichokes and the soda refrigerators were overworked holding his vats of meatballs.
After being abused one too many times and being set up by pizza guy who tried to throw me under the bus with some lies, when Chef V got there he immediately started on me, I told him enough was enough. "I work my ass of for you and this place and I will not tolerate his shit any more. All I ask of you is to have my back and you don't."
I went home and left him to be yelled at by our tormentor. Who was the boss?
Even with all of this nonsense going on, it still did not get to me, in my core. Somehow there was a higher power that had me on a course. I've had my own business and had my own heartbreak. I have lost money and had to work to get it back. Over the years I have gained something very valuable, and that is humility. I am talented, I am honest and a very hard worker but I am disposable. I can always be replaced, just like any other employee. I was never fired from a job until I was 50 years old and since then I have made up for lost time by getting fired a few more times. It's always horrible but I know how to survive and I always do.
That trip to Sicily had changed me by reminding me of who I really am. The person who loves to cook and to bake, the teacher in me and the love for my family. Nothing else really mattered and was basically a big game of chess.
The first move had been to get out of the warehouse, which I did. Now, what would be my next move?
Hand sink and pot-washing sinks, with storage area above, all where the customers could see!
