Where I Come From by Aaron Sanchez

Author:Aaron Sanchez
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2019-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

LIVING THE DREAM

After I left Isla, I decided to dial it back a bit. I had been approached about doing some consulting in the past, but I couldn’t fit it into a working restaurant schedule. Now seemed like a good time to revisit those conversations: to take a step back, get some perspective, and see what else was out there for me while I prioritized working through some personal stuff.

One of my main gigs was with a guy named Eddie, who had a chain of Mexican restaurants in New York called Mary Ann’s, with about six locations. Eddie found me through Alex García. At the time, it seemed that when any Latin or Latin-adjacent restaurant opened in New York, a couple of names were thrown around—mine included. We were the Ghostbusters of getting a Mexican restaurant open; they all knew who they were gonna call.

Eddie contracted me to help him make specials for his menu. He’d married a Dominican woman named Gloria; all the people in the kitchen were Dominican, a lot of them her relatives, and I felt right at home working with that crew to get them set up. I was really living right; I’d go to one of the locations from eight to five P.M., teach the guys three or four new dishes, and then get paid cash—about $700 a week. That was a ton of money back then for what felt like not a ton of work compared to the grueling back-of-house gigs I was used to. And mercifully, my name wasn’t on the menu, so even though I wanted to do a good job for my clients, I didn’t feel anywhere near that same level of pressure for press and perfection. It was a great opportunity to stretch my culinary legs again, getting some of my creative mojo back by developing menus on someone else’s dime, where the stakes weren’t so high.

Eventually, I started running into a guy named Eamon Furlong, a bartender at the Mary Ann’s location on Fifth Street and Second Avenue, and I would see him regularly when I stopped in to meet with the team. Eamon was this very avant-garde, artistic Irish dude, one of the few sober bartenders I knew, and an artist on the side who loved building things with his hands. He and I had a nice little rapport going; he was this typical New York guy, and I could tell he wanted more in life than slinging margaritas at some downtown chain.

One afternoon, after I had wrapped up with Eddie’s kitchen crew, he pulled me aside. “I want to open a restaurant,” he told me. “But I need a chef.” He asked if I might be interested in doing a little consulting, but I had a feeling about Eamon, and I wanted to hear more about the project. We agreed to have a bigger conversation and set up a time to meet at a coffee shop uptown near where I was living at the time. When we did, I was impressed by how far along Eamon was in the process.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.