What is the best thing about working together?
That we see each other all day and we are able to understand each other’s frustrations.
And what is the worst?
That we see each other all day and when you get home you can’t tell him anything he doesn’t know.
How is love maintained when you work in a kitchen, knife in hand, between burns, nerves and screams, with adrenaline overflowing the saucepans, with impertinent clients, dizzying amounts of money and services that fly with the speed and violence of a flambé ? An increasingly common case, because the ERTE and ERE of the crisis and the pandemic have reduced the staff of medium-sized restaurants, and now in many the couple pulls alone with the business ahead.
The two answers with which this article begins, or the contradiction between never separating you but at the same time not being able to surprise you, linking you like a sauce for better or for worse, synthesize with a strange beauty the problem and the fortune of sharing a business of stoves with your partner. They are, by the way, answers from Cristian Palacio, 37 years old, and cook of Weird people in Zaragoza.
If the restaurant has always been one of the ideal environments to go crazy, now, in this crazy 21st century, I won’t even tell you. When, as a privilege of servants, we find an apparently decent job, it ends up enslaving us, tyrannizing our time, demanding constant training, tightening the salary and cutting the labor rights that our parents and grandparents won. To shake off this bad feeling that seems to permeate the world, we have proposed a game to six couples who work together: fill out the same questionnaire on the good and bad of sharing a house and work, but do it separately, without looking at each other’s answers. The six have accepted and also with amazing honesty.
RARE PEOPLE: DIVISION OF WORK
Sofia San Mouchet, 35 years old, from Elche de la Sierra (Albacete), is Cristian’s partner in Gente Rara. They have been in love for 16 years and as many of the other sweat, that of the pans; since they met at the El Lago restaurant in Panticosa (Huesca). “Cristian was my cold room batch manager”, remembers Sofía. “On my first day, the first thing he taught me was to clean oysters, I will never forget it”. Few memories are fixed in the heart like those born on the tongue .
At Gente Rara, Cristian is the chef: “I take care of the kitchen, marketing management, creative development. Sofía, from the management of the room, the reservations and the administrative part. And besides, she is our fromelier, with a cheese cart where he handles more than 40 items a day”. As Alberto Pérez used to sing, “she takes care of the waves, I watch the tide”. Let’s go with her:
What do you like about Cristian as a co-worker?
He is resolute and a very creative person in all aspects, his decisions always have a lot of logic and are well thought out. He sees things that others do not see.
And you do not like?
That when I go more than ass with my things, come to ask me if I can think of what to do with an ingredient. In those moments it drives me out of my boxes. It’s like, “Can’t you see I don’t have time!?”
Sofía adds something that makes you think, while arousing a laugh: “The truth is that 16 years are enough for many anecdotes, there are countless good and not so good situations. He is a very good life partner and I love him to the stars and planets, as our daughter says. And from here, since Cristian is not going to read the interview until he sees it published, I want to tell him to please, please, pick up the dishwasher that he had this week.”
BELUGA: UNITED TO THE SPINE
The restaurant manager beluga from Malaga is Andrea Martos, 29 years old, born in Terrassa (Barcelona). The chef, Diego Rene López, is 31 years old and from Alicante. They have spent six years overlapping the intimate and the professional without losing affection, but rather increasing tenderness, which smokes under the cover of all his answers. They have spent six years overlapping the intimate and the professional without losing affection, but rather increasing tenderness, which smokes under the cover of all their answers.
What’s the best Andrea?
“It’s funny that no dish can come out on the menu if I haven’t tried it before and I give it the go-ahead, I’m the restaurant’s gastronomic certifier, hahaha. We also tease each other a lot for silly things and the anger lasts half a second. There could be no better connection between the living room and the kitchen than knowing that the same love of the profession exists between them. And obviously, we can be together for a long time. The tension can be exhausting at times, but I wouldn’t want to be without him in another job.”
And what is the best for Diego? Same thing: “When they ask me how I’ve been working with my partner, I can’t answer, because I’ve never worked without her: Pedregalejo, Londres, Frigiliana, Teatinos, Rincón de la Victoria, Málaga capital… always together!” As was the case with those dentists who unanimously recommended chewing gum, Andrea and Diego’s responses are almost identical. Both suffer because of “the discussions by third parties, in which in the end we ended up fighting,” Diego confides. Andrea responds the same, but she adds a nuance about what she has learned by looking at her partner with her mattress and cloth: “I have learned to forgive. I have always been a very spiteful person and by looking at him I have learned to be a little less so. That feeling is useless.”
COOKING: THREE KNIVES
Because, of course, in addition to bed and apron, you have to move in a duet with the rest of the staff. Who gets along better with peers? In this group of six, or rather twelve respondents, they usually put out those fires. As they also assume mostly the management part of the business. Empathy and organizational capacity stand out on the female side, although logically it feeds back.
Ratatouille, one of the best stories ever told about the love of cooking, also contains one of the most beautiful romances sponsored by food. And a reflection on the extra difficulty that, as in so many jobs, women face. When Colette Tatou is entrusted with the training of the new kitchen boy, a certain Alfredo Linguini, she makes things clear for him by nailing the sleeve of his jacket to the cutting board with three threatening knives, so that he listens attentively to his first and fundamental warning: “I want that you know who you are dealing with. How many women do you see in this kitchen? Just me. Because haute cuisine is an antiquated hierarchy with rules written by stupid older men, rules that make it impossible for a woman to enter. But still, here I am. How did it happen? Because I’m the toughest cook in this kitchen. I’ve worked hard and long to get here and I’m not going to risk it for one lucky garbage boy. Do you understand?
“Wow,” Linguini replies, her sea bream eyes already hopelessly captivated by her French partner.
Violence, again, breeds love in the kitchen. “If business goes bad, it can take the couple ahead,” warns Imanol Ossa, 55 years old (Zumaia, Gipuzkoa), Andrey Finanta’s partner for 24 years, 58 years old and Indonesian (Surabaya). Here there are only boys, but the same love, mutual and to the job. Imanol and Andrey teamed up in the Makan Makan of Barcelona in 2018, as head chef and chef, respectively. “Initially it was a pop-up six months old and now we have a four-year-old boy”, jokes Andrey about how complicated the hotel adventure has been for them.
Can you get away from home business?
“Impossible. Sunday breakfasts are no longer what they used to be: it looks like the board of directors of a multinational company, hehehe,” Imanol says ironically.
Now, imagine the morning toast when, instead of four years in the oven together, you add 19, almost two decades, in the case of Juan José Pérez Robredo and Yolanda León García, a couple since 1997, and owners since 2003 of cooking, in Leon. They are both chefs and share knives. His answers are shorter, but no less eloquent.
What do each of you do in the business?
“We both do practically everything, but there are things that we like more than the other. Yolanda, pastry and cold dishes. Juanjo, winery management and purchases, budgets, etc.”
This is how Juanjo responds, speaking of himself in the third person, perhaps in that third cook in which they have been transmuted. “The first two years we had a very bad time because we stepped on each other when making decisions. Later we learned and we have been able to respect each other”. And Yolanda, what do you think? “Now we are a real team, but we don’t disconnect and we are tired of being together all day.”
Juanjo has learned from Yolanda “to enjoy my work”, but he does not like “that she is so bossy”. For Yolanda, Juanjo “is very rational, an entrepreneur, saver and decisive”, but he “protests and fights a lot over insignificant things”. Imanol appreciates “Andrey’s calmness” with the place full, but it pisses him off “that a dish can’t be waiting for a second in the kitchen”. Curiously, Andrey says something similar: he applauds that Imanol is “very organized”, but not that he loses “his nerves”. Deep down, love always results in the same trifles: in the offal of routines, which we have to whiten daily so that only tenderness remains on the plate from the entrails.
OAK: DISCONNECT THE LOOK
Curiously, Juanjo and Yolanda are the only ones who say they do not have a special connection, a way of communicating that they do not share with another colleague. The rest say they understand each other “just with a look.” One look and you know what happens, without opening your mouth. It happens to Jairo Rodríguez (41 years old, Castrillón) and the also Asturian Paula Lamas (40 years old, Lena), who have loved each other for more than a decade and who in October 2018 opened Oakhis restaurant in Pola de Lena.
He cooks and she runs the room. “It continues to amaze me how Paula is able to organize all the paperwork. That I am a little note-taker, and that she is able to find, classify and organize my papers is something that always catches my attention”. Paula loves “watching him work when she is in the process of creating a new dish. She has an enormous level of concentration and self-demand”.
Can you unwind outside? “We have two children and a farm to run, so once the door of the restaurant is closed, we take off our work uniform for the staff, and we are not in charge there. We were always very clear that we had to be able to disconnect, otherwise being together 24/7 could take its toll, so at home we don’t talk about work. It is a self-imposed rule that we try to take to the letter. As much discipline inside as outside. Perhaps, because of that firmness, his good humor in the restaurant always attracts the customer’s attention.
Susana Aragón (45 years old, Igualada) also has a smile just by reading her responses to the questionnaire. She has been a partner for 22 years with Óscar Teruelo (48 years old, Paris), and a co-worker at centricfrom Barcelona, for 20 years. She cooks, and he manages and coordinates the room.
Susana, what do you like about your partner?
His power of conviction: he sells ice to the Eskimos, and it sells well!
And you do not like?
When you’re hungry, you can’t wait for the service to end: you’re hungry!
Do you manage to disconnect when you return home?
Óscar: I (almost) always. Party stuff stays on the field. At home we don’t talk about gigs!
Susana: Not so much for me, Óscar gets it more.
And what is the worst thing about working together?
Óscar: Problems, we both eat them. We also solve them together.
Susan: Nothing.
I wish food, and life in general, were full of that nothingness.
#Couples #restaurant #stories #love #knives