Some misconceptions about celebrity chef owned restaurants

“See you tomorrow,” said the celebrity chef who I worked for.

At that point he had four restaurants, one cookbook and so many television appearances that I had lost count.

His workdays usually consisted of walking in the front door of the restaurant, down the bar in between the bar area tables, through the kitchen and out the back door. His office was across the parking lot, and in it, a team of five people was busy coordinating his appearances.

“Is (insert celebrity chef’s name here) working today?” customers would frequently ask.

“He just left,” we were instructed to say, which was far more often wildly inaccurate than being merely incorrect.

People who frequent restaurants don’t often understand how kitchen hierarchies work. Celebrity chefs almost never cook in their restaurants. Executive chefs often don’t cook either, at least not on an individual basis; they create, and that’s altogether different. Even head chefs usually don’t cook everyday items. They’re not back there putting your salad together. They too might create — if there’s no executive chef — but more often they manage. And sometimes who they manage is the chef de cuisine. Now they do cook, but not quite in the way you might imagine. They’re certainly not back there flipping your steak or saucing your pasta. They more often direct people to do those things, sort of like a conductor. Now the sous chef might be cooking. Literally “under” the chef, the sous chef does the brunt of the physical cooking that one usually attributes to a chef. But one must also remember that the word “chef” literally means “chief” in French. And that’s four chiefs until you get to an actual worker.

What made our executive chef/celebrity chef’s comment odd was that the next day was Mother’s Day, and in the four years that I had worked for him, he had never once worked Mother’s Day.

“You’re working tomorrow?” I said, my voice containing more surprise than probably prudent when addressing my boss.

“Yep,” he said. “I will be in around noon.”

There’s nothing like knowing your boss will be there right next to you in the figurative trenches when facing the busiest day of the year. The restaurant business is often busiest on weekend nights, and ironically, the first shifts that people usually give up when they can are weekend nights. Friday night, not technically a weekend night, is often next, followed closely by Sunday brunch. Anthony Bourdain hated brunch, and so often do many restaurant workers. Which is why if you’ve had employment problems in your past or are looking for a new job, Sunday brunch is often the first shift you get hired for. Which, by the way, is exactly what Bourdain said about it himself.

Mother’s Day is always on Sunday. No coincidence there. When Anna Jarvis originally advocated for a day to honor mothers, she meant a pious religious holiday to honor one’s own mother and not mothers in general. She even went to great lengths to make sure Mother’s Day is singular, not Mothers’ Day, plural. Whatever her original plan, it hasn’t really turned out that way exactly.

On the next day in question, we all labored under the pretense that our fearless leader would be in shortly. We opened at 11 a.m. after arriving at 10 a.m. My co-worker, who only worked Sundays, wasn’t exactly pleased about one of those days being a holiday, something he voiced almost immediately upon arriving.

“What is that you’re making?” asked a young woman in her May Mother’s Day pastel finery.

My co-worker stopped what he was doing (making a pitcher of blended Ramos Fizzes), set down the blender cup, put both hands on the bar and looked the young woman directly in her beaming face.

“They’re called pains in the butt,” he said.

Not exactly incorrect, but wildly inappropriate, nonetheless.

And while Ramos Fizzes, replete with raw egg, cream, gin and the obscure orange flower water, do include ingredients that are either messy, contaminant friendly or obscure, ours were especially problematic being blended on top of all that. And if you’ve never held a sticky electric blender with four to six Ramos Fizzes in it, you don’t really know what you’re missing, especially having to clean it up.

At any rate, my co-worker didn’t last another hour. It was decided that sending a young woman back to her family in tears wasn’t really in the best interest of the restaurant, much less the family, or even Mother’s Day in general. But that meant that I had to work the rest of a two-person holiday shift by myself. The only consolation was that my boss would be there too. Soon.

He dutifully arrived on time, at noon, with his family of eight for their noontime brunch reservation.

Leaving me with these thoughts:

• That was the last Mother’s Day and the last brunch for two of their bartenders.

• Another celebrity chef is leaving Marin; Michael Mina will no longer be at Bungalow Kitchen as of June 1. I never personally saw him there, but his name was definitely on the menu.

• The celebrity chef I worked for also eventually moved on. Ironically, his name remains on that company’s menus to this day.

• “We can’t all be stars because someone has to sit on the curb and clap as I go by,” once quipped Marilyn Monroe.

• Anna Jarvis never married and didn’t have children of her own. She died in a sanatorium, alone and destitute, in 1948. Legend holds that a portion of her final medical bills were paid for by florists.