Chef’s Choice, Double Duty on Brunch Crunch

The celebrity chef I worked for was leaving. “See you tomorrow,” he said.

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 were 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 rather than being merely incorrect.

What made our executive/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 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 is nothing like knowing your boss will be there, in the figurative trenches, right next to you when facing the busiest day of the year.

Mother’s Day is always on Sunday. 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 had opened at 11am after arriving at 10am. 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 ass,” 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 one has never held a sticky electric blender with 4-6 Ramos Fizzes in it, they don’t really know what they’re missing.

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.

• Michael Mina will no longer be at Bungalow Kitchen in Tiburon 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 nor did she have children of her own. She passed away in a sanitorium, alone and destitute, in 1948. Legend holds that a portion of her final medical bills were paid for by florists.

Jeff Burkhart hosts ‘The Barfly Podcast.’ More at jeffburkhart.net.