Big Sur Bakery Cookbook - Michelle Wojtowicz [2]
In those days we just offered a sit-down breakfast and baked goods, and besides the two of us, Mike, and Terry, we only had one other employee, our dishwasher. Terry kept us going with strong cups of tea and Hide bread sandwiches and, well, we worked our asses off—which was ironic, given that, as we quickly learned, Big Sur does not attract many people looking for eighty-hour workweeks. People here work to live; they don’t live to work—which is a great life philosophy but makes it difficult to find good help. Our staff was always late, and if it was a beautiful day out, it was hard to get them to show up at all. Few of our employees had any restaurant experience, and eventually our rule of thumb boiled down to this: If the person looked “clear eyed,” they were hired. One time Mike decided to hire a woman based on the fact that she’d hiked the Appalachian Trail. When Michelle asked what the hell that had to do with the restaurant business, he just said, “Determination.” As it turns out, he was right—she ended up being one of the best employees we ever had.
Photographs by Sara Remington
As for us, we were used to working all the time. It’s probably in our blood—we both grew up in New Jersey in third-generation-immigrant working-class families and once we’d caught the cooking bug as teenagers, we never stopped. We worked in the kitchen of the Metuchen Inn in New Jersey, we worked our way through the Culinary Institute of America, and when we went to California for our mandatory eighteen-week externship, we extended it so that we could work for a full year. Once we’d moved out to Los Angeles, Michelle worked in a boutique hotel on Sunset Boulevard and, later, at the Four Seasons and Campanile; Phil started at the Four Oaks restaurant, moved on to Joe’s in Venice, then Melisse, Axe, and finally Campanile—all high-pressure, high-quality kitchens run by people who were as serious about their businesses as they were passionate about their food. When we took a summer off to backpack through Europe, we used it as an opportunity to learn as much as we could about different foods and cooking techniques. Back in America, we worked overtime and volunteered at different restaurant gigs. Even when we were working in the same restaurant in Los Angeles, we hardly saw each other—if we got one day off together in an entire month, we were stoked. So adjusting to life in Big Sur was challenging.
Photographs by Sara Remington
Terry and his girlfriend, Rachel, told us we needed to learn how to slow down and enjoy Big Sur. Otherwise, they asked, what’s the point of living here? And eventually we began to figure out how to balance our ambition for the restaurant with our desire to enjoy Big Sur. We went on walks together and took our dog to the beach every day. We snuck away in the afternoons, spent time with our new Big Sur friends, and cooked food for countless dinner parties. We were still always busy, but we began to find time to have lives outside of our jobs.
At the same time, we were in the midst of figuring out what to do with our favorite part of the restaurant: the wood-fired oven. You can cook almost anything in a wood-fired oven—these days we use it for our breads, chicken, oysters, leg of lamb, suckling pig, fish, beans, and pizza, to name a few items. But learning to use it is difficult. If it’s too hot or too cold, a normal evening at the restaurant can turn into a nightmare. If it’s chilly and rainy out, the oven performs differently than it does when it’s hot and sunny. Sometimes the wood isn’t dry enough. Sometimes