Big Sur Bakery Cookbook - Michelle Wojtowicz [56]
By the time they opened the Bakery, Phil and Michelle had already been together for years. They grew up in neighboring towns in New Jersey—their grandparents actually raised their parents on the same boulevard in Newark—and when Phil was nineteen and Michelle was seventeen, they met at a party in Phil’s hometown of Metuchen. Phil, who was in college studying architecture, had just been in a major car accident and was taking time off to recover from multiple skull fractures. Michelle was still in high school. She likes to say that Phil spent the whole party ignoring her—but when he found out that she drove a 1967 Ford Mustang, he started to pay attention. She let him take it for a drive and, well, they’ve been together ever since.
When we got married on October 1, 2005, no one was surprised—after all, we’d been dating for over a decade. Originally we didn’t think we were going to have our wedding in Big Sur, but then one day at the Bakery, a friend of ours offered to let us have the ceremony on her property. Her place is beautiful, with a terraced lawn right on the edge of a cliff overlooking the Pacific, but at first we didn’t think we could take her up on it—she and her husband have a deal where one person isn’t allowed to offer their property unless they’ve cleared it with the other person first. And besides, why would someone volunteer to host a hundred-person wedding at their private home?
But then a couple of days later her husband came into the Bakery and pulled us aside. “If you don’t have your wedding at our house because you don’t want to, that’s fine,” he said. “But if you don’t have your wedding at our house because you think you’d be imposing on us, then I’ll never eat at your restaurant again.”
He left us no choice. We had the wedding on their property, and it couldn’t have been a more beautiful spot: a three-tiered lawn, a gorgeous home, lavender and wildflowers, and a panoramic view of the ocean. We got married right on the edge of the cliff and then went up to the second tier where long banquet tables were set up on the lawn. Chuckie, who was then our sous-chef, led a drum procession (that’s what happens when you get married in Big Sur), and we celebrated our wedding as the sun set over the Pacific.
When people ask us what it’s like to run a restaurant as a couple, they’re usually pretty surprised at our answer: we love it. We spent a lot of the past ten years working on different schedules or at different restaurants, and we usually didn’t have much time off together. Even in Los Angeles when we were both working at Campanile, we were apart—the bakery and the kitchen were separated by the dining room floor, and with the chef (Phil) working nights and the baker (Michelle) working days, we basically never saw each other. We used to joke that that was how we made our relationship work, especially in the early years.
Photographs by Sara Remington
Photographs by Sara Remington
But these days, we’re always together. The Bakery is our life. Even when we go on vacation, we’re constantly brainstorming about things we want to do when we get back.
The thing that makes it work is probably the fact that cooking and baking have very separate responsibilities and require different skills. Michelle enjoys the schedule and repetition of baking: if you’re going to make five hundred cookies, you know exactly what you need to do before you even start. Phil, on the other hand, doesn’t have that kind of attention span. He needs to be doing fifty things at once, finds unpredictability thrilling, and hates being around chocolate or anything sticky.
Even though we spend a huge amount of time together, we rarely fight. That’s probably because we know each other so well that it’s easy to figure out when one of us needs some time alone. Phil will play music and go to the beach, and Michelle will read or take walks with friends—we manage to be very independent despite the fact that our work and home lives are so intertwined. And we’re especially lucky because our house consists of two parts: one section has a bedroom