Susan Feniger & Mary Sue Milliken, Chefs & Restaurateurs
DEBBIE: You guys have been together for a long time... since 1978. Would you ever imagine that you'd still be working together as restaurateurs?
SUSAN: No, I don't think either one of us ever really thought about it. It was just... we started working at a restaurant in Chicago together and we totally hit it off, we really supported each other. So it wasn't really a planned-out thing—it just happened.
DEBBIE: I read that you both left for France early on in your career to work there. Do you think that an important part of being a chef is traveling and experiencing other cultures and cuisines?
SUSAN: You know, it was early on, we both had gone to culinary school, we both had worked in restaurants quite a bit and then we both ended up in France. A lot of our food was, at least initially, very eclectic, and so travel was a really big part of it because we both loved ethnic food. So I traveled a few different times to India and worked in a kitchen there, which was fantastic. MarySue went to Bangkok and Japan, we both went to Mexico. I think I don't think it's critical, but if you love cuisines of different cultures, it gives you a whole different perspective when you sort of throw yourself into the culture versus just reading cookbooks. It doesn't mean you couldn't be a great chef without traveling, but it's certainly inspiring and helps you to see other cultures and where the roots of things come from. When you go into someone's home and you meet their family and see what they're eating for breakfast and lunch, it's a whole different experience than just reading about it in a book.
MARY SUE: If you love travel, it will serve you very well in this industry. But if you don't love travel, you may still be very good...you'll just be a different kind of chef than Susan and I. There are plenty of people who don't really leave their little domain and they're fabulous at what they do, so it's not something you have to do. But for us, it's part of our passion.
DEBBIE: Maybe you could walk us through some of the things that you might do on a typical day.
SUSAN: Well, you know it's changed. I think now it's a very different schedule than what we used to keep. My typical day is I get up and maybe I'm doing other stuff, and then I might start looking at emails at 9:30am, something like that—9 or 9:30—and then I usually try to go into the restaurant somewhere around 10 or 10:30 and I try to go between all three restaurants. So I may go to downtown, I might go to Santa Monica, and I might get on a plane and go to Vegas.
Usually then what I do is check in with the chefs and walk through the restaurant, sort of connecting with the people who are there. I may end up sitting down with one of the chefs, talking about things that are going on or talking about what specials we may be changing to, depending on whether there's a chef there at the moment or if there's a Sioux chef filling in. Usually right before lunch, I'll go down and be a part of the tasting of the specials, and then I try to be working on the floor during service, either looking at the food coming out, which is called expediting, talking to customers, or if it's busy I'll jump in and help. Then I'll end up in meetings in the afternoon—sometimes it's kitchen meetings, sometimes it's front-of-the-house meetings or financial meetings with the whole team. Then we might be in an interview or doing a demo or a TV thing or something like that.
And then during dinner, I'm usually involved with the tastings again and then the same thing—working on the floor, connecting with customers, watching food coming out and maybe working on benefits or whatever. Because we've got a big benefit coming up in less than a month, right now I'm doing a lot of stuff in putting together auction packages and figuring out what our menu's going to be, what our prep list for it is. That's sort of a typical day. And then at 9 or 9:30pm, I may meet friends for dinner at the restaurant or leave.
DEBBIE: That seems like a very packed day. Anything that you would add to that, MarySue?
MARY SUE: Well, I think I do more planning, and I work on the radio show, what we're going to talk about this week and writing new recipes that we're going to be trying out, or testing recipes, I do that pretty often. I go the farmer's market and see what's new and interesting, I do a lot of research on food and what's happening in the food industry and kind of big-picture planning...trying to figure out how we're going to sustain this business and keep it going and stay true to our philosophy and those kind of things.
DEBBIE: I know that the restaurant industry is a precarious one, and you've been very successful at it. How do you deal with that stress?
MARY SUE: Well, the business is constantly changing and the atmosphere is changing and the one thing you can count on is that it won't be the same as it was last year or five years ago. So, I think it's just trying to really stay connected to the business and what it needs and what the people here need. I mean the people are really what make the whole thing work. If they're not happy or they're not informed or if they're not inspired or they're not developing and challenged and they don't want to stay, then it's starting all over again. I think it's kind of staying closely connected to the business so that it will still be here in the next several years.
DEBBIE: There have been a lot of reality shows lately that give a lot of people an inside glimpse of what it's like to run a restaurant and be a chef. Are there any misconceptions out there?
SUSAN: It's interesting, I think that even for a lot of people who work in restaurants, there isn't a clear connection between how busy they are to what it costs to run a restaurant. People like waiters and waitresses, they actually see all the money that comes through the door, but they don't see all the money that goes out of the door. So it makes it very difficult. I think that's a big challenge with the staff is to have everybody have an understanding of what it takes, so you're constantly needing to educate staff—about when you break a glass, when you throw away a piece of silverware...all that stuff adds up. So you have to be very careful about watching the bottom line and it's something you have to be very aware of in the restaurant business. It's why so many restaurants fail.
MARY SUE: And I think that people just don't see the whole picture. You know, the idea that one day you walk into work and the toilet's overflowing and that means that you need to dig up the whole floor of the restaurant and it's going to be $50,000 and so we'd better make the guacamole another ten cents more. or whatever. It's the same in any business really, even if you're working for someone else and you're not owning it. If any owner has to invest or the lease is coming up or whatever, it really affects the entire machine and the mechanics of how it works. It affects the guests, it affects the employees...it affects everybody.
DEBBIE: Could you tell us some more challenges of being a chef and running a restaurant?
SUSAN: Well there's you know, it's long hours, and in some ways you're sort of always on-call. I mean, we're a little bit past that now because we've got a strong team in place but if you're at the restaurant, you're planning to leave and something happens, someone gets hurt, they have to go the hospital, a toilet overflows, whatever it is, I think you have to be ready to jump in no matter what and you have to really be able to juggle a lot of things at one time. You have to be able to handle what for many people is very stressful. You might have someone no show, someone give their notice, a toilet overflow, a ton of people at the front door, and half your produce order doesn't show up. You have to be able to juggle all that.
MARY SUE: And you can look at that as a challenge or you can look at that as an opportunity to be really creative and figure out what kind of specials you can make with only half the produce that you were expecting. It's fun in some ways, until it builds to the point where it's not fun anymore, where you can't really control it. I think the same thing that attracts people to the industry—that total, you know, immersion and the fact that it sucks you in because you're so busy and there are so many challenges—is the exact same thing that turns people off to the business, when you can't control the fact that there's too many challenges and they stop looking like opportunities.
DEBBIE: On the flip side, what are some of the best parts of your job?
SUSAN: You wear a uniform everyday...that's a great thing.
MARY SUE: You don't have to decide what to wear anymore...that is a big perk.
SUSAN: Yeah, it really is. And also, you know, you can use the restaurant sort of as your grocery store and you can also have the opportunity to have friends come in and it feels like an extended arm of your home, so that's a great thing. There's a camaraderie that happens within the restaurant business I think, with staff as well as with customers that come in that you sort of build these extended relationships because it's a very social, giving environment.
MARY SUE: I think a huge perk is you get to eat. And not only do you get to eat, but you get to make things, you know, 150 times. If you love to cook and you cook at home, if you made it 150 times, you and your friends and your family would be sick of that dish and you wouldn't even like it any more. You'd actually talk yourself out of it. But if you're in a restaurant and you can make it 150 times in the first month and you're serving it to different people, then you get to figure it out. The repetitive process is so exciting because you get to figure out how to make it better each time. You know, you just watch it and you take care of it and you observe the difference in the temperature that you cooked it or the amount of acid or salt and then pretty soon you have the opportunity between your first time and your 150th time. So that's a huge perk. If you love to cook and the only outlet you have is your home, that's pretty tough because you get sick of trying to perfect that same old thing.
DEBBIE: Can you speak to the creativity involved in your work?
MARY SUE: I think it kind of permeates the whole job because, you know, it's very creative cooking with food and all the ingredients you're putting in, it's like a puzzle everyday. You know, you walk in and see what's ready to be eaten and what's not going to be good by tomorrow if you don't figure out what to do with it, so you have all kinds of creative opportunities there. But then in addition, you know when you're opening a restaurant and your budget is tight and you've already spent everything and you have no more money...I remember when we opened City, we didn't have any wine buckets and we were going to open the next day, but we had no money. And one of our partners found these really cool shiny, marble, heavy stone crocks at Pic-N-Save and they were $2.99 each. And she got twenty of them and brought them home and we sand-blasted them in the back alley of the restaurant and they looked fantastic. So you have the ability to be creative you know, in the way you create the atmosphere, in the way you create the menu, it's all sort of a way of really communicating who you are.
SUSAN: You've got it in all these different ways. What the staff uniforms are going to be, what kind of silverware, what kind of china, glassware, how the menus are going to look. And so you've got all these different avenues besides the food where you are able to explore your own creativity. So it's sort of, it really is challenging, but it's pretty exciting, so it keeps someone who's driven and creative really challenged.
DEBBIE: When you first got into this career back in the day, were you aware of the possibilities of extending into other media?
MARY SUE: No, not at all. In fact, my biggest mentor was this Yugoslavian guy who's fifty years older than me, and he never wrote a single cookbook, he never talked to anybody on the radio, in fact, he banned food writers from coming to any of his restaurants. So it never entered my mind. But Susan and I were both really passionate about teaching and getting people informed and educated about food and what they're eating and how they eat. And we're natural teachers and we started teaching cooking classes to people and every time we'd teach a cooking class people would say, "Oh, you should be on TV or you should be on the radio, or you should do this or do that." And you know, they were right. We really do enjoy it and we had done it so much before we ever set foot in the TV studio. It came very naturally, which was lucky.
DEBBIE: Do you have any advice for a girl reading this book who wants to work in the restaurant industry?
MARY SUE: Don't wait to get started. The wonderful thing about this industry, especially for women, is that it's got very flexible hours and schedules, so you can start when you're in high school or college, working 8 or 10 or 15 or 20 hours a week. There are places that can give you a taste of the industry and you can start to navigate your way through to figure out where you're really comfortable because it's a huge industry. It's not just about being a chef. You could be a nutritionist, you could be a food stylist or a writer or, you know...the food business itself is just enormous. What we all eat is a huge part of our gross national product.
SUSAN: And I think that for someone starting out, you have to really get in there and do the grunt work. You know, start as a dishwasher, be a prep cook, work in the kitchen, really try to see the kind of work that it is because the hours and the commitment is the same, so you have to really be passionate about it. You can't really think that I'm going into this because I think that I'm going to make a fortune.
DEBBIE: How would you answer this question from Brittany, Age 16? "The most incredible thing about life is what we all contribute. Would you say that in your success, your job has allowed you to contribute something to the benefit of this world?"
SUSAN: One of the benefits of being in the restaurant business is it gives us the venue and the opportunities to give back to the community in a way that I think many businesses can't do other than just give money. And so being in the restaurant business, you often can give back. Potentially it's food, and it's people's time, and it is money in many ways because you're paying staff to do that, but it gives many people in our organization an ability to get involved with nonprofits that Mary Sue and I are passionate about or that they're passionate about. I think one of the great things that Mary Sue and I have done over all these years is we've continued to give back to many, many different organizations. It's been a big part of our culture, our company, and it's something that we try to really get our staff involved with so that they can see what an incredible opportunity it is to give back. It's a great opportunity I think we have being in the restaurant business. We work with lots of other nonprofits, but we do probably the most with Share Our Strength and the Scleroderma Research Foundation.
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© 2003-2007 Deborah Reber
