Cooking For Love, In And Out Of The Kitchen
As The Washington Post noted, maintaining a relationship is difficult enough when one member of a couple works in a restaurant. How about when both work in the restaurant? After all, even for the happiest couples, the idea of working together can be a frightening thought. But these couples use their love of food and for each other to achieve happiness both in and out of the kitchen. While most couples celebrate Valentine's Day by indulging in a meal at a nice restaurant, these couples work behind the scenes to make the evening extra special for their customers.
Mark (Executive Chef) and Marjorie Fuller, owners of Spring Hill in Seattle, Wash., take pride in helping others enjoy their romantic occasion. "We both work on Valentine's Day since it is a busy day for the restaurant," explained Marjorie. "We are happy to be here to help our customers celebrate this day for them." She added, "As cheesy as it may be, we love each other and don't celebrate it on Valentine's Day, it's celebrated every day."
Karen (Pastry Chef) and Quinn (Executive Chef) Hatfield of Hatfield's in Los Angeles strive to find the balance between celebrating Valentine's Day as a couple and running their restaurant. They explain, "It can be hard to celebrate traditional holidays like Valentine's Day when you're in the restaurant industry. You never know when the restaurant will call you away from your plans." They added, "Valentine's date night is not a planned affair, but we celebrate it on an off-night close to the day — it's our opportunity to try a new restaurant, or visit with friends at their restaurant."
High school sweethearts and owners of Recette in New York City Lindsay (Director of Operations) and Jesse Schenker (Executive Chef) try to treat each day like Valentine's Day. Lindsay said, "We won't really do anything differently — Jesse may cook something special on Valentine's Day, but other than that, it's another day at work. We are lucky that we enjoy working together so much!" In fact, this couple loves working together so much that they even went back to work at Recette the day they got married. Lindsay added, "It was the best, most fulfilling day of our lives. We wouldn't have done it any other way."
The Daily Byte is a regular column dedicated to covering interesting food news and trends across the country. Click here for previous columns.