She came up in the era of Kitchen Confidential lore. The tricky thing about simplicity is that you really have to know your shit. Jay hired me even though I lacked so much as a drop of knowledge on classical savory French food or wine or professional service. This article originally appeared on The American South: Baking is essential, fosters community, says famed pastry chef Lisa Donovan, Like us on Facebook to see similar stories, Openly bisexual, autistic candidate wins election for state House seat, 'I Am Greta' chronicles the birth of Greta Thunberg's climate crusade. I had decided his was too stodgy, that it needed a little more finesse. They all went to get beers and smoke cigarettes across the street at a bar called 3 Crow nearly every night, or they lingered on the patio at the restaurant to wind down after work — the most pressing things they had waiting for them at home were a few Chihuahuas whom they treated like human children. Standing all of maybe five foot four, Margot wore a tight, curly, black haircut and a perpetual disapproving squint, her apron high and tight and a pair of black, plastic slip-on Birkenstock kitchen shoes that she always slid off and on her white crew-socked feet while she sat with us during lineup, her legs always spread wide and her torso hunched over them with a menu in hand and a cocksureness that I could only dream of having. But there was still an expectation that I would fold into her life, not just do my job well. Questions? Consider subscribing to the Los Angeles Times. United States, © Copyright 2020, Georgia Public Broadcasting. And thrilling. Their whole lives seemed to be about studying food as if they themselves were going to be the ones to cook each dish. She opened Margot Café & Bar in 2001, and it is still a pillar of high standards and delicious food to this day. After eating her cajeta ice cream and apricot dessert at an event, Mexican cooking expert Diana Kennedy said those words to pastry chef Lisa Donovan. I can always recall the color of ink, the doodles in the margins, the color of the cover, or the lack of a cover if it had fallen off. On the importance of telling women’s stories. Donovan’s first job at McCormack’s Margot Café is a far cry from her time at her first steady restaurant job at TradeWinds, a “22-seat Italian cigar den housed in a double-wide trailer on a dirt hillside corner” in Valparaiso, Florida. Yet you also made a decision to step out of restaurants and focus on writing. You should give them a reason to be a healthy individual outside of your door. Your talent as a writer is as evident as your gifts as a pastry chef. I would calculate my till, tip out the bartender and the back waiter, make a bit of pleasant conversation, and then go home. Four years into a new restaurant is its mere infancy — you’re just learning to walk, just learning how it all works, just learning how to maintain your vision. (Like), well, this guy is absent. For the next 15 years, at City House and Margot Café & Bar in Nashville, and at my pop-up that came to be known as Buttermilk Road, the notebooks were my most important tool. Recipes Included: Cast-Iron Cornmeal Cake with Buttermilk Cream /Buttermilk Cream / Sweet Potato Yeast Rolls / Buttermilk Panna Cotta / Dried Apple Hand Pies / Lisa Donovan’s Pie Dough, At Nashville's panaderías, a pastry chef finds meaning beyond bolillos. Phone: 404-500-9457. Yet its arrival — with themes of personal reckoning and reclamation, gender inequity (specifically the treatment women have endured to succeed in professional kitchens) and the country’s racial caste systems, as enacted within her own family — feels as if it was written for the moment. Accompanying Photo Essay by Andrea Behrends. It would take me a few more years, and several more notebooks about my strange kitchen and eating habits, to realize that this self-education was the stirring of a career as a pastry chef I did not yet know I was going to have. At what point did you know that you wanted to write this book? Victor Protasio, My Notebooks Tell the Story of How I Became a Chef. Gratefully, I’m not easily scared off. It looks like sand from a tropical beach, but the material gleaming from the bunkers at Augusta National actually comes from the mountains of North Carolina. My notes became even more important as I ventured into that landscape. Or does the industry need to be restructured? Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey swore she'd never return to Atlanta after her mother was murdered there. Lisa's ultimate embrace of the human who stares back at her is a kind of freedom for us all.” —Osayi Endolyn, James Beard Award-winning writer. No. Those are the people that are making your food at a restaurant. Like, these aren’t things that our culture has necessarily promoted or supported or even looked for. Emilia Brock is senior producer for GPB's program, Political Rewind. However, it's important to have the conversation about why restaurants in this country cannot be built in the way they deserve to be built for the workers and for the chefs that own them. So I'm very glad that this exists. 35 years later, she faces those demons in her searing new memoir, Memorial Drive. In 2018 Nashville pastry chef Lisa Donovan won the James Beard Award in the personal essay category for her Food & Wine essay titled “Dear Women: Own Your Stories.”With Our Lady of … I always knew I wanted to be a writer, that I could commit myself to the kitchen and still find a way to write. In this excerpt, Donovan recounts the career influence of another woman: Nashville chef and restaurant owner Margot McCormack. We moved to east Nashville, and my job became one I worked hard to keep. I’m brimming with the energy and enthusiasm I remember from when I was first teaching myself to bake. With gigs at City House, Margot Cafe & Bar and, most famously, as Sean Brock’s pastry chef at Husk, she became known for her versions of chocolate church cake, Carolina Gold rice pudding and especially her buttermilk chess pie, adorned with whatever fruits came from local orchards. I watched and learned and was quietly writing blueprints for my own life.