Restaurant couples get creative in the kitchen to celebrate love
By Kate Bernot February 9, 2012 3:02PM
Yvonne Cadiz-Kim, who owns Belly Shack with her husband, chef Bill Kim, likes to surprise him with last-minute vacations. | Rich Hein~Sun-Times
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Updated: February 9, 2012 5:09PM
New Year’s Eve aside, Valentine’s Day is the couples’ holiday that bears the weight of the highest expectations. There are flowers to buy, cards to write, and, certainly, dinner reservations to be made. But while the public settles down to a romantic meal at a candlelit restaurant, the chefs and kitchen staff must spend their evening apart from their spouses, fiances and significant others. That is, of course, unless the pair works together.
For a handful of chefs in Chicago, Valentine’s Day dinner is spent with a spouse, but not over wine and white tablecloths. Instead, they’re working as a team to ensure that their restaurants live up to diners’ expectations on one of the busiest and most challenging nights of the year. In an industry that is notoriously difficult to balance with personal relationships, Valentine’s Day could be a tough annual reminder of what chef-owners sacrifice for the sake of business. As two chefs prove, however, working alongside your spouse can have its own blessings — if you don’t mind forgetting about Feb. 14.
“For a while when I was working at Carnivale, there were times that it was really bad. We were working a lot, a lot, a lot,” says Mark Mendez, chef and owner of Vera, whose wife, Elizabeth, is the restaurant’s wine director. “I remember leaving a note at home on the kitchen table for her that just said: ‘HI.’ ”
The pace hasn’t slowed down for the Mendezes, who are still working late nights since opening Vera in October. The key to keeping their marriage strong, they say, is finding creative ways and times to communicate with each other, including using Facebook to leave each other messages and sharing the restaurant’s staff meal together. “I don’t know that we celebrate Valentine’s Day, but we definitely treasure the days that we have that are spent at home together,” Liz says. Because the husband and wife are often apart for lunch and dinner, breakfast is a favorite meal for them to cook at home. Dishes like chilaquiles and biscuits and gravy are improvised and shared together before the hectic pace of the day begins.
Another restaurant-owning couple, Urban Belly’s chef Bill Kim and his wife, Yvonne Cadiz-Kim, also are preparing for some long hours. The pair, who already operates Urban Belly and Belly Shack, will open an Asian barbecue restaurant called Belly Q on Randolph Street this spring. The laid-back chef, Bill, and the outgoing, stylish front-of-house manager, Yvonne, complement — and compliment — each other at the restaurant, but it’s important to them that they make a life together away from work.
“At the end of the day, we go home. We shut it down. We don’t talk about work,” says husband Bill. “And our days off are our days off. We shut both restaurants down one day a week so we can spend time with each other.”
The Kims also stay sane by taking periodic vacations, which Cadiz-Kim plans and then springs on her husband at the last moment. She says the sneakiness ensures that chef Kim won’t stress in advance about leaving the business. This past December, she booked them a trip to Puerto Rico, only telling her husband to pack for warm weather and have his passport ready.
“The challenge of having to worry about every single solitary thing at the restaurant makes it hard to be a proper couple,” says Cadiz-Kim. “We have such a really solid staff that the infrastructure of the work environment enables us to step away. If we didn’t have that, we wouldn’t be able to take that time for each other.”
The Kims don’t have plans to take any trips for Valentine’s Day, mostly because they ignore those sorts of holidays. “One thing we don’t do is buy presents for each other. We don’t celebrate birthdays, either,” Bill Kim says.
His wife immediately adds, “I always say, if we wake up together, that’s a birthday. Every day is a holiday. Every day is an anniversary. Every day is a moment to celebrate your union. That’s what we try to do. Not literally; we don’t wake up and toast champagne, but we celebrate the opportunity to be with each other.”
The pair says that this sort of philosophy keeps them from placing too much emphasis on calendar dates, which, as anyone who’s sat through a forced Valentine’s Day dinner will later declare, are arbitrary.
“I think the expectations and those pressures can set you up for more drama because you build it up,” says Cadiz-Kim. “If you treat every moment that you have when you’re together and alone as Valentine’s Day, it doesn’t matter that it’s not in February. You have that opportunity every day.”
Kate Bernot is a local free-lance writer.
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