I came to the US over 20 years ago with one suitcase and $500. Today, I get to unlock the doors to allmine every day.
There are a lot of years, a lot of work and a lot of people between those two sentences. I am grateful for every bit of it.
I didn’t know what my life here would eventually look like, and I certainly couldn’t have imagined that one day I would be sitting in a restaurant in California that I owned, writing a Labor Day note to the people who grace us with their presence and appreciate the work that we do.
What I did know was how to work.
I have always had a slightly unreasonable relationship with the word impossible. That tenacity carried me through more than two decades, countless restaurants, hotel hallways, hundreds of meetings and trainings, a master's degree, some fun failures and a few magnificent leaps of faith, until the girl with the suitcase became the woman with the keys.
And America gave me room to do something with all of that.
And I tell you all this today, because Labor Day means something particular to me:
Labor Day is a day to recognize the dignity and value of work, and the people whose work makes everyday life possible. It is a reminder that work is rarely just the thing we see at the end. It is actually everything that happened before.
Sitting at the counter at allmine, you get to see the show. You watch one of our cooks stretch a ball of dough, spoon tomato sauce across it, scatter cheese and sausage over the top and slide it into the oven. A few minutes later, there is a pizza in front of you, and it can look wonderfully simple from your seat.
That moment is, of course, the climax but it is also only the tip of the iceberg.
We started building that pizza three days earlier, when we made the dough and began its slow fermentation. With time in the oven and just a touch of herbs, tomatoes became sauce, while well-fed, locally sourced pork was seasoned, made into sausage and then smoked. After a long journey from Italy, wheels of cheese were grated and blended, and the mozzarella was stretched. Vegetables delivered from the farm were washed, trimmed, roasted, confit or pickled. Herbs were picked, sauces were tasted and adjusted. By the time you watch the cook stretch that dough, most of the work behind your pizza has already happened. And of course the same is true about all the layers of our beloved lasagna.
What you are witnessing is the last act.
The dining room has its own version of everything that happens before the curtain goes up. We taste and study until the menu becomes familiar enough to talk about without reaching for the words, and we move through the room again and again until carrying a plate, clearing a table or stepping aside for guests becomes instinct. We learn to see beyond our own immediate task, to notice the table that needs water or the teammate whose hands are full, and to understand what needs to happen next because we don't talk, but we communitcate. In our little restaurant, the kitchen, the bar and the dining room are all part of the same stage, so there really is no backstage. How we move, how we speak to one another, even the volume of our voices becomes part of the experience in the room.
We rehearse because when the doors open, we want all of that practice to disappear into the performance.
Hospitality has a certain choreography to it. A plate arrives, an empty glass is noticed, someone clears a table while someone else resets it, the kitchen knows what the dining room needs and the dining room knows what is coming from the kitchen. When we have done our homework well, all of those individual movements become one seamless experience, and you, maybe without realizing it, feel taken care of and comfortable.
There is tremendous dignity in the work that makes something complex look simple. I have been the beneficiary of that work, and I have built my life around it. I also know that nothing I have built has been built by me alone.
This Labor Day, I am especially grateful for my team, who bring their own skill, ambition, histories and hard work through our doors every day. I am grateful for our farmers, producers, makers, vendors, drivers and everyone else whose work becomes part of ours. Long before we opened the doors this morning, so many people had already done their part.
We are open today. Come spend part of your Labor Day with us. The doors are open, and we’re ready for the show.
food that hugs you back
Roxana and your allmine family
