Welcome back to the CulinaryWoman Newsletter, and a special welcome to our new readers and subscribers. It’s been hot across much of the country, so I hope you are reading this somewhere cool.
I also know that COVID-19 has brought about a great contraction in the food business. We’re seeing all kinds of places close, from coffee bars to those with Michelin stars and James Beard Award winning chefs.
This week, I’d like you to meet someone who is pushing through the challenges everyone is facing, although it’s meant some significant changes.
In Memphis, Kat Gordon’s Bakery Looks At A Reset
Kat Gordon admits she knew absolutely nothing about running a business when she opened Muddy’s Bake Shop in Memphis on Leap Day, 2008.
“It’s not something you would recommend to anyone you care about,” Gordon says, laughing. “Oh, sure, open a small business in a recession and do it in a field where you have no background, and do it with no money.”
She liked to bake cookies and cakes in her spare time, and found it far more interesting than selling real estate and working retail. So, despite a caution from her parents, and with her friends’ encouragement, she decided to take the plunge.
Naming the bakery after her grandmother, she managed a build out for around $30,000, taking over what had been a coffee shop that lacked a commercial kitchen. Rather than do an immediate renovation, she installed what was basically a souped up residential kitchen.
“I’d never used a stand mixer. I bought a KitchenAid after I signed the lease,” she says. “I really thought the lesson God in this was for me to fail.”
In between painting chairs and hunting down quirky decor, the then-26-year-old would regularly talk out loud to a higher power, hoping no one heard her.
“I was praying and praying, ‘give me a passion. What am I supposed to do?’ Meanwhile, people were calling and ordering cake.”
Kat says she had heard the term “soft opening,” and figured that meant she would have a month to get the shop up and running.
Instead, she was so busy from the start that customers jumped behind the counter to help her box up baked goods. Ladies would come in and have coffee, and then bus their own dishes to the kitchen.
“I always tell new staff that the person they are waiting on at the counter might be someone who came in and helped out that first year,” she says.
Like coming over for cake
Kat’s original bakery in East Memphis has a prep area visible to people when they walk in the door, and that’s exactly the atmosphere that she was aiming for.
“I wanted people to feel like they were coming to my house and I was giving them food,” she said.
Initially, she had to tell customers not to stand too close to the cash register, or they might run into a baker stocking a case.
Her lineup included cupcakes, including her specialty, the Prozac Cupcake (devil’s food cake with a light butter cream icing), chocolate chip cookies, and Plain Jane cake, a vanilla layer cake with vanilla butter cream.
She believes Memphis residents had a hankering for old-style baked goods. “Memphis used to have some little bakeries and a great grocery store bakery,” says Kat. “And then, for a couple of decades, we were in this wasteland of really bad grocery store bakeries.”
She’s convinced her emphasis on a homey atmosphere fueled her success.
“We’ve just done a nice job of staying real and having a personality, which strangely is hard,” Kat says. “With as many tools as there are, every 18-year-old is aware of the concept of personal brand, which is crazy.”
When the bakery opened, Facebook and Twitter were only a few years old, and Instagram was two years away from creation. “I would never survive now with the expectations on what a space should look like and how ‘Instagram’ it is,” Kat says.
Although she posts vibrant pictures on her social media accounts, she finds promotion requires a balance, too. “There’s a flattening, like a TV show that runs too long, and the characters start to be like caricatures instead of personalities.”
What saved her from becoming too commercial — or giving into the urge to franchise — was the vision she created for her bakery.
“I think of the business as a person instead of a business. It’s not all sweet like Grandma. It’s more like your slightly eccentric aunt who will make you chocolate chip cookies for breakfast.”
She goes on, “Not your mom, not your best friend, you don’t necessarily want to live there, but wow do you love to visit.”
After amassing a pile of admiring press clippings, and sterling online reviews, Muddy’s eventually expanded into three locations (customers could shop at two, while the other was a prep kitchen), and took on 59 staff members. She wound up 2019 with revenues of $2.5 million.
And then came the pandemic
When COVID-19 struck Tennessee, Kat shut down her locations for several months, and only recently began taking orders for pickup on weekends.
Along with baked goods, she added take and bake items like chicken pot pie, seasonal fruit crisp, pie crust, and some groceries.
The first quarter “was looking really great,” Kat says. “Q2, I have no idea,” nor can she predict where her revenue will end up for 2020.
Like many people in the culinary world, Kat often sounds a little dazed when talking about what COVID-19 has done to her bakery.
“It’s almost like having a near-death experience,” she says. “Running this business is so hard, and it’s going to be hard for the next several years.”
She continues, “We have no idea what the next three months will look like. What will success look like when we re-open?”
Kat says it would be “really compelling if we could get back to $2 million” in annual revenue. But she is not planning on it all coming through coming through the bakery.
After taking training classes at ZingTrain, the training arm of the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses in Ann Arbor, Mich., Kat decided to create her own training program.
She offers a version of the visioning course that is a ZingTrain signature class (with its blessing). The course asks business owners and others to envision where they will be in five years, and figure out some of the steps that are needed to get there.
In the process, she’s looked back at the vision she wrote in 2015 for 2020. It’s no longer compelling, she says, to be planning for a business that simply keeps growing.
Now, she’s actually embracing the opportunity to jettison things that no longer work, and get back to her original, fun approach. She hopes the same rebirth that comes from pruning an old rosebush or getting a post COVID hair cut, which some of us have yet to do.
“I feel like I’m shedding,” she says. “I’ve had (downsizing) in my head for a couple of years now. It’s an interesting silver lining” to what the pandemic has wrought.
CulinaryWoman Of The Week
Like many television viewers, I first discovered Carla Hall during Season Five of Bravo TV’s Top Chef, and I was immediately charmed. She had an infectious personality and she looked to be a great Southern cook. She didn’t win (trivia: can you name that season’s winner?), but it was clear that she was going to become a culinary personality.
In fact, she’s become a bona fide television star, on programs like ABC-TV’s The Chew, even as her career had some fits and starts. Her Brooklyn restaurant, Carla Hall’s Southern Kitchen, folded after about a year, and The Chew went off the air in 2018 following the sexual harassment scandal involving Mario Batali.
But, beyond all that, Carla has played a role in America’s culinary education. In 2016, she advised the founders of the National Museum of African American History and Culture on the dishes that are served in the Sweet Home Cafe.
The museum itself is a fantastic experience, and if you haven’t gone, you should try to visit as soon as it reopens. Leave yourself several hours, and be prepared to be deeply moved.
You also should spare time to eat, because the food is spectacular - way beyond typical museum food. The cafe’s offerings are divided into four regions: the North States, Agricultural South, Creole Coast and Western Range. (Do not miss the desserts.)
Growing up in Tennessee, Carla thought that Black families all ate like hers, so the project was a learning experience for her as well as museum visitors. And for her personally, it was part of a shift in the way she views herself.
I interviewed her last year about her decision to move away from a more-general Southern persona and embrace her Black identity. A key reason was a DNA test that pinpointed the location of her African roots.
Those test results inspired her to insist that her next cookbook become Carla Hall’s Soul Food, and to embrace the Smithsonian project.
“The realization is the most important thing," Carla said. "Once somebody decides they are a thing, everything changes. Their perspective about themselves changes."
I’m a big fan of Carla’s social media accounts, particularly her Instagram, which is full fun photos and videos. Lately, she’s been a judge on the Netflix show Crazy Delicious, and she is teaching weekly live classes on the Food Network’s app.
When we talked last year, she shared some words of wisdom that can apply now as we’re picking up the pieces from COVID-19.
“I truly believe you will never, ever get there by being safe. If you don’t feel some form of uncomfortable and growing out of the old, you will never get there.”
I’m delighted to name Carla Hall as our CulinaryWoman of the Week.
A Cookbook To Know About
The Happy Pear: Vegan Cooking For Everyone
Stephen Flynn and David Flynn
If you watch the Netflix series, Somebody Feed Phil, you will know about the Happy Pear — or in their case, pair. Irish twin brothers David and Stephen Flynn have a shop, a popular YouTube account and a series of cookbooks under that name. All their food is organic and healthy, and it looks delicious, especially their signature overnight oats.
The brothers are avid fitness enthusiasts, diving into frigid ocean waters at dawn and breaking into planks and pushups at the drop of a hat. They’re an excellent follow on Instagram if only for their joyous energy.
I have toyed with the idea of becoming a vegan, although I would face a real challenge giving up fried chicken. Still, I try to eat vegetarian about 80 percent of the time. This cookbook is likely to help me make some progress on that goal.
What I’m up to
Do you drink cold brew coffee? Allen Leibowitz, formerly the managing partner at Zingerman’s Coffee and now with Pit Crew Coffee Service, introduced me to it about a dozen years ago. After I got too jittery from the caffeine, he kindly made me a test batch of decaf cold brew that he called Micki’s D. (Somehow, I haven’t yet convinced Zingerman’s to put it into production.)
Since then, just about everyone in the coffee business has embraced cold brew. From the original simple recipe, it’s turning into a base for lots of different flavors, at places like Peet’s and Starbucks. I wrote about cold brew’s flavorful summer here.
Shake Shack used to be the darling of the quick service restaurant business, but it is having a pretty terrible summer. First, it got in trouble for taking PPP money that was supposed to go to small businesses (although it now turns out that lots of different places, large and small, got those loans).
Then, COVID-19 forced it to close its stores, and it hasn’t reopened all of them yet because it wasn’t completely set up to do contactless pick up. Its same store sales in the second quarter were just terrible, although it’s vowing to open new stores and regroup.
Send me feedback and ideas!
Are there some culinary people you’d like me to talk with, or are you spotting trends I should know about? I’d love to hear directly from you. Email me at mamayn@aol.com.
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Feel free to share this newsletter. Stay healthy, wear a mask, and see you next Sunday.