“Southern Fork” podcast producer Stephanie Burt has covered the Southern food scene for more than a decade, and her bonds with restaurant workers in her hometown of Charleston, South Carolina, run especially deep. But when Charleston’s restaurants and caterers closed their doors in mid-March, many of the chefs just couldn’t stop cooking. This is how two of them find sanity in the rhythms of the kitchen, even if it’s the kitchen at home.
By Stephanie Burt
April 30, 2020
Cheyenne Bond says the kitchen of her Charleston home is redolent with the scent of “kombucha funk.” We’re speaking via phone, and she pauses and says, “Whoo, this one needs to be fed!” It’s one of three jars she had bubbling and frothing away on her counter, each striped with blue tape bearing the date and the flavors: Maple, Apple Ginger, Strawberry Mango. Her roommate had brought home a SCOBY (“symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast”), or kombucha mother, after a make-it-yourself workshop six months ago, and it had languished in the back of the fridge until around March 21, when after a few days of unemployment, Bond realized she needed a project besides just working out. That was before she’d realized, with a sinking feeling, that “this thing wasn’t going to just be a couple of weeks,” before she’d hacked a shrub in the yard of her James Island home, before she’d gone a little too far in trimming it and then temporarily abandoned the project, leaving limbs scattered like storm damage on the sidewalk adjacent, returning inside to skim more of Noma’s Guide to Fermentation.
When the kombucha project ends, she’ll have around 120 ounces of “full-bodied, in your face kombucha” in repurposed bottles from a juicing routine, almost a gallon she and her roommate will have to drink before making more. It’s way too much for two people, but that’s not stopping her. She can’t sit still and she is done (for now) trying to tackle more landscaping, though she has planted edible flowers and herbs. It’s onto bread next, she figures.
Cheyenne Bond’s kitchen is ripe with the aroma of “full-bodied, in your face kombucha,” more than she and her roommate can drink. The chef de cuisine of Cannon Green thinks she’ll probably move to bread next since, she says, she can’t sit still.
Bond was in high school when she started her first restaurant job as a snack bar attendant for Sandpiper Lanes on Ashley Phosphate Road, only a few minutes from her home in Summerville, just up Interstate 26 from Charleston. She’d drop cheese sticks and french fries into hot oil and stand over the hot grease. She started thinking she’d like to taste more varieties of food than just this — more varieties than the five meals her mom made each week. She set out to learn how to cook. She took her first cooking job in 2003 at Denny’s, a place she worked on and off for 12 years.
“Sure, it’s all processed and stuff, but I was able to make things on my own, start experimenting with what was already in the kitchen to be creative,” she explains. “And I was a punk kid and never finished culinary school.” So she was in and out of jobs, from Waffle House general manager and line cook, to working her first finer-dining gig at a Charleston hotel. Then a headhunter for Cannon Green convinced her to take an interview. Because she was living in a rundown apartment in Summerville, she says, she went for it. She was hired on the spot on August 26, 2015, as a part-time line cook.
To make ends meet, she kept up a side gig making deliveries for Domino’s. The morning after she was robbed for cheesy bread and a medium pizza, she went into Cannon Green and scored full-time hours. Since then, she’s been working her way through the ranks while falling in love with menu development, the art of plating the ingredients, working with the staff, and her growing role as chef de cuisine for Cannon Green, the banquet side of the property.
“I like that I get to do different things for each client,” she says, “and I’m kind of a mama bear for my team.”
Bond has been standing on her feet 12 to 14 hours for the better part of two decades. On March 18, after one last day at Cannon Green, where she felt the work in banquets finally suited her, those long hours stopped and became a waiting, a purgatory: knowing that to do what you do, what you’ve done since that snack bar in high school, was suddenly no longer an option. For now.
Cannon Green is an event venue spanning the interior of a block between Cannon and Spring streets on the Charleston peninsula. There’s an open-to-the-public tasting-menu restaurant named Wild Common at one end of the block and a banquet room at the other, joined by a courtyard. In some ways, it’s an embodiment of the new Charleston, once a hodgepodge set of buildings now renovated into tropical-isle-resort splendor to attract the weddings and events that make Charleston one of the leading destinations in the country. String lights glow softly over perfectly manicured sod and palmetto trees, surrounded by two terraces, making a modern Charleston courtyard without the wrought iron, without the moss-covered brick. There is one big prep kitchen out of sight behind the banquet space, and then at the front, an open kitchen for Wild Common. During events or dinner service, staff would swell with hourly workers, but the prep kitchen was always the beating heart of the space, with six to eight cooks working to create tastings to woo event clients or conversely, prep all the food that would then be hauled nightly — in hotel pans and Cambros, on carts and speed racks — up to the Wild Common kitchen for dinner service.
On March 18, the last day its doors were open, the place buzzed with the activity of shutting down that restaurant and event space. The HR department had been in good contact over the week before as the closings escalated across the country, and that morning, the staff knew they were laid off. But there was work to be done.
Restaurant work is all about margins, all about prep, and all about teamwork, so there were some things they could freeze: stock, some vegetables, some meat. But so much is so fresh, purchased and processed weekly to be the freshest for each guest, that a lot would have to go home with the staff. Bond and the executive chef of Wild Common, Orlando Pagán, took charge while staff cleaned walk-in coolers, locked doors, and moved refrigerators to disinfect the floors beneath them.
“The management had been in conversation with us, but all was happening really fast,” Pagán says. “The last thing I made was a small production of duck stock, about eight quarts, and when I went in Wednesday morning, I knew we were laid off and I put that in the freezer. My sous, Zack, and I just started working, breaking everything down, and shutting down the kitchen.”
Hours of backbreaking work, fast yet methodical, and suddenly, the task was ending. Managers called hourly staff to tell them they could come and pick up food if they wanted it. Staff walked to the employee parking lot a few doors down then drove their cars back to the entrance, parking like a frozen caravan, then popping trunks and opening car doors to pack flats of eggs, leeks, an opened jar of Luxardo cherries that wouldn’t keep at the bar, or a block of cream cheese that might be good for a cheesecake.
“It was a weird feeling, like a storm was coming,” Pagán says. “And all of the sudden, we got in our cars and drove away.”
They’d all discussed how it wasn’t right to keep the restaurant open, to endanger guests and employees, but still it felt like something was very wrong.
“It felt like we broke up with the restaurant, broke up with each other but we didn’t,” Pagan says. “All my tools are still there.”
And when Pagán arrived home, a 25-minute drive out to suburban West Ashley, he greeted his wife and children, and immediately sensed a new beginning.
“This was going to be a new phase, probably more dark in this journey than light, and I wanted to start us on the right path,” he says.
So he had to cook. He made it into an occasion, firing up the grill for a nice dinner for his family and opening a good bottle of wine. The next morning, “I clocked into this kitchen, and it’s kind of weird, but basically I’m cooking all day, breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the family,” he says.
Like many, Pagán is turning out sourdough bread, now up to three loaves daily. He’s had the starter for years in his fridge from his time in San Francisco, and he’d bake occasionally for friends or family. But Pagán had never done it (what he would term) “professionally,” neither in his mami’s kitchen in his native Puerto Rico, nor in restaurants in Miami when he moved to the United States in 1999, nor since in California and now Charleston. Now, things are unfamiliar.
Orlando Pagán resurrected some sourdough that languished in the back of his fridge since his time in San Francisco. The executive chef at Wild Common never baked “professionally,” and has taken it up the rhythm and challenge of baking 3 loaves a day.
“Something about restaurants in general, not just the kitchen, it was like a drug,” he says. “I love it when it is busy, it was fun and hostile, but you know what I mean? In a good way,” he says a little wistfully. “And I want to go fast, I want to be there. I was the son of a single mom for a long time, and she was always doing her best. I want to be the best.”
Each day, he proofs the bread that is 82% hydration, 93% bread flour with a little whole wheat. It proofs for four hours in bulk, then rests in the fridge until he’s ready to bake. He’s labeled everything in blue tape, which he insists be cut instead of torn — proofer, ingredients, drawers — and at day’s end, after baking bread and selling it for a $8 a loaf to his neighbors (“I’m not trying to get rich, just make enough to keep going”), he cleans the whole kitchen, just like he’d require of his staff at Wild Common. He likes to look down at the flour on his T-shirt. It makes him proud. It shows work.
“I make the same loaf,” Pagán says. “I want to keep learning. Every time I make it, I want to be better.”
It’s a rhythm, it’s a practice, it’s a compulsion. Even on the days he doesn’t feel well, he cooks. Pagán is in treatment for multiple sclerosis. It can make him weak, it can make him forget words sometimes, and now it opens him up to this virus, because MS compromises his immune system. So he goes out only when he needs ingredients. He goes instead of his wife because she has asthma. He’s learning about the supply chain of home cooking, figuring out how to order groceries. The other day after treatment, Pagán scored a 50-pound bag of flour from a wholesale distributor he’d worked with in restaurants. He stored that in a large can, labeled neatly in black ink on blue tape, beside the other flours he’s collected for his kitchen: rice, rye, spelt, chickpea, and quinoa. He rests and takes care of his health, hugs his kids and plays with them in the backyard. He says he’s happy for this time off, the most he’s spent with Paige, 5, and Sebastian, 3, since they were born. But he’ll keep baking those loaves, calculating at the end of each day how he might add jam-making into the mix if he can buy enough sugar.
We all live in this waiting, this space of stolen hours, where bubbles of joy emerge from the intense pain of the crumbling of how we built our lives. It’s purgatory, this space between lockdown and what comes next. Before, we were learning what to do with ourselves, how to work remotely if that was even an option, how to educate our children, how to cope. Now, we live in a frayed patchwork of rules and regulations that vary state by state. Our stress increases as we watch others do what we don’t think they should, be it government, those we see on beaches or at statehouses, or those we love.
Purgatory has come for all of us, but for chefs like those I meet in my work, there seems little way to stop acting like they work in a professional kitchen, even if they don’t right now. The kitchen is more home than home, and the act of making food is how cooks process the world. And making enough food to share, too much for just a household, is how many have worked for decades.
Work, in fact, is how they experience the world; work is the rhythm, and work is the communication. When that work, those years of heat and burns and mind-numbing repetition leads to success that you or I could partake in by just eating their food … well, now, that’s communing. We shared in their success, if only a little, just by taking a bite. But Bond and Pagán, and so many others like them, are still cooking in home kitchens with dull knives and no range hoods, cooking because they don’t know what else to do, cooking because, in the past, when things got hard or sad, when they had breakups or fights with family, or were late on the rent, they got through it by cooking, by moving, by making order out of the mess with blue tape and clear lettering.
They know this “phase” might not be a phase at all. They know their paths are already changed, the rhythm of their days and careers sent skipping like a needle on a warped record. But the music is still there, and they can still hear it, like a song played so often it echoes even in silence. They keep moving to that music. They have to keep the process going. They have to keep cooking.
