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. I wandered into that restaurant in 2005, a few months after my daughter Maggie Donovan turned one and when the restaurant itself was just four years old - which is a strange thing to realize in retrospect. She opened Margot Café & Bar in 2001, and it is still a pillar of high standards and delicious food to this day. She came up in the era of Kitchen Confidential lore. Born and raised in Nashville, Margot was a chef in New York City when being a chef in New York City meant something.
Margot Café is known as the South’s Chez Panisse and Margot its Alice Waters. Gratefully, I’m not easily scared off.īuy Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger on Amazon or Bookshop. I was immediately attracted to Margot’s focus. She had high standards, and she did not care if you liked her. If I remember correctly, I had heard from a friend of a friend that Margot was hiring but that she was, notably, “a battle‑ax” and “a straight‑up bitch.” I would soon learn that this meant those with that opinion simply did not have what it took or were not passionate enough to deserve to stay in her orbit. I did not even know restaurants of that caliber existed until I walked in to apply for a job at hers. All the while, on the east side of town, there was a restaurant serving classic French food, simple and fresh and perfectly executed. Schlepping pastry and bread and cakes out of an apartment on the west side of town, waiting tables at a shit-hole tavern, I was very far from Margot McCormack’s world. But while invigorating, she realizes that her role as a restaurant server with sights set on a career in the industry might be incompatible with her other roles: spouse to John and mother of two.
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. In this excerpt, Donovan recounts the career influence of another woman: Nashville chef and restaurant owner Margot McCormack. Throughout, she relates her own narrative and relationship to food to those of her mother and grandmothers. The memoir traces Donovan’s path to becoming a celebrated pastry chef, including at Sean Brock restaurant Husk in Nashville, where she developed her signature buttermilk chess pie and endured a particularly toxic working environment. ” With Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger, Donovan is doing just that.
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.
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