Mary Ellen Diaz - Transcript
Transcript of Ann Louise Haak
Interviewee: Ann Louise Haak
Interviewer: Dorothy Nygren
Date: December 13, 2017
Place: First Slice, 5357 N Ashland Ave., Chicago, IL.
Transcriber: Dorothy Nygren
Time: 29 minutes 40 seconds
Copyright © 2018 Edgewater Historical Society
DN: This is Dorothy Nygren with Martin Stewart of the Edgewater Historical Society. We’re at First Slice, 5357 N Ashland on December 13, 2017 interviewing Ann Louise Haak about Mary Ellen Diaz, who started the First Slice initiative to help less fortunate people in the Edgewater community. Thank you for taking time to meet with us Ann Louise. I know this whole initiative has just blossomed and grown into your neck of the woods which we will talk about a little bit later. The first question I would like to ask you is how did Mary Ellen start in community work? What motivated her to get involved?
AH: It’s interesting because the roots of First Slice, as you know, are deeply embedded here in the Edgewater community. Mary Ellen is a well-trained, fancy pants chef, as I call her, who among other places, studied at the Cordon Bleu in France. She and her family were living here in Edgewater, in Andersonville, right around the time their son Henry joined their family. He’s now taller than me. That was awhile ago. Mary Ellen was home on maternity leave from her position as executive chef at a Lettuce Entertain You restaurant taking care of Henry and his older sister, Thea, trying to figure out how she was going to marry her passion for restaurant work and her tremendous culinary skills with a more balanced life that would allow her time to be home while her kids grew up, to be home in time for bedtime stories and not at the restaurant running the restaurant.
(2:30)
While she was home on maternity leave, she connected with the soup kitchen that was being run out of Ebenezer Lutheran Church on Forster Avenue. Mary Ellen, being a chef with time on her hands, saw an opportunity to cook and said, “Oh, yeah. I’d love to come and cook someday.” That was really the start of First Slice, when she experienced first-hand and in a very personal way, what it meant for her to take her skills and apply them to feeding a very different demographic than the folks she was used to feeding at her work. But it was just a really vibrant connection with people that she saw and really felt what it meant to provide a nutritious, delicious, lovingly prepared meal for folks that were really in need. All of a sudden, she sort of realized that the folks that were dining in my restaurant on Printer’s Row and North Pond, who pay hundreds of dollars for a meal, in some ways they don’t need my food like the folks in our community really do.
(3:38)
DN: How did that grow into four different First Slices?
AH: The irony is that as Mary Ellen was at home with two small children, she realized that even she was having a really hard time getting dinner on the table. [Chuckles] and she thought, ”Well, if I can’t get dinner on the table on time and I’m a professional chef, how does anyone make this happen?” This was early 2000s. It was long before all these mail order dinner companies that you can now subscribe to.
(4:28)
She started the first subscriber meal program out of the kitchen at Ebenezer Lutheran Church. She put the word out that she was going to start this plan that individuals and families could sign up to receive three meals a week that would be prepared by Mary Ellen and a team of volunteers. They would do all the cooking ahead of time, freeze most of the food, and then some of it would be fresh, but all assembled. So you’d get everything you’d need for a Caesar salad all in one little kit. Folks would come in and pick up their meals on the weekends, or in church on Sunday, and take them home. With the income that was generated from that program, Mary Ellen and her volunteers would then make more of the same food. For example, for professional chefs cooking for a hundred and fifty is as easy as cooking for a hundred. With the profits from the meal subscriber program – for example if they were making chicken tetrazzini for the meal subscriber families, they would just double that amount. Literally half the food would go to the paying subscribers and the other half would go straight upstairs to be served at the soup kitchen that was being run at that time out of the church.
(5:57)
I think one of the things that has always been important at First Slice, and certainly has always been important to Mary Ellen, is recognizing that there are people in our community, there are folks that are our neighbors who are really struggling; battling with food insecurities; maybe on the brink of homelessness; trying to figure out which bill not to pay so they can pay something else. From the very beginning First Slice has been all about giving back directly to the community where we are involved. Absolutely in the beginning the food was cooked at Ebenezer Lutheran Church and the food that didn’t go out to our paying customers went right upstairs to be fed to folks in need in our community.
First Slice has grown over the years. We now have four locations. The meal program subscriber program is still at the heart of what we do but also this idea of giving back to the community where our cafes are located, sort of combatting this myth that people in need, people who are homeless, are far away somewhere. They are right here in our community.
It’s interesting. One of our partner organizations currently is Epiphany United Church of Christ, which is in the North Center neighborhood, right at Damen and Bradley. That church is home to the Common Pantry, which is a food bank that is open on Wednesday night. So again, people in the community and this is a community with million dollar homes, once a week when people come to shop for their non-perishable items, the church also opens its doors and serves a free hot meal. So they can shop and have dinner all at one time in one experience. Now that really is important to us to be strengthening the community of the places where we work and live.
(8:14)
DN: Now, could you talk a little but about First Slice’s name, how that evolved and what it symbolizes?
AH: Sure. When Mary Ellen opened up North Pond restaurant in Lincoln Park, one of the things on the menu that that place was famous for at the time, was their pies. Mary Ellen loves to make pie and is a master baker. But the name First Slice – yes, it reflects the pies we make, but it really comes from the idea that we give the first slice, the best cut, to folks who are hungry and in need, not just whatever is left over at the end of the meal. We talk about serving people with dignity, not feeding them the crust. Pie is such a communal food. A cupcake is for one person. Right? A piece of cake is for one person. A cookie is for one person. But a pie is meant to be shared and it’s easy to cut it up into portions that allow lots of people to be fed, not just one.
(9:40)
DN: As you said it started from a soup kitchen at Ebenezer [Lutheran Church] and expanded to four locations, how many needy people are you feeding at this point?
AH: Currently we’re providing about six hundred meals each week through our outreach program. Over the years as we’ve grown and strengthened our program, we’ve figured out the best ways to get our healthy, nutritious, delicious meal in front of the folks who need it the most. Currently we have partnerships with other non-profit organizations and the majority of the meals are served through those partners. For example, I know anyone living in, or even visiting the city of Chicago, does not spend much time on our city streets before they meet a Streetwise vendor. So five days a week we serve free, hot, restaurant quality meal to all the Streetwise vendors at their job training site, which is at the corner of Wilson and Broadway in the Uptown neighborhood. So the overwhelming majority of our meals are served are provided through our partner organizations, partly because we want to make sure that our food is getting to folks who really need it and also because we like to partner with local organizations so that our meal is part of some other wrap around services and support that folks are getting.
(11:15)
AH: However, having said that, each of our cafes does have a little cadre of folks in need who are welcome to have a free meal once a day, whenever they stop at the cafe. In fact I was in here just last night when one of our regulars came in. His name is Jeffrey. He was walking around handing out flyers for something or other. Jeffrey is a regular here. He came in and a staff member working behind the counter said, “Oh, can I get you a cup of hot chocolate tonight to take with you on your rounds?”
DN: I think that’s a great example of dignity and respect given to people who might not get it from the ordinary person…
AH: Right….
DN: …and what that does for someone is, as they say, priceless.
(12:08)
AH: Here at First Slice we appreciate good food but we also recognize the importance of food. It doesn’t only nourish our physical body. It nourishes our spirits as well. Sometimes customers come in and they want help picking out a slice of pie. I’ll tell them that our French Silk pie is more effective than therapy if you’ve had a rough day. It costs a lot less. It’s much quicker acting. There are many ways to meet a need or to fill a hungry belly. I guess there’s a time and place for everything, but one of the examples I often use is if you’re hungry you can go to the drive through at McDonald’s and grab a meal that will fill you up for the moment. But if you’re hungry and you know that you are sitting down to a home cooked meal shared around the table with people you know and love who maybe made your favorite pot roast and mashed potatoes with just you in mind – there’s a different kind of sustenance you get from that kind of meal. Not only are you physically fed, but your spirit is nurtured as well. At First Slice we really want to meet the needs of all the folks in our outreach program and feed them with that kind of love and dignity.
DN: In addition to feeding people as customers and feeding people in your outreach program, I think your employees also get fed by the work they do and nurtured. Could you talk about that a little?
(14:18)
AH: Well, we hope so. We certainly hope so. The restaurant industry is a tough one to work in. I was reading in the paper this morning about some big name chefs who are coming out, stepping aside from the day to day operations of their organizations because people are beginning to speak up about the ways they have been treated unfairly in the workplace. So the restaurant industry is not an easy one to work in. It also doesn’t have a very large profit margin, which makes our work even harder to do; to try to turn a profit so that we in turn can feed folks in need. Absolutely all of our staff play a huge part in helping us achieve our mission. It’s also interesting. People will say to me, “Does First Slice have a job training program, hire people who are at risk?” They kind of get us confused with some of the charitable restaurants in the city. To which I say, “It’s not a formal part of our program, but it’s absolutely a part of our informal part of our program.” We do hire folks who have previous criminal records. We are very up front in our interviewing and hiring process but that does not have to an obstacle for someone to come on board and work with us. When Inspiration Kitchens was running their sort of culinary skills program to provide some job training for folks who had barriers to their employment, we hired folks out of their job training program to be part of our permanent staff. We’ve also hired LGBTQ youth who have been kicked out of their homes by their parents. There is definitely a family feel to supporting and encouraging all of our employees, whether they’re with us for a short time or a long term.
(16:12)
We do have a handful of employees who have been with us since the very very early days before we had any dedicated space of our own, when we were just cooking out of the kitchen at Ebenezer Lutheran Church. Those are folks that we really wanted to….Actually I should pause and back up and say that the individual who is currently serving as our executive chef, Carlos Contreras, he met Mary Ellen over twenty years ago when he was working as a dishwasher in a fancy downtown restaurant where she was running the kitchen. He was in his teens and a newly arrived immigrant from Ecuador and she saw in him a real drive and a real commitment and an astounding work ethic. When she left that kitchen, she said to him, “Come with me to the next kitchen I’m going to run.” Over the years that cadre, that group of folks has grown, and they’re helping run First Slice today. And that’s great! In one of our kitchens there’s a picture of those guys when they were eighteen or nineteen years old sitting in one of the fancy restaurants where they used to work with Mary Ellen.
(17:47)
DN: How long have you been with Mary Ellen?
AH: Well that’s a funny question as well. I’ve been connected in one way or another with First Slice since probably 2005, 2006, but I’ve been serving as the Executive Director since 2012 – five years or six Thanksgivings as we count time around here. [Chuckles]
DN: Could you talk a little bit about Evanston, your latest effort with First Slice? I think it’s a really fascinating initiative.
(18:28)
AH: A lot of our growth at First Slice has been organic. We sort of move as opportunities have provided themselves for us. The Evanston café [in the Gibbs Morrison Center], which opened in August 2016, has been a really interesting venture. We were approached by somebody who works in the Economic Development Department for the city of Evanston, asking if we would be open to running a café inside a building that the city of Evanston was planning to purchase and running the community center. This person was actually familiar with First Slice and our work because they used to live right around the corner from our Ravenswood location, right inside Lil Street Art Center. They had seen how we had been able to do that before. In Evanston, it’s been an interesting private, public partnership. I think it’s the first time the city of Evanston has done anything like that, so it’s been a learning opportunity for all of us.
(20:00)
So we run and operate this café inside the Morrison Community Center which is over by the high school in Evanston in a part of the Evanston community that has historically not had a lot of economic opportunity, and also a part of the community in Evanston that is historically African-American. So it’s a very different kind of venture for us as well. It’s interesting. It’s different and at the same time it’s a continuation of the work we’ve done.
We run a café inside this community center that’s really intended as a safe space especially for the young people in that community. We want to have a very welcoming space. So don’t tell anyone else but you can buy Hot Flamin’ Cheetos at that First Slice, only at that First Slice, marked at the best price in town because I want kids to come in with a little money in their pockets and feel like there’s something they can afford and enjoy as well.
(21:29)
DN: Remarkable. What direction do you see in the future for First Slice?
AH: Oh my goodness.
DN: Given the fact, there’s only one of you….
(20:15)
AH: There’s only one of me. At this point I think we’re trying to catch our breath and get our newest baby, the Evanston Café, steadily walking, not tumbling over all the time. I’m not sure what the future holds. Also there are so many opportunities. There was a time right before we got involved in the Evanston project where I was dreaming big dreams about First Slice having a food truck that would serve a dual purpose. During the daytime it would work in the Loop and other business areas to sell lunch and pie and generate revenue, but then in the evenings we could turn it into a mobile soup kitchen and take it directly to where people were in need and in need of a really hot meal served with dignity. I do not fear lower Wacker [Drive], or even lower lower Wacker [Drive]. Maybe that project will happen.
DN: That would be a very interesting one.
AH: Yeah.
DN: I’ve asked all the questions I have. Marty, is there anything you’d like to ask?
(23:14)
MS: Just one little thing. I’m curious about the transition from the soup kitchen to these retail stores because that’s a giant leap for a lot of people.
AH: It was a giant leap. When the first brick and mortar café opened in the fall of 2005, and as I’m sure we all remember, the next few years were particularly tough in terms of the economy, not the easiest time to start a new restaurant venture. Then again, by the grace of God and a lot of hard working commitment on the part of the First Slice team, we were able to pull it off and pull it off so successfully. Mary Ellen is the first one to say owning and running a mini chain of coffee shops was never a part of her business plan or her dream growing up, but it was a really organic growth process. Part of what happened was the subscriber meal program was really really successful and grew. At one point there was a waiting list for people who wanted to sign up and join the program. At some point we needed more commercial equipment, and a bigger cooking areas than we were able to borrow from our partner churches. Basically we needed more space and were reaching the point where we couldn’t just be freewheeling. We needed more freezer space and more cooking areas than these fabulous old church kitchens were able to provide. As it turns out, Bruce Robins had recently moved the Lil Street Art Center from Lil Street to the corner of Ravenswood and Montrose. There was little café space on the first floor that somebody else tried running for a while but it didn’t go so well. Bruce ran into Mary Ellen. Mary Ellen said, “We kind of need a space of our own.” Bruce said, “Oh, I bought this big warehouse building. It has this little café on the first floor. Would you be interested in maybe running a little café there?” That was how we got in on the ground floor at Lil Street and then within the next two years they were doing some renovations on the building and some build out. We were able to get some more space there. Then at some point another space became available in the next neighborhood over. It just organically grew from there.
DN: Amazing.
AH: Sometimes we miss those days when we didn’t pay rent, insurance, payroll, utilities because life was much simpler in some ways in those days. But I also think opening the cafes and setting down roots in the neighborhood spread the word about what we do, but it also spreads the word about what we do and it helps us invite even more people to partner with us and be part of the work giving back to the community. That’s one of the beautiful things about First Slice is that we generate the revenue to help support our programs with the help of our customers who come in and eat in our cafes every day. I like to think when somebody comes in to have a cup of coffee with us that they come into have lunch with us or order their Thanksgiving pie or the other pies from us or have pies at their weddings that come from Fi8rst slice. In part, it’s because people in the community want to find ways to give back and to integrate their own values into the day to day decisions that they are making. Now I often say, “The only guilt free slice of pie in town. A slice of pie for you will put dinner tonight in front of somebody in need, so enjoy guilt free!”
(28:11)
DN: Is there anything else you would like to add to this interview?
AH: Well I guess I just want to say if anyone is ever looking for volunteer opportunities, we’re a small but mighty organization, emphasis on the small. I’m the Executive Director which means I do everything from taking out the garbage to negotiating new leases. I’m the HR Department. I am our Marketing Department. I act as our bookkeeper. We’re always looking for folks who have time and skills they would like to give back. On our website, www. FristSlice.org, there’s a little volunteer tab, and if people want they’re welcome to click on that and find out more ways they can partner with us and make our community stronger.
DN: Well, it’s been a very interesting and productive interview. I very much appreciate you taking the time Ann Louise, and wish First Slice every success as you move forward reaching out to the community and having the community support your efforts. Thank you.
(29:40)