Revisiting Joanne Chang: Flour Bakery and Myers + Chang, Boston and Cambridge
Photo: Kristin Teig
PROFILE SIX IN THIS SERIES: REVISITING BOSTON CHEFS AND THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC
What has been the major change since we last connected during our summer interview?
During the summer we started to feel like we were adjusting to this new pandemic way of living and doing business. Patios were busy, restaurants were seeing some action, everyone was outside walking around and while it wasn’t vibrant it wasn’t dead either. We felt some optimism that we could muddle our way through this period. Since then the snow, wind and cold have done what they always do in New England—discouraged people from coming outside and slowing down business. We always slow down in the winter anyway—and now we have a double dose of New England winter and a pandemic. Couple that with sporadic internal cases of COVID which lead us to shut down while we get the teams tested and sanitize the locations and honestly at times it feels like we are in the middle of the craziest movie ever. A superhero adventure movie where we are the good guys and the bad guys just keep coming and coming. (But in the end the good guys WIN!)
Do you offer winter outdoor dining and can you describe it? What would I need to wear to stay comfortable?
At M+C we are not offering outdoor dining right now—our patio is so tiny already and we decided to focus on take out only which has been okay so far. At the bakery we set up some outdoor tables and chairs at locations where we have patios that are not city owned (and thus we don’t need a permit) and on sunny days they are pretty nice to hang out in. We have heat lamps and if you bundle up with a warm coat and hat you can enjoy an outdoor social meeting with a friend with awesome coffee and treats.
Did you serve up holiday meals? Can you describe them? Were these meals takeout?
We did offer Thanksgiving and holiday menus at both the restaurant and the bakery. We will continue to offer special menus for upcoming events like the Super Bowl and Valentine’s Day. All menus are preorder for takeout. For example for the Super Bowl we will have wings and chili and guacamole and football Oreos and cupcakes!
How is the restaurant, cooking and preparing your menus now as opposed to pre-pandemic times?
We have moved all of our cook stations so that cooks are at least 6 feet apart. Since we do not have currently have in-house dining we have spread out into the dining room with worktables and refrigeration units.
Everything is being packed for takeout, which takes some of the artistry out of cooking for our guests. We love to present our dishes to you so you can enjoy them in the bakery or restaurant. We have sandwich makers at Flour who love to arrange sandwiches into heart shapes for guests and line cooks at M+C who take pride in piling up the udon noodles just so in a bowl or arranging the dumplings in a neat line on a plate. When everything is packed to go it means you have to adjust your aesthetic to a small take out box or sandwich wrap. Pre-pandemic we did a ton of take out so it’s not new to us and we love it! But it was always interspersed with in-house dining and it took some getting used to cook entirely for takeout.
Same with front of house—what feeds our FOH team is that connection with a guest that comes from a greeting at the register or a conversation at a table. Service is now streamlined to smiley faces and notes written on take out bags and thank-you’s given through masks with smiling eyes. Still awesome! But takes getting used to.
What is available on your winter menu? Have you adapted a winter takeout menu?
Photo: Heather Thompson
We have created a few options for winter takeout! M+C now offers lots of take-and-make kits so you can cook dinner at home with our help—hot and sour soup, Mama Chang’s dumplings, dan dan noodles for example. We also added a traditional North Shore style egg roll and boar dan dan noodles to our menu for the winter.
At Flour our winter menu features a mixed mushroom melt, bok choy and smoked salmon salad, smoked turkey with a cranberry cherry chutney, cinnamon sugar cream cheese coffee cake, ham and cheese croissants, chocolate ginger scones and spinach and artichoke flaky turnovers. Our menus work well for takeout so we are prepared for the winter months.
What dishes are the most popular for takeout?
At Myers+Chang definitely Mama Chang’s pork and chive dumplings, wok charred udon with chicken and bok choy, soy glazed salmon with cool cucumber salad (my favorite), green papaya slaw, tea smoked ribs are super popular.
At Flour our egg sandwich, BLT, banana bread, chocolate chip cookies, chocolate cream pie and carrot cake are part of pretty much every takeout order!
What do you see happening in the coming months?
We are hopefully all going to get some assistance from the government with a second round of PPP loans. More and more people will get vaccinated and our teams will get vaccinated which will bring great relief in coming to work every day. When spring comes around more and more people will come into the city and simply walk around more and that will naturally lead to more people visiting the bakeries and the restaurant. By summer we anticipate that we will be back to the same level of business that we were last Sept/Oct and by the fall we hope that students go back to school and people are working back in Boston and things are picking up for the holiday season. That is our HOPE.
When the vaccine arrives and the pandemic subsides, what are the top three things you will do first?
Hug every last one of my team members—actually, make that pretty much everyone I can conceivably hug.
Bring back as many people back to full employment as possible in anticipation that our guests will be back meeting friends for coffee, having lunch dates, catering parties, picking up lunch to take to the office.
Grab Christopher and fly to Dallas and see my parents and try and convince them to move to Boston.
Can you tell us your most challenging moment since the onset of the pandemic, and your most positive highlights?
The most challenging moment was when we shut down all of the bakeries and the restaurant and then realized that many team members were not eligible to apply for unemployment benefits and thus their only source of income had stopped. We went into hyperdrive to raise money to help continue paychecks for those who were not getting unemployment. We were not sure when we would reopen and every day was like a clock ticking as we struggled to figure out how to reopen, how to continue to payroll while we were closed, how to reconfigure our kitchens and operations under new safety protocols. It was very emotional at times—we were trying to do the right thing by the community and by our teams by closing to keep everyone safe...and then we came face to face with the reality that we are a lifeline for many of our team members. We are really, really happy that we were able to continue to pay anyone who was ineligible for unemployment benefits for 3 months and by the time we ran out of funds we were back open and many/most were able to come back to work.
The most positive highlight was during the same time ironically. For 13 years Christopher and I have worked in the evenings with M+C. For 20 years we’ve worked on weekends with Flour. For everyone in the restaurant and bakery business it’s 24/7 and you do it because you love it. For a month when all the bakeries and restaurant were shut down we had time to eat together, cook together, have cocktail hour from time to time, go for walks after dinner. For a month we had a “regular” schedule and it was really wonderful.
How have you been both personally and professionally grappling with life surrounding these tough times? What’s your source of relaxation and/or method of survival?
Personally I’m very blessed to have a life and business partner who keeps me grounded and inspires me to keep things in perspective. We’ve taken this last year or so as an opportunity to build new habits for ourselves such as daily walks, composting (although we are not sure what is supposed to happen in the winter when everything is just freezing instead of breaking down!), meditating (this one hasn’t quite stuck yet but we are not giving up), cooking together, FaceTiming my parents more regularly. I’m also a stickler for self-care and have continued to do something physical—whether it’s go for a run or do yoga or go hiking—every day. I recently got earphone things so now I also listen to podcasts when I run/walk and I feel like I am learning SO MUCH.
Professionally the team that surrounds me inspires me every day—they are committed, passionate, devoted, determined and when I am with them it energizes me to stay focused on keeping the businesses moving forward. There are most definitely times where it feels overwhelming and you want to throw your hands up in the air and say, I can’t anymore! But when you have a team of dedicated people around you who are all working their butts off you snap out of it pretty quickly. We’ve all kept our sense of humor during this past year and it’s just FUN to work with everyone so that keeps us all going.
This interview appeared as an online exclusive in January 2021.
