FROM THE CUBICLE TO THE KITCHEN
By Elia Weg
One afternoon, last March, Bryan Mayer left the advertising agency where he worked in midtown Manhattan, walked into an upscale market in Fort Greene, on the way to his girlfriend’s house to pick up a nice cut of grass-fed beef for dinner. He walked out two hours later with his cut of meat and a job. He is now the head butcher at Provisions in Fort Greene.
Bryan Mayer carves himself a niche as a butcher. (Photo by Elia Weg)
“I saw an ad for an upscale provisions market that was opening up that was looking for counter help doing anything… So I showed up with a résumé and talked to the manager who said ‘I don’t need a résumé. What’s this for? Show up on Tuesday.” When Mayer showed up to train he realized he had found his calling. “I started peering over the butcher’s shoulder while he was doing stuff and… just felt that there was something about being a butcher that really sparked something in me.”
Switching careers in the United States and New York in particular is hardly a new trend. Very few people in this city are doing exactly what they set out to do originally, or have never switched careers. The difference and underlying theme seems to be the consciousness of the process involved with the craft of food.
Cheesemonger and co-owner of Williamsburg’s Bedford Cheese Shop, Charlotte Kamin, has had experience with many such people coming to her to begin these new paths. “There’s actually been over the last three years, a huge influx of résumés from extremely professional people coming to me and saying they’re ready to leave their job, or their career and want to do something else that they perceive as more passionate.” She believes that there are different reasons that people want to make this switch. “To have something tangible, but also when you walk into an ad agency the energy and that which you walk into is more of a professional, quiet demeanor. When you walk into a food service place there’s much more of a lax, lenient energy, which is a whole other thing. To walk into a cheese shop and hip-hop’s playing and people are tasting cheese and making jokes, it’s a much different energy than walking into a fashion designer’s photo shoot.
Mayer’s reasons don’t seem too far off from this, but don’t necessarily fit it either. “I knew I wanted to get into food,” said Mayer. “I’d always been cooking. I’d grown up around it and it was always sort of my therapy, coming home from my crappy job to cook all night. Now I do this thing that very few people do in my age bracket. It’s something my grandfather did. It’s something my great grandfather did. They were all butchers, or worked in the Fulton Fish Market. This is something that was a legitimate job and hasn’t been for a long time. Everything that comes into the shop, I handpick. I talk to the purveyors. I talk to them about the farms and the slaughterhouses and their practices once the meat comes to them. It’s also what I can do with it when I get it. This is nature. This is a piece of an animal that comes into my shop and I have to look at and think. Ok what am I going to do with this? This is a craft that’s been done for thousands of years. I think it went behind closed doors for a while. I think people really haven’t paid attention to it for a long time.”
VIDEO: MAKING THE SWITCH
Mayer is not alone. Professionals all over the city are giving up their desk jobs for aprons. Franz Hueber, a former advertising art director, switched off his Mac to become a baker at Sullivan Street Bakery. “I came here because I really love the bread here and the other things they do, but there’s people here for all sorts of reasons. Some kids are just here for a job and they wouldn’t know good bread from bad bread. It’s one of the city’s best bakeries. I decided, if I was going to make this career jump, I don’t want to go to just any bakery, or any restaurant. I want to do it at a place that’s renowned, well-known, respected and delicious,” Hueber said with a laugh.
He takes out a loaf of bread with a slight curve in it from the oven. “That’s unservable,” he said referring to the mouthwatering loaf, explaining the importance of detail in his craft. “What looks like a tiny mistake to anyone, the owner, Jim will see it from a mile away and he’ll say we can’t serve that. That’s the kind of thing you learn- shaping and all these little things you do, it affects the product in minor ways some times and major ways other times. There’s a certain standard, here at least, that he’s trying to hold us to. Just because that’s a little curved, it’s still good. It’s delicious, but it’s not supposed to be. New York City has high standards for everything.
Hueber explains the misconceptions people may have and that he had about his new craft. “It looks easy, but it’s not at all. I didn’t think it was going to be easy, but I didn’t think there was as many subtleties as there is- where your fingers are when you shape the dough, how you just use your hands and the dough is always different every day, even if it’s the same recipe. It sounds bizarre, but dough is affected by a lot of things. It’s all essentially mixed by hand. The person is in control. There’s a lot of variables. The dough is different every day. You’re going for consistency, so it makes it kind of hard.”
Bob McClure, a former office temp and aspiring actor, got together with his brother, a PhD student, and went from making pickles in his kitchen with his great-grandmother’s recipe into a rapidly growing and successful family business. “We’ve been making pickles since we were kids, based on my great grandmother’s recipe, but the company’s only two years old. Every bit of the product is made by me, my brother, my parents and an old family friend.”
Explaining how a hobby became the family business, McClure said, “We grew up making these pickles every year for holiday gifts, which was painstaking when we were children, going down to the market at three in the morning with our grandfather to pick up produce and now it’s totally a labor of love, because we go down to the same market and sometimes the same farmers are there that we bought from years ago, but Joe [McClure] and I try to maintain first-hand relationships with these farmers that we know exactly who we’re buying from, where they’re growing their produce, how they’re growing it and they know how their product is being used. So we have this great symbiotic relationship from farm to finished product. We love being able to take our product back to the farm and say ‘these are your peppers that you grew on this day’ and that farmer can take that jar back home to his family and say look at what’s being done with our product.”
Kamin, speculating what people making the switch expect, believes people are bored with their lives, looking for an escape. “They’re looking for something completely new and since they already probably went to 12 years of school, undergraduate and graduate, they want to try something they consider organic, that you just kind of stumble along and find your way, when in reality I’ve been doing this for 12 years. This is not stumbling. So I would assume, probably stupidly, that they’re expecting to have a whole new life, that they can leave what they trained for behind. Do they get it? Probably not, because it’s a fucking job. They’re all jobs.”
While making pizza, Hueber compared his new career with his old one. “There’s not a lot of room for creativity. “What I really miss about the design job is you get to be creative all day long and you get paid for it. Now basically you’re doing someone else’s recipes, but you’re learning a craft, which I guess is a good trade off there. Our client list is really the top restaurants in New York and we make the experience for customers at their restaurant better and we can’t afford to have the same experience. It’s funny. You think why am I doing this? I really enjoyed that part of my life. That’s probably why I got into this also. I really liked going to restaurants and eating good food and now I can say with certainty that I eat a lot less good food. I don’t get to enjoy that restaurant quality food anymore, so I’m trying to learn how to make that good food at home.”
Mayer’s take on the switch is different altogether. “It’s long hours and a lot of hard work, but I’m absolutely happier. I’m dealing with a very basic element. I’m feeding people. I’m making food presentable for people to take home to their families to eat. If you can’t get happiness from that, especially when they come back in and they say ‘god I bought this thing from you,’ whatever it is, ‘and I cooked it and I served it and it was great,’ then there might be something wrong with you.”
McClure is also happier he started making pickles. “I get to work with my family everyday and I love my family. I couldn’t ask for anything better; to be in a company with my mom, my dad, my brother- the people I love making things we love.”