The Women Who Set the Table
I can still picture my grandmother's rounded shoulders at the stovetop. Gigi. Always turned slightly away from the room, tending to something, never quite done.
My grandfather and I played checkers at the kitchen table while she cooked…the old oblique wood table with the plastic-pillowy runners she saved for the holidays or when everyone decided to show up on a Sunday in July…sticking to your forearms from the heat.
Gigi was Czech and Austrian. Not a drop of Italian in her. Which makes it all the more remarkable that the dish I've spent 20+ years trying to recreate is her spaghetti and meatballs.
She had her go-to spots. House-made deli meats. Old school marinara made fresh daily. Meatballs from the people who made them right. She didn't always make everything herself, that was the skill. She assembled the Sunday table, everything the best available version of itself.
The drives to the bakery in Greenwich for fresh rolls are why I still prefer a turkey sandwich on a poppy seed kaiser roll. Not because I decided to. Because she decided for me, a long time ago.
I last tasted that spaghetti thirty-some years ago on a random Sunday. I'm still trying to get it right. Certain dishes just get into you and stay.
My wife had her own version of this. A different kitchen. The same understanding. Both of those women are gone now.
Our son was born on Mother's Day last year. He made that call himself. The joy of that day I'll carry forever. So will the quiet suspicion that he already knows exactly what he's sitting on.
He'll never sit at either of those grandmothers' tables. But a recipe is never just a list of ingredients. It's a way of bringing someone back to the table, whether they're in a different city or 25 years gone. She's in every plate of spaghetti I taste and decide isn't quite right.
We see that same thing in this building every week. The women on this line, on this floor, behind this bar who show up on the hard Sundays the same way they show up on every other shift. Who carry the kind of knowledge that doesn't get written down. Who feed, tend, care, love, guide, discipline and congratulate people well without needing the credit for it.
That's what Gigi did. That's what all of them do.
Shout out to our AB moms: Jess, Courtney, Missy, Jenny, Yaima, Kelly and Virginia.
To the women who set those tables…at home, in this space, on this floor- today is yours.
And today belongs to all of them. The mothers by blood and the mothers by choice. The ones who raised you and the ones who stepped in when someone needed to. The grandmother who showed up every Sunday. The women at work who saw something in you before you saw it yourself. The friend who fed you when you needed feeding and asked nothing about it. Motherhood is less a title than a practice. The daily decision to tend to someone else's life as carefully as your own.
-Paul
