Ally Peralta-Amador - V. Mertz
MARCH 21, 2020 © Right Here, Right Now.
I think it hit me a little more sooner than it hit most of the staff because I’m here in the morning, by myself, for 4 hours, before I see anyone in the morning. Whether that means I see Matthew in the morning and we’re chatting about it or I’ll just hear things through Jake because we talk more. I’ll hear things before he tells employees, you know. In that way I think it’s a little more different for me, communication-wise and communication with the owners. I’m here in the morning, I get a lot of interaction with the owners. So…probably like 3 days before we closed I was like okay…we’re gonna have to close. When we started reorganizing the dining room to be six feet apart with the tables and got Purell stations I’m like…how long is this gonna last? How long are we gonna be here until they say we’re not able to do this anymore?
I have a huge family. I grew up homeschooled and I had to feed my siblings a lot at night. My mom worked nights, my parents were divorced. Dad just like up and left. I have one older sister, I’m the second out of seven. So when my mom would go to work at night I would be like (dramatic arm gesture) “Everyone step away from the kitchen. It’s my turn.” I would just cook food for my siblings at night and I would want my mom to come home to a hot meal. Me and my mom had a really great relationship and to have my mom com home to a hot meal was like super important to me because she gave up a lot for us. And just to do that for her made me want to do it forever. To have my mom smile at me and like appreciate just that at night and I would wait for her to come in…how did it taste? I’m 8 years old, 9 years old. I think just the emotion that comes from having something in your belly that warm, that’s what really drives me to do it all the time. You want that feeling all the time, you know?
I love coming in. Especially with Jake. When I first started here we weren’t together or anything. We didn’t start off as a couple. Really coming in and digging deep into the things that we love. If you see the menu itself it’s not like this is a French menu. I’m Hispanic so there’s a lot of Hispanic-driven things. Obviously French…I went to Japan last year so that super cool…all these things that I get to just challenge myself with here. And I have so much freedom to do it. That’s the thing. Like a lot of other restaurants are like, “No, let’s follow these guidelines.” You know, you have to have a chocolate thing on the menu, you have to have this…Mertz is like you can do whatever you want as long as it tastes good. Before I start to do anything I’ll ask Amanda, Natalie, anyone: “What sounds good to you today? What is your favorite thing and what sounds really good to you right now?” They’ll tell me and sometimes that will end up on the menu. Most of the times that’s how I do it. Or like I’ll test out things twenty times before I really get it right but in the midst of that I’ll save back all of my mise en place so the employees can taste it before I go forward. They have my favorite opinions. I think just to have the freedom to do what you love without anyone holding you back. That’s what I love.
It’s tough. Coming in and seeing basically my family. I see these people more than I see my family. Coming in and not conversing with people…like I call my mixer my baby. It’s really hard not to com in and make my coconut rolls every day. That’s hard. I’ve already made three types of bread at home in the past five days I’ve been gone. Not rolling rolls every day for me…it’s crazy. Like all those things just taken away…like when we had to clear out the freezer and all of my mise en place. I had it on one sheet tray. Had to pull the sheet tray out and take all the things I needed to freeze then dumped all my work away. It was hard, you know? It was really hard.
Josh - What have you guys been doing at home? Obviously food is such a huge part of your lives.
Yeah like the first day…on Monday when we got done cleaning everything out he was like, “Well…what should we do…tomorrow?” And I’m like, “…wanna miss out some cinnamon rolls?” Haha so we mised out all things things to do for the next day and then woke up at 7 and made cinnamon rolls to bring to our family members. To keep each other occupied with the things that we love, especially together, is huge for us. We peeled five pounds of asparagus just naturally. Sitting on the couch just peeling asparagus? Like what is this haha. But we’re in our domain. These things brought us together. I fell in love with Jake here. No doubt about it. I cam from Spencer’s, you know, Dan Watts is his best friend and he was like, “Hey you should go work with Jake.” And I’m like, “Okay, whatever.” Got in here…was here probably six months and we would go to a local farm that we got produce from every Monday and just go through the farm. Then come back here and cook eggs. I just knew that yeah…you were the person for me forever. And then we worked so well together that it just makes the food really easy. It makes us really easy to create things together and just grab each other’s opinions and not be offended by it. We support each other in a way that if we’re failing or in a tight spot we’re like, “Let’s open a book and just be quiet for a second. And let’s talk bout it for two hours.” That’s I think, for us, where we really thrive together.
You gotta keep your head up. You have to think about how strong you’ll be when you come back. Get a notebook and read cookbooks. I’ll give you cookbooks. Stay in it. If you’re not in it, then it’s gonna be hard to come back positively. I think if you think about the future and how strong you can come back and how much you can tell your story when you come back too. What are the things you thought about while you were gone, and this is what the menu looks like. Or someone that’s going through this right now…we’re all going through this. It’s not like you have a fiend and you’re like oh man I can’t even imagine what you’re going through. But it’s all happening to us at once. I think it’s easy to steer away from just sitting at home, thinking about the worst possible scenario when you can just really dive in and do the best you can with what we’ve got right now.
Yeah, we just got engaged. It was 3 weeks ago, yeah haha. We went to Napa with the Mertz crew and the only person that new was Matthew, Amanda, and Jill, our owner. And we were like on top of this mountain and he just proposed. It was crazy. I had no idea what was happening. We were up at this beautiful place, I’d never been to any wineries before so it was really new for me and we’re just like looking around and Jill was like, “Oh, let me take a picture of you guys. This looks really good.” We hug, we took a picture, then he kisses me and I’m like, “Why are you kissing me in front of all these people.” We don’t do that in front of groups of people and then he’s just like, “Awe, you know, not everything is perfect. But I think we’re really perfect together and we love each other.” Then he got down on one knee and asked me. It was really great. I couldn’t have asked for anything better. Especially the people that were around us, they’re like our family.
I love how positive he is. How he just attacks his day with the strongest amount of creativity. He talks to people too, in sense, where he’s not just like the normal chef, the normal person that would be a leader. He goes like above and beyond. If you have a problem he’ll tell you to sit down and talk about it. He’s very calm. Very understanding. And I just know that he loves me. We’ll be walking in the kitchen and then just look at each other and just smile. I can’t imagine being in the kitchen with him and not walking past him and just brushing his shoulder. Because that kitchen’s small haha we’re in a small space so we’re always just right next to each other. Even if I’m having a bad day or something he’ll walk past me and just touch my shoulder. Like if my cake fell or I dropped something, he’ll just walk past me to the cooler and just touch my shoulder and I just know that he loves me.
Josh - And does that help during this time too?
Yeah. Yeah…I don’t know what I would do…especially since I’m a lot younger and like seeing all my fiends around me as well, my age, like none of us have gone through this sort of thing. It’s a little bit more scary when you, like you said, have to pay off a student loan. Or well, shit, rent’s coming up I just moved out of my parents house, you know? Things like that. It’s a little…it’s scary. And to have a support system that’s gonna be like, “It’s gonna be okay, it’s alright. We’ll make it through this together.” I think that is super impactful for me.