The Sacred Table – Part I
Setting the Table
This post is part of a series titled, The Sacred Table. In this series, I explore the importance of creating a daily habit of eating together as a family. As a lifelong restaurateur, many elements of serving guests in restaurants found their way into my home. We restaurant operators are on the front line of hospitality. We are present during our guests greatest joys and heaviest sorrows. We are witness to men on their knees engagements and the occasional breakup. (By the way, the theory that one should go to a busy restaurant to facilitate a breakup is nonsense, one only increases the number of witnesses to a drink tossed into a face.) Graduations, baby showers, birthdays and anniversaries are just a few celebrations shared with others centered around a meal. When we share a meal with friends and family, we create a sacred space.
I became a single parent in 2011. My children then were ten, twelve and fourteen. After most of my adult life operating the demanding long hours of a restaurant manager, my new situation required me to switch my professional focus. I took a day job as a restaurant group CFO so I could be home with my children in the evenings. That journey is well documented in my book, Restaurant Management, the Myth, the Magic, the Math. Through a new series of articles, I will explain how I kept my family together by focusing my time and efforts on the Sacred Table.
The daily family meal did not begin once I became a single father to three. Since the birth of my first child through the subsequent two, they were present at every meal. We had no plastic sippy cups nor special child-friendly dishware or utensils. The minute my children went to solid food, they ate from a Blue Spode China collection received as wedding gifts and a set of sterling silverware hand-me-downs from my parent’s 1960 wedding. Meals were taken together as a family, and we were seated at our dining room table. What is important to note here is, it does not matter what style of dishware you use to serve your family, but that you purposefully “set the table” for the meal. I cannot emphasize this more, setting the table sets the expectation of what is to come.
When I became the sole parent, the daily routine of family meals was firmly entrenched in our family structure. What changed was that I had a full-time job, was the sole procurer of groceries, chef and chief bottle washer. It would have been easy to let the family table tradition slip away at that stage of single parenthood. I was perpetually exhausted, and no one would have faulted me for abandoning that part of my family’s dinner routine. With the age of my children at that time, they were old enough to forage for food and feed themselves.
I certainly did by the time I was their age. I am not the product of single parenting, but as an early Gen X'er, I was part of the most unparented generation. My mother was a full-time teacher, and my father was a restaurant owner. Often, as is the life of a restaurateur, my mother went from the classroom to the restaurant to help out during the dinner rush. That meant my sister and I either had to wait until the restaurant slowed down to get a burger and fries for dinner or find another way to feed ourselves at home.
I was twelve years old when I watched a neighbor, who was invited to our house for brunch, make omelets. He brought with him a special pan with a wooden handle. In it, he melted butter to the point where it just started to smoke. He then threw in fresh peppers, onions and chopped ham. After tossing the ingredients for about a minute, he poured in eggs, scrambled in a separate bowl with a fork. The smell of the eggs combined with sautéed peppers, onions and ham filled the house. He then did something that fascinated me more than anything I had ever seen in a kitchen. With a flick of his wrist, he flipped the omelet into the air and caught it in the pan once again. After a quick 30 seconds to finish cooking the other side of the omelet, he repeated the same motion, by flipping the omelet again. Finally, he placed shredded cheddar cheese on the omelet and slid the masterpiece on to a plate, gently folding the omelet in half as he did so.
That was it, watching this neighbor make omelets one by one for the entire family had me hooked. I was going to learn how to make this delicate dish myself. I was twelve years old, and I wasn't asking for a "Red Ryder, carbine action, 200-shot, range model air rifle" with a compass in the stock and a "thing that tells time;" I wanted an omelet pan. The fat man in the red suit granted my request and I confidently set out to master the art of omelet-making.
I meticulously duplicated the process I had seen and quickly became an expert. I proudly served omelets to my friends, and soon, neighborhood mothers were coming over just to witness the twelve-year-old in action. I was well on my way to becoming the go-to omelet maker of my small northern Minnesota town. Within two years, I would go on to make many more omelets as a cook in my father's restaurant. When I opened my first restaurant after graduating from college, our Sunday bunches included an omelet station with yours truly flipping the egg dish one by one in front of eagerly awaiting guests. To this date, though I have produced hundreds of thousands of meals, the one menu item I have made more than any other is the omelet. And I still use that very same method I learned as a child.
The Sacred Table is not a cookbook, a parenting guide, or a dissertation on religion. The Sacred Table is a project on the philosophy of creating a cohesive family life, one meal at a time. In America, we live busy lives and meal choices too often reflect that lifestyle. When analyzing American's food choices, the common theme is, the food is calorie dense, cheap, and fast. Busy lives leave no time for slow food. Our restaurants and grocery stores play to this formula, especially the fast part. Meals are taken in the car by going through the drive-thru while on the way to hockey practice or ballet classes. Meals at home come out of the freezer and into the microwave or from boxes delivered to our front door.
Busy lives with children's activities, parent taxi services, and internet-based distractions, leave no time for family meals together. Little Aiden, Braden and Jaden have different after school activities and their exhausted parents are the chauffeur, procurer, and medic to busy lives. There is no time for keeping the hearth, and the dining room table is not reserved for family meals but is the repository of the weekly mail and tomorrow's science project. Worse yet, the "dining room" table does not even have its own room, as modern architects have incorporated this relic from a bygone era into the "great room."
The great room is the ADD center of the house with every being of the house flowing through this "nerve center" that is equal parts kitchen, dining room, and family room. We know it as the great room because it has a ridiculously large omnipresent flat screen TV mounted on a distant wall. Meals served in the "great room" tend to be staggered family events as members come and go from various scheduled activities. Meals are quickly "zapped" in a microwave oven or dispensed from whatever box was delivered by DoorDash. Mom and dad most likely eat their meal standing whilst playing conductor of the evening's orchestra of events and little Aiden, Braden and Jaden eat dinner sitting on the sofa, ignoring whatever is on the ridiculously large omnipresent flat screen TV with EarPods in and noses buried into whatever is playing on individual little screens held in their hand.
If this scenario fits your family structure, you are not alone. If you are lucky, maybe you can pull off one uninterrupted home-cooked meal per week. But the reality is, by the time that opportunity arises, you are simply too tired to tackle the shopping, prepping, and serving a family meal. And what is worse is that your family is so unconditioned to appreciate that effort and the time together, that the efforts fall flat. Honestly, when a modern parent makes the effort to prepare a meal, the family treats it as if it came out of a box anyway.
What I will do with my work on the Sacred Table is to help you put purpose back into dining together as a family. The power of one hour a day, eating together as a family is not replaceable by any other activity. If you want your family to gel, to love and support each other, to grow healthy and to respect one another, it begins at a Sacred Table every day. Through this series, I will explain my methods for purchasing, preparing, and presiding over the family meal. No matter how busy our lives were, no matter what activities were on the agenda, my family ate dinner together every night, without fail. For me, there was no more powerful daily event that helped me hold my family together during both stressful and celebratory times, than a shared daily dinner. If you follow my guide, you will be able to recreate this magical experience with your family as well. Please join me on this journey of discovery – discovery of the purpose of a Sacred Table and how it creates Divinely-inspired interpersonal connections with friends and family.
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