It’s summer vacation season for our Sunday Story writers, and this week’s piece comes from guest editor Todd Kliman’s column in our August Dining section.
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From left, Longoven founders Andrew Manning, Megan Fitzroy Phelan and Patrick Phelan (Photo by Jay Paul)
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Longoven's space in Scott's Addition (Photo by Jay Paul)
By now you’ve probably heard the story of Longoven.
How three good friends — Patrick Phelan, Megan Fitzroy Phelan and Andrew Manning — came together, in 2015, to do a pop-up restaurant at Sub Rosa in Church Hill.
How this partnership represented a homecoming of sorts for the two men, who first worked alongside one another in the kitchen at Helen’s almost two decades ago.
How, to the immense shock of all concerned, Bon Appetit, one of the bibles of the food world, anointed this not-yet-restaurant as one of the best in the country for 2016.
But what you probably don’t know is the pain and the frustration and the waiting — Lord, the waiting — that are the other side of the story.
In late June, more than two years after they’d started scouting locations, the partners finally signed a lease for a 65-seat space on West Clay Street in Scott’s Addition, and began planning for a launch sometime in early 2018.
What took so long?
It would be difficult to find a team that was better prepared for long-term success. Manning had, for years, run his own kitchen in a castle in Alba, Italy, no small feat for an outsider, while the Phelans had come of age culinarily in New York City — Patrick as the executive chef of a catering firm that produced canapes for the likes of Henry Kissinger, Megan as a rising-star pastry chef at such prime-time properties as Daniel, Torrisi and Sullivan Street Bakery.
Beyond that, their credit was good — no bank had any trouble with any of them.
And it wasn’t as if they hadn’t been trying to find a place.
Oh, they’d tried.
Fifteen spaces in nearly every neighborhood of the city. Submitted letters of intent on half of them. But then the financing fell apart, or a “discovery” demolition discovered structural complications, or a landlord, in a final meeting before signing a lease, asked, “What are the waitresses gonna be wearing?”
Megan, admittedly the most pessimistic of the three, began to doubt that Longoven would ever make the leap from pop-up to actual restaurant, and began asking her husband for a Plan B.
Having left an increasingly high-profile career in the country’s food capital, she now works at the downtown Y, her entire professional life on hold, she says, until the new restaurant opens. Her husband is doing catering work, though at a lower profile and pulling in considerably less than he had been. As for Manning, he keeps the bills at bay with consulting jobs, but the urge to be running his own kitchen again only grows more pressing by the day.
That’s not the pain part. Waiting is not pain; not real pain, which the three unfortunately know all too well.
In a way, the real pain is what has enabled them to withstand all the waiting and the frustration.
The real pain, in fact, was what set this long, agonizing process in motion.
Two years ago, Megan gave birth to a baby — at 26 weeks.
Patrick was on a cruise ship off the coast of Germany, on a catering job with Manning, when he received word that the baby had come early, and that he needed to prepare himself for the prospect that he would be making end-of-life decisions on his wife’s behalf.
On the flight home, mercifully semiconscious from the two Ambien Manning had slipped him, his sister texted the good news: Mother and child had both survived. Attached was a picture the doctor had snapped of the premature baby, alongside, for scale, a ballpoint pen.
Weeks earlier, Manning had his own confrontation with death, losing his father to cancer.
These twin reckonings, Megan confides, left the two men reeling. Manning was 41, Phelan 42. If not now, when?
The choice was in its way as clear and stark as the one Patrick had confronted earlier: Make real the dream they’d hatched nearly two decades ago at Helen’s — of collaborating on a small, intensely personal restaurant, but even more than that, of working for themselves and nobody else — or die regretting it.
Which is why, today, you will hear neither man utter so much as a peep of complaint about the seemingly interminable wait for a permanent culinary home.
Really, what’s two years when you have waited almost 20?
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