“I just finished cleaning the bathrooms,” says Chef Mark Dela Cruz matter-of-factly, his face shrouded by a hooded sweatshirt while the sun rises above the Live Oak Café on a recent Thursday morning. “I have to mop the floors early so they’re dry by 7 a.m.”
When he and his girlfriend, Molly Holveck, opened the Bath Street restaurant inside the Encina Inn & Suites more than three years ago, they fulfilled a shared dream, one that’s not uncommon in this age of celebrity chefs and foodie fandom. But they also entered, almost blindly, a new reality of endless toil, on-the-job learning, and steady personal sacrifice. The romance of owning and operating their own restaurant was essentially dead on arrival.
They put their heads down and persevered, and recently were able to stop working 16-hour days seven days a week — they’re now on more of a six-day,
8 a.m.-6 p.m. schedule; Holveck gets Saturdays off while Dela Cruz takes Mondays. However, like restaurateurs everywhere, they remain at the whim of the lives of their nearly two dozen employees, meaning that the pair’s next missed wedding, canceled vacation, or 16-hour day is only a text message away.
This particular morning the dishwasher can’t make it, and so Dela Cruz finds himself scrubbing toilets and sanitizing flatware rather than curing bacon or braising short-ribs. When a server calls in sick, Holveck is bussing tables and taking orders instead of baking cakes and crafting cappuccinos. And just like the napkin folding, coffee mug refilling, and question answering about whether the wheat bread is gluten-free or if the halibut is farmed, the paperwork never stops. Although cooking is what brought them to this point, it’s often the least of their daily concerns now.
As the food editor of the Santa Barbara Independent, I’ve frequented — and written about — dozens of restaurants over the past two decades, but I know the Live Oak Café story most intimately. That’s because Mark and Molly are my good friends, and I became a back-seat passenger on their journey even before the restaurant opened in April 2015. When I decided to write about how a Santa Barbara restaurant really works, I trusted them to speak honestly about the business, without the everything-is-organic sugarcoating that’s the mantra of today’s culinary world. And because the Live Oak Café’s three-meals-a-day formula, moderate pricing, and wide-ranging menu essentially makes it a classic American diner — albeit a more upscale and creative one — I believe their experience represents what restaurant ownership must be like in cities across the country.
But what’s most compelling to me about the Live Oak story is that Dela Cruz had never stepped foot in a commercial kitchen before this undertaking, having worked primarily as a handyman for most of his adult life. While Holveck’s résumé is stacked with managing jobs at some of Santa Barbara’s best-known eateries — Natural Café and the former Sojourner Café, to name two — Dela Cruz is just a couple of steps removed from me and possibly you: i.e., those who enjoy cooking, think we’re pretty good at it, and entertain far-off fantasies of one day running our own place. But, as you’ll discover, theirs is a cautionary tale, albeit one with a light finally flickering at the end of the tunnel.
“If you’re asking me if I’d change it,” Dela Cruz replies when I ask whether he wishes he’d had more technical training or practical experience before embarking on this adventure, “I don’t think I would. Everything’s worked out the way it’s supposed to.”
Makin’ Bacon
7:08 a.m.: A buzzing sound like a dot matrix printer hums in the kitchen, spitting out an order and prompting the two line cooks, Jovani Crucillo and Claudia Cuevas, who arrived around 6 a.m. that morning, to start pancakes, oatmeal, and an over-easy egg. “That’s the first ticket,” says Dela Cruz. “I used to have nightmares about that sound. That was just my inexperience in cooking at a commercial level.”
Born in Honolulu, where his Filipino paternal grandmother was born on a sugar-cane plantation, Dela Cruz, who is 43 years old, was raised in Orange County’s Fountain Valley, his dad a computer programmer, his mom a nurse originally from British Columbia. He started cooking in the mid-1990s when he came to UC Santa Barbara to study biology. “I wanted to eat the same food that my parents were eating at home: fried rice and kalua pork and shoyu chicken,” says Dela Cruz, whose dad still lords over his parents’ kitchen. “I had to learn all those recipes.”
That little bit of knowledge was valuable in Isla Vista, where grilling culture reigns and yet very few know how to cook. His culinary interest grew stronger after graduating in 1999, which is about when we met and began tending many a barbecue together. He’d gotten hooked on Alton Brown’s Good Eats television show around that time, fascinated by the scientific side of the kitchen.
After quitting a marine biology lab job, Dela Cruz started working construction with a property manager who oversaw about 100 units in town as well as various remodeling jobs. His boss also owned a massive barbecue trailer, and one day they catered a 200-person wedding together, which was the first time Dela Cruz really cooked for people he didn’t know. He eventually did some other small gigs as well, to much applause. “Everyone was telling me that I should think about doing this professionally,” he recalls, and that thought started burning in the back of his mind. “I knew I didn’t want to do construction forever.”
