Julie Pandl began working at her father’s restaurant at age twelve. She didn’t get paid—that just wasn’t part of the deal. She peeled stuff: potatoes, onions, carrots, cucumbers and shrimp, mountains of food that, in the end, weighed more than she did. Standing on a five-gallon pickle bucket, she watched, as her father, wearing a paper chef hat and armed with a set of utility tongs, turned Sunday mornings into a frenzied work of art. As time went on, she realized that on Sundays, she and her father exchanged a different kind of currency: friendship, understanding and trust. A crusty waitstaff, seasoned with Aqua Net and Pall Mall’s, and an unsuspecting bus boy, incapable of understanding the divinity of keeping even a basement floor immaculate, look on as her family, blithely devoid of sympathy, slips on the grease traps of life.
Memoir is a sassy and irreverent yet loving story about growing up in the restaurant business and finding one’s way in a sea of siblings. It offers a tender wisdom regarding the simple physical, emotional, and social pleasures that lie in the daily ritual of breaking bread. The story makes you laugh while it nourishes the soul. And it reminds us that life’s lessons are found in the most unlikely places, among shrimp and potato peels, and in a parking lot littered with yesterday’s cigarette butts.
In a time of increasingly fractured family relationships, Memoir of the Sunday Brunch gives hope by showing the blossoming of friendship and love within the everyday struggles of raising a large, Catholic family and running a business. It’s an intergenerational read that crosses the lines of faith, gender, and economic status. It speaks to anyone who has skinned their knees on the blocks of sibling rivalry, and it quiets the minds of anyone who has ever thought their father was just a tiny bit crazy.
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