Saturday would be the final day of enterprise for Waters Advantageous Meals & Catering in San Diego’s Morena neighborhood, the place founder Mary Kay Waters has been cooking up her well-known quiches, rooster pot pies, mulligatawny soup and orange cranberry pecan butter cookies for the previous 33 years.
Waters is retiring, and he or she has offered her café-and-catering headquarters at 1122 Morena Blvd. to fellow San Diego chef-entrepreneur Tracy Borkum, proprietor of the City Kitchen Group of eating places and catering. Though Borkum will now not run the café on the property, she’s going to provide some objects from Waters’ menu for takeout. Borkum can also be hiring Waters’ 20-member employees, together with chef Steve Ferguson, who has been with Waters for 30 years.
Waters, a Bay Park resident, mentioned that going into the café lately makes her need to cry. However she’ll be there on Saturday throughout enterprise hours, 11 a.m. to three p.m., to say goodbye to her clients, a few of whom have been shoppers since she began her catering enterprise in 1989.
Waters mentioned she had deliberate to function her enterprise effectively into her 90s and was only one week away from signing a lease for a second café location in Del Mar when the pandemic hit in March 2020. All her catering jobs for 2020 evaporated and, though she stored the café open each day, her sit-down and takeout enterprise was devastated.
“I labored seven days per week. It was fairly brutal getting by. I used to be exhausted in each method: bodily, mentally and financially. Even in fall 2021, some issues had been reserving and different issues weren’t. It was fairly powerful,” she mentioned.
Raised in New Jersey, educated on the College of Maryland and the Culinary Institute of America in New York, and mentored by Michelin-starred chef Daniel Boulud in Washington, D.C., Waters was working a catering enterprise in New Jersey when she married legal professional Jim Waters in 1988 they usually relocated to his native San Diego.
When she began Waters Catering a yr later, San Diego wasn’t the restaurant-packed foodie vacation spot it’s at the moment. It was additionally years away from being a nationwide chief for its superb produce farms and girls chef-entrepreneurs like herself had been uncommon. Within the years since, she estimates she has overseen greater than 30,000 catering jobs and numerous 1000’s of sit-down and takeout clients on the onsite café that she added in 2000.
Waters mentioned she’s one of many final remaining San Diego cooks from the Nineteen Nineties who’re nonetheless within the kitchen. So, understanding her workers and clients might be taken care of, she feels relieved and able to go. A number of weeks in the past, Waters auctioned off for charity the final three copies of her 2019 cookbook, “Waters Advantageous Meals: Tales and Recipes From Our Kitchen.”
Her final day within the kitchen might be on Tuesday.
Waters mentioned she plans to remain in San Diego, and he or she seems to be ahead to an extended relaxation and a few journey. After that, she’d prefer to focus her energies on training and advocacy work to advertise more healthy consuming, the worth of a Mediterranean weight-reduction plan and, maybe, providing cooking lessons for longevity to seniors.
Waters mentioned she’s grateful that Borkum got here ahead to assist her ease into retirement, and he or she’s a fantastic admirer of Borkum’s enterprise. Apart from working 5 Cucina eating places in San Diego and Orange counties, Borkum’s catering enterprise has contracts on the Mingei Worldwide Museum, the Rady Shell live performance amphitheater and Museum of Up to date Artwork, San Diego in La Jolla.
“I’ve identified Tracy for a few years, and he or she is taking up the world proper now,” Waters mentioned.
