Shelley’s dad was a college professor who liked sweets. Her mother Shirley had no experience in the kitchen when she got married, so she learned to cook from cookbooks. “I was with her all the time,” Shelley remembers fondly. “My mother put me on a stool next to her, and the two of us would go at it. She gave me pie dough to knead, and the dough would get gray from being worked so much!”
Those early experiences were so pleasant that Shelley has been in the kitchen her entire career. Her first job was dishwasher in a tiny, 12-table restaurant, The Purple Cow. The cook and her assistant could never agree. After one argument, the cook fired her assistant and said to Shelley, “Now, you’re going to help.”
It got to the point where the cook would go off on a camping trip for a couple of days and leave Shelley completely in charge. She’d shop, write the menu on the chalkboard and cook. Everything in the restaurant was homemade. “This was in the early 70’s,” she explains. “It was like eating at somebody’s house. Everybody knew everybody. I wish there were a restaurant like that now; I’d eat there every night.”
When The Purple Cow closed, Shelley worked in a variety of restaurants and then moved to New York to get married. She got a job with Chef Larry Forgione at the River Café. (Larry now owns An American Place.) She found out later that Chef Forgione initially hired her simply because she was a woman and he needed to moderate the behavior in his all-male kitchen!
She started out at the fish station, but when she got pregnant—“I was huge,” she exclaims—it became difficult for her co-workers to maneuver around her on the line. So Chef Forgione made her a dessert station, so she could have more space.
She moved back to Santa Cruz and joined India Joze Restaurant, where she became part owner. She ran the bakery and catering business and when business was tough did everything. Finally cured of the restaurant business, she relishes the freedom to do one thing very well: biscotti.
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