Learning Spanglish

Anna and Vicente Serrano’s story reads like the script of a compelling feature film:

Vicente, a poor orphaned boy being raised by his morally strong but physically handicapped grandmother in a rural village high up in Mexico’s rugged and dangerous Sierra Madre del Sur mountain range, strikes out on his own at age 12 and lives from hand to mouth, somehow managing to survive his circumstances.

Anna, a Traverse City native from a close, nurturing family with ties to what is now the Village at Grand Traverse Commons dating back to the early 1900s, earns a college degree in science and foresees a career in environmental restoration.

How and where did these two people, from vastly different worlds, meet and fall in love? Anna was Vicente’s boss when both of them worked in the kitchen of a luxury health spa in Northern California in 2000.

Fast forward to June 2013. Anna and Vicente, by now married for over ten years and living in Anna’s hometown, open their new restaurant, Spanglish, in Building 69 on the grounds of the former Traverse City State Hospital, now the Commons. The concept: fresh, healthy, flavorful, made-from-scratch food that blends the ingredients, cooking techniques and cultures of their native countries. And just like the tamales that they had been selling by the hundreds at the Saturday market in the Mercato at the Commons for the previous 18 months, the new venture is an instant hit.

But lest this sound like a film with very little plot development, read on…

There are the connections, beginning with grandparents. Anna’s great-grandmother graduated from the nursing school at the old State Hospital at the beginning of the 20th century. Her maternal grandfather was a doctor at the hospital, and her paternal grandmother a registered nurse.

“I have very deep roots here at the Commons,” she says. “And very strong food memories from growing up: There were gardens and canning sessions for jam and corn, and I learned how to cook just about anything from my grandma and my mom at a very young age. I grew up with that really close connection to the land and to food.”

After high school Anna earned an associate degree in science from Northwestern Michigan College. “I was studying environmental science and botany and, during the school year, I worked the early morning shift at Bay Bread. In the summer, I worked in environmental restoration—that was one of my passions—but in the wintertime, I worked in restaurant kitchens, because food was my other passion.”

Vicente’s upbringing could not have been more unlike Anna’s. His mother died when he was just 7 years old, and his brother was 5. His grandmother, Patricia, took them to live with her at her coffee farm, telling them that she would do everything she could to protect them. And protection was necessary. The region he grew up in was rife with drug lords and kidnappers, and many young men chose the wrong path.

“I tell my kids, ‘Be honest—it will keep you out of trouble,’” says Vicente. “That’s what my grandma taught me. I always think of her and wish she had survived so she could see what I am doing now.”

Anna reassures him: “She knows, and she is proud of you.”

LIFE LESSONS IN SURVIVAL

Anna says Patricia (which is her own mother’s name—another connection) helped Vicente through some of the worst situations one could imagine.

“She did a good job with the boys. She gave them a lot of responsibility at a very early age. She toughened them up, because she knew they would need it, but she didn’t take away that sensitivity for life and for each other and for themselves, which I think is a hard balance to strike. Because of her, Vicente is definitely a survivor. He has moral integrity and he has a really specific skill set, including being self-sufficient.”

Vicente adds, matter-of-factly, “I’ve been cooking most of my life, even before I was with my grandma. The food was there—you just had to harvest it or catch it or forage it first. I did rough farm labor most of my life, and I didn’t complain about it. But I felt if I had the opportunity to learn to do something else that I really liked, I would try to do it.”

That opportunity came when he moved to Northern California, where he had a cousin, in 1999. There he found a job working as a dishwasher at the health spa where he would soon meet his future wife.

Vicente had worked at the spa for about eight months before Anna landed there. “I wanted to continue my studies, so had I applied to two universities, but neither worked out. It made me think that maybe I was meant to be doing something else. So I decided to go to California, where my aunt and sister lived in the San Francisco Bay area,” she says.

“As it turned out, one of my aunt’s friends worked the front desk at that health spa, and I needed a job, and they were hiring. At the interview, they asked, ‘What can you do in the kitchen?’ And I said, ‘Whatever needs to be done.’ I did all the cooking, and Vicente was my prep person and salad person. And he was good at it. I didn’t speak Spanish at the time, and he didn’t speak any English, but we worked so well together. We were such a good team. The Spanish I know, I learned from him, and the English he knows, he learned from me.”

Moving to Traverse City from California just kind of evolved, they both say—it was, like so many of their individual and mutual decisions—instinctive.

“We didn’t talk about opening our own restaurant in the beginning, says Anna.” I went back to Bay Bread as a manager, and Vicente worked at a Christmas tree farm for a couple of seasons. It was a good change of pace for both of us for a while—we needed a little something different.” But in time, they both realized that they missed working together. It was Vicente who finally verbalized it, though, saying, “We have to open our own business.”

They had both worked in enough restaurants to know the failure rate and how much work would be demanded of them. “We also knew that we wouldn’t go into anything half-heartedly,” says Anna. “If we were going to do it, we were going to give it our all and do it right.”

They discussed various potential sites within the Commons with the owners of the Minervini Group, whose company has been responsible for the “resurrection” of the historic buildings there, and it turned out that the lease was coming to an end on the property that then housed the Underground Cheesecake Company.

“I came in with my dad one day after that to check it out and almost immediately said, ‘Uh-oh, this is what I was afraid of….’ I absolutely loved the space and the location. I could see us being here. I could see the restaurant. I could see all of the things that we could do to make it work, and why it would work. And that was both amazing and terrifying. But this was where I wanted to be.”