Tartine Manufacture: Elizabeth Prueitt Profile
«I am really at the point where
I am trying to figure out what I am doing with my life.»
That’s it. We are here. And as we speak everything crumbles down. Every piece of this carefully constructed myth falls apart as we sit down to talk candidly about her path, depression, and how the heck do you balance life being a cofounder of the most influential place in the baking industry, a student at the age of 55 and a divorcing parent of a disabled child.
On this Monday morning after a week worth of rescheduling, Miss Prueitt looks cool, calm, and collected. Only slight shaking of her hands gives away irritation and anxiousness and at the moment makes me question if it’s an embodied stress of the recent events. (I will learn later it’s a mere embodiment of a neurological issue.) Yet that quake is so subtle, especially for the Bay Area, that on the Richter Scale it will be considered somewhere around two. Unlikely to the weekend brunch time, when the entire place is buzzing like a beehive, this morning Tartine looks like this beehive was placed in a Parisian garden: while visitors longingly sipping on their matcha lattes and stretching in the slick mid-century chairs, the waiters are bustling around them offering something way more sophisticated then avocado toast, again with names so French and so fancy that it makes it sound as if the servers were reading CHARLES BAUDELAIRE out loud. Each employee of Tartine carries themselves with such dignity, almost floating above the concrete floor of the former factory and looking like a statue one finds in Louvre. Tartine does not only breathe French aesthetically but spiritually too; just a few days before I see Liz, her employees decided to resemble the apprising of 18th century… on a smaller scale of course, and carry on those moods that are still quite present in modern France. They decided to create a union - Liz almost whispers and remains private about it. Yet, still so fresh and unpredictable, this topic seems to be the only one left out of the spotlight. In the next hour, she will open her heart on matters way more personal, taking her Celine glasses off and putting them back on as if they were her shields or armors. Towards the end, as we rush out through Tartine’s heavy doors she will tell me how pride has overflown her when she called her parents to brag about getting all A’s at the end of the Fall semester.
«Because, you know, those ghosts of the past still hunt us even at age of 55»
- she says nonchalantly referring to growing up dyslexic and struggling in school. Yet that’s not the only battle Liz faced in her life. While her childhood girlfriends, who she still gathers with at least once a year, are preparing to retire to raise their grandchildren, Miss Prueitt is surely going through another turbulent chapter, where the Tartine revolution is just a cherry on top. It’s been 16 months since Liz and Chad, not only her romantic partner of 26 years and father to her daughter, Archer but also her business companion have been going through a divorce. «It’s a very disruptive process,» – Liz says with a surprisingly light heart
«but if I am not happy with a marriage, for instance, well, let’s find a happy one».
It seems like Miss Prueitt has always had this approach to life, she let her choices reflect her hopes and not her fears. When back in 1982 she traveled to Alaska to work in fish camp and was cutting beach grass with a sickle to build strength before the salmon run: «We looked like a painting from 1750», she laughs loudly; when she went across the Atlantic to intern in French bakeries with her then-future husband; when they came back to California and had to live with a family of the man who built them firewood oven, to then for five years be going to Sunday markets to sell fresh bread, baked in that very oven, every time battling her introverted nature –
«The crab wouldn’t come out of the water if you slowly heated it»,
she laughs. Yet, even in the situation when she was thrown into a boiling pot, Liz kept swimming fearlessly. At the age of 43, she introduced her daughter Archer to the world and soon enough was introduced to the world of cerebral palsy. For many years to follow it became her primer research subject, pushing the new wave of gluten-free pastry recipes to the side. Liz not only would take Archer to attend therapy all over Europe, but she will also use her privilege to bring the best European therapists to the States, organizing a non-profit camp for children with disabilities. Only later she will slowly start coming back to business and begin to write her first culinary book, again with a single goal in mind, for Archer to be able to support herself, once her parents are gone. As Liz puts it, Mr. Robertson, on the other hand, will be more interested in work and global expansion of the business, which, despite 5 years of couple therapy, will eventually bring them apart.
Being eight years older, Liz also contributes this turn of events to the age as she gradually became more concerned with security and stability and with what the future may hold for her daughter than with risk-taking. Sadly enough, there is little accuracy in predicting the future. Once a proud almost-owner of a splendid hard-wood-floor-and-private-garden apartment in Castro so generously photographed for Remodilasta, Liz and her daughter are now in a rental small two-bedroom apartment.
«It sounds shocking when I think about it, but I mean, it’s life»,
she says when telling me about it and the circumstances that caused this drastic change in her lifestyle. The thing is, at the time when Tartine was about to be bought out by Blue Bottle, the «more sophisticated» Starbucks version of the Bay Area, the company promised Liz and Chad they will help the family to buy the house that not only had a perfect interior design, also spacious and suitable for Archer’s wheelchair, but also an elevator, which was essential for their daughter. Yet the day before the contract was to be signed Blue Bottle called it off. Of course, if it did go through Liz would have received «money beyond her comprehension» and would never have to worry about Archer ever again, but unfortunately, the tables turned with no explanations. «Of course, we still put a lot of money in this (Tartine) and I know we can sell it and be fine, but day-to-day we are not this wealthy business owners, it’s all on paper».
When I ask Liz if she is going to leave the business to Chad her gaze drifts down for a minute she hesitates: «No…I don’t know. But no, I am not leaving this to anybody.» Despite the lack of support from her husband and equal distribution of parental responsibilities, it’s clear that she remains very respectful of Chad. But the frustration with the current situation in households not only of her own but across the country is so present it almost electrifies the air. «I was staying in a hotel in LA passing back and forth «and another thing and another thing» she recalls when we talk about that time when the magazine with her work on the cover came out with Miss Prueitt’s name nowhere to be found and the only time she was referred to she was referred to as «Chad’s wife».
«It was shocking and I was furious»,
Liz says. It was a published version too and they couldn’t fix it, but Miss Prueitt still wanted to get her point across and wrote a Facebook post that said «Looks like Chad’s wife has done a lot of work.» People were all over it. By doing such a, maybe, spontaneous, «humorous» as Liz herself puts it, but objective act she not only gave an impulse to a wave of rightly earned apology but also sparked a conversation around the whole notion of «Moms Who Work». «It’s ridiculous, I know, but our business is chauvinistic, so behind times…All moms work.» , she says.
Besides the obvious struggles a working mom may face, I wonder how Liz approaches balance as a human.
«Get comfortable with the idea that you never gonna have it perfect and prioritize what you need to do. With so many moving pieces, you need to be very real with your abilities and not to spread yourself thin. It’s about day-to-day checking. You need to look into 30 days, a year, or 5 years and decide what needs to be done today. If there is something that comes out of the blue and you see is going to wreak havoc, you either drop it or prioritize it.”
That is precisely why when Miss Prueitt went back to college and her daughter began whining that mom does not give her enough attention, Liz turned to her and said «Honey, I understand your feelings, but I want you to see that you are capable of this too» and that is also precisely why when her employees caught the air of French revolution, she had to drop out of college.
«That aspect of not always knowing right where our feet are, we do solid and nothing will ever change… I think this is a very specific personality trait - some people just wanna know what their job is - they are happy in the same job for 35 years and that’s what gives them peace of mind - but I’ve always been creative and that’s what keeps me going».
Yet, Liz does not claim her creativity to be her impenetrable armor. Just a couple of month ago she went into depression. «Everything just became very overwhelming, the divorce, my daughter, and not knowing what was happening to my business. Everybody has bad days and I usually snap out of things», she snapped her fingers, «but it was different. It came like a snowball. I know it isn’t good - but I can’t do anything about it - I literally binged watch the Americans - which has A LOT of episodes». This time she has chosen TV show as a weapon to fight the depression because her creative tools were too heavy to lift then, but with the help of a therapist, Miss Prueitt did return to her peace of mind which on a normal day she finds on an ocean shore along with her ideas, inspiration, and simple pleasures. Turns out that a woman who is portrayed in Vogue and The New York Time to be larger than life goes through all the same crap in life each of us goes through. Because aren’t we all human after all?
