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Best Place to Eat on The Job
Cardwell’s
By Bryan A. Hollerbach
Photograph by Frank Di Piazza

Now in its 20th year at the southwest corner of Brentwood and Maryland, Cardwell’s has thrived for a number of reasons, not the least of them its insistence on employing the best and the brightest.

“You have to hire right,” says Rich Gorczyca, a man of natural and considerable affability who owns and operates the Cardwell’s in Clayton with his wife, Debbie Gorczyca. “You’ve got to treat ’em good, and you’ve got to expect performance out of them.”

That means intensive training; servers, for instance, face an 18-page written test. Still, such rigorous standards yield results. “I have repeat guests that I’ve been waiting on for years,” notes Geno Martino, a stocky, confident server who’s worked at Cardwell’s for more than a decade. “They hire people that think for themselves,” he says of the Gorczycas, “and the quality of food is really consistent, so it’s not a hard sell.”

Cardwell’s employs roughly 50 people; on average, eight servers work each shift. After diverse prep work—Martino, for instance, has been slicing limes to help a teammate—those servers customarily gather at the back of the restaurant’s first section for the preopening “lineup.” There, in the presence of co-manager Les Dickens and bartender Damien Hamm, chef Joe Hovland paces the mosaic floor, detailing the day’s specials, speaking slowly and often repeating himself—making sure to communicate his message. Hamm and the servers take notes with the focus of college seniors readying for a mortarboard-or-bust final.

Then the lunch rush hits. Parties of varying size bustle past Ernest Trova’s elegant “Walking Jackman,” just outside, and settle into the equally elegant restaurant, with its abundant mahogany, numerous French doors and marble tabletops. From the front hostess station, Debbie Gorczyca greets several regulars: “So many of them, they don’t have to make reservations. I know them, and I hold [places] for them.”

Hovland and the kitchen staff then coordinate closely with Dickens, who acts as “expediter,” and the serving staff, dispensing everything from hearty gumbo to exquisite crab cakes to slices of sinful macadamia–and–white chocolate cake.

At the bar a young couple dines, an older man sips a martini and discusses underwriters on his cell phone and Hamm banters with some of the servers, trading notes on a Fox musical. He echoes Martino’s assessment of Cardwell’s: “It’s one of the few places that I’ve worked where the owners and management actually recognize the hard work that I do and appreciate it.”

Once the lunch onslaught has abated, Hovland, a trim young man in spectacles and a traditional white chef’s jacket, lingers a moment to discuss Cardwell’s. With one hiatus, to attend a culinary institute in Providence, R.I., he has served here since the restaurant’s opening, rising from sous-chef to executive chef in June 2000. He’s learned to balance his own gastronomic leanings and those of customers; by way of example, he calls foie gras a personal favorite but ruefully notes, “You simply can’t give it away.” Other challenges involve an increasing emphasis on affordability and, predictably, lighter fare: “Not so much butter, not so much cream, a little more vegetables and grains.”

Hovland pauses, reflecting on his profession. “It’s a nutty business,” he says. “You have to be passionate about it.”