Welcome to my Thanksgiving holiday special for you! On Monday (11/25) at KXFM Radio 104.7, I interviewed Celebrity Chef Mary Schoenlein, renowned Founder of Mary’s Marvelous, a 2002-2021 can’t-live-without-it breakfast and lunch spot in the posh Hamptons of New York.
Mary has recently resurrected Mary’s Marvelous at her brand new Substack blog. Readers all over the world are, once again, flocking to see what this Celebrity Chef has to say about the life and times of her two counter service restaurants in Amagansett and East Hampton, life lessons around cookin’ and food, and many of her most well-loved recipes.
Listen to the fun and funny audio podcast replay, above, or peruse the show notes summary, below.
Be sure to download your recipe gift from Mary - her best-selling Sour Cream Coffee Cake.
Learn how you can grab the “Grateful for You” bundle of awesome Thanksgiving recipes from Mary’s Marvelous, too!
SHOW SUMMARY & NOTES
We talk about how Mary and her native-Manhattan-raised husband searched all over the country to put down stakes of their own … and ended up in the Hamptons.
We compare notes about our parallel worlds between Laguna Beach and the Hamptons (beautiful landscape, beautiful ocean waters, hiking trails everywhere, artist colony abounding and a whole bunch of tourists in the summer season)
Mary talks about what got her started in cooking and her initial apprenticing journey, which included her initial commercial kitchens and working with a caterer who provided all the food to the musicians of rock-and-roll concerts (don’t miss her funny story about Diana Ross).
Mary shares how she ended up moving rather suddenly from her roots in Upper New York state to a cooking job in Manhattan, and then to a 2-star Michelin restaurant apprenticeship in Versailles.
From her experience in France, Mary’s continued journey through catering and her tenure as Resident Chef in Dean and DeLuca’s “Red Horse Market” in the East Hamptons, Mary talks about the life and cooking lessons she brought with her into her own restaurant.
“Every day you aim at being at least as good as you were the day before, if not better that the day before.”
The ONE food item invention of Mary’s that led to a distributed product line and the opening an entire restaurant, the first in Amagansett and the second in East Hampton, “seven minutes down the road.”
Mary talks about some of the food items that became so “addictive” to returning patrons … morning pastries, egg sandwiches (which she first resisted making until patrons forced her to cave), Sour Cream Coffee Cake, Lemon Cake, and then the addition of savory, portable frittatas and more.
The tale of the infamous Mary’s Marvelous Blueberry Muffin and the numbers they would sell daily in a summer weekend.
How Mary and Ina Garten (The Barefoot Contessa) became friends and cooked with each other, and what Ina would typically purchase at Mary’s Marvelous.
What Mary and her husband, Pat, experienced on the day they closed Mary’s Marvelous. We talk about the unrealized impact chefs and restaurateurs make in a community that they’re usually quite unaware of.
“I didn’t realize the impact that Mary’s Marvelous had on people.”
Mary talks about her plan for her cookbook and how it’s finally beginning to unfold on her brand new Substack blog. We talk about her “content pod” plans for her subscribers – teaching and support opportunities, cooking technique questions answered, ingredients, profiling recipes, spotlighting known and unknown chefs that have inspired her along her journey, and telling the back stories of the business of owning and running a restaurant.
As our interview chat continues, Mary and I wax euphoric on types of baking pans and then return to talk about Mary’s Butternut Squash and Asian Pear recipe and her best-selling Sour Cream Coffee Cake recipe she’s providing to all of my listeners and readers here:
We talk about live events (like Q-and-A) Mary is planning for her Substack world and then move into the traditional food we (and our hosting families) each make for Thanksgiving and Christmas.
We finish with Mary’s “second life” in Manhattan … the fact that she’s going to our own Chef Leo Bongarra’s restaurant in SoHo soon … the wonderful mother-in-law, Barb, that she misses (and the amazing thing Barb actually did for a living in Manhattan) … and a hysterical story about a Monday gone wrong with her three dogs in Central Park.
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