Within a year, Cora tripled the restaurant’s value and sold it. She then got a job as hostess in a large upscale Montreal restaurant, thinking her hours would be more reasonable. But she was so good at her job that she was promoted to assistant manager, then general manager, then junior partner and was once again working double shifts six days a week.
She was doing well enough financially to buy a house for her family. But then her life crashed. Her father died of leukemia, her mother soon afterward in a car accident and, after five years of long days, no weekends off and not a single vacation, Cora became totally brûlée: she suffered a complete physical and emotional burnout. “I remember one day I was at work doing the payroll and I couldn’t count the money properly,” she recalls.
“The next day, I didn’t want to get up. It’s like the light in my head, the electricity, stopped. A power failure in the brain.” The doctor told her it wasn’t depression; it was exhaustion. The prescription: pursue something pleasurable.
Cora was baffled. “I didn’t have any notion of pleasure,” she says. “I’d had nothing but a buildup of suffering, of pain. Finally, I remembered the one thing I used to enjoy – writing in my diary.” Having quit the restaurant job and sold her shares, she now spent her days sitting in a nearby café and filling the pages of several cahiers with the story of her life’s disappointments. She wrote. And wrote. And wrote. “And one day,” she says, “I didn’t have anything else to write.” After almost a year, she declared herself cured and ready to face the world with an energy and enthusiasm she’d never known.
Two days later, Cora was driving her son to school when she was riveted by a For Sale sign on a small, vacant 29-seat diner on Montreal’s Côte-Vertu. “I wanted to start again but I didn’t want to kill myself with a huge restaurant this time,” she says. Once again, she sold her house, moved the family into a rental and put $20,000 down on the $30,000 restaurant. She and the kids cleaned it, painted it white, brought plates and cups from home and, on Cora’s 40th birthday, Chez Cora was open for business.
It’s an unwritten law in the restaurant business that you make the most money at dinnertime and only then through alcohol sales. But Cora found that her busiest time was mornings, when the local police officers and firefighters would come for breakfast. “I said to my kids, ‘I’m always burning myself when I do French fries and cutting myself when I cut the club sandwiches. Why don’t we serve only breakfast?’”
Remembering the crepes that her mother used to make, Cora replaced the restaurant’s deep fryer with a huge griddle. She started buying bananas from the épicerie next door to slice over the crepes, then added berries in season. She then considered adding a filling to the crepes – perhaps a little cheese and maybe, since it was so popular in Greek cooking, spinach. “Are you crazy, Maman?” the kids said. “Quebecers don’t even eat spinach for dinner. Now you’re going to serve it to them at breakfast?”
