Genevieve Villamora: On quitting what doesn't fulfill you and how perfectionism kills creativity
Advice from a former restaurateur and all-around creative
Meet our next creator, Genevieve Villamora:
Genevieve Villamora
Age: 46
Child: Javier, 11
Location: Washington, D.C.
Vocation: Owner of now-shuttered Bad Saint
The service industry is a strange one to work in for anyone who wants to be a human and start a family. Despite an increase in awareness of the plight of service workers during the pandemic, the industry still seems to exist outside of all normal mores and regulations. And so much of it comes down to the pay structure and the late-night hours. Our country has turned it into a job, rather than a career, that is especially great for young, carefree, attractive people. They thrive in that environment. They have the fun and make the money.
The system is not designed to be sustainable for someone with a family, especially for a mother. It’s hard to make truly good money, especially if you work back of the house, the benefits are meager if they exist, the hours are brutal, and paid leave is nearly nonexistent.
The result is that many people work in restaurants and bars when they’re young but then change careers or go into ancillary roles (like liquor repping or distribution) when they reach the family-making years. And it’s a shame because their knowledge and experience is lost, and they have to forfeit jobs they had loved. Restaurant jobs aren’t just about serving people, they’re filled with creativity, whether creating new dishes or cocktails, or designing a dining room, or the art of hospitality.
This week I talked with the delightful Genevieve Villamora, who was an owner of Bad Saint, a Filipino restaurant that took D.C. by storm and which Bon Appétit had named the No. 2 restaurant in the country. Despite its cult following, the restaurant was one of the pandemic’s victims. It closed last fall, leaving Genevieve time to reflect on the whirlwind that was restaurant ownership and on what feeds and what quashes her creativity.
Now, Genevieve, in her own words…
On quitting the stuff that doesn’t fulfill you:
Restaurant work was my second career. I worked in nonprofits in D.C. for 10 years. Outside of my paid work, I did other things, like serve on two different boards: one for an urban farm that was working on food access and food security based in D.C. and another for a domestic violence organization that worked exclusively with the Asian American community in the area.
My extracurricular work fed me in ways that my paid work often did not. And I feel like the paid work that I did in the nonprofit community was rewarding, but I also felt like there was always a part of me that wasn’t being utilized, like a very small sliver of my capabilities were being used. I thought at the time, Oh, that just must be how this is, having a day job and working in an office. I just thought it was like that for everybody.
But I really did care a lot. I’d bring work home. I’d stay up late doing the work at home. One night I was up late working, and I was just anguished, super stressed out. And I’m literally working on the bedroom floor, and my boyfriend, Ben, was like, “Who’s making you do this? Is it you? Because you know you don’t have to do this, right?” And I was like, “I don’t?! Don’t I just have to deal with my lot and make it work somehow?” And he’s like, “If nobody’s making you do it and you’re so unhappy, why are you doing it?” And I was like, “Oh, that’s such a good question.” So I decided to leave, and I didn’t have another job lined up.
On being pregnant in the restaurant world:
So I eventually worked at Komi [editor’s note: a James Beard Award–winning restaurant]. I was there for four months, and then I found out I was pregnant. It was totally a surprise. I took the pregnancy test on April 1, and when I waved it in Ben’s face, he totally thought it was a joke. He’s like, “Your sense of humor is messed up.” So I found out pretty early and just kind of sat on it for a while. Then they asked me if I would move to this new restaurant they were opening downstairs, Little Serow [editor’s note: named one of the best new restaurants in America by Bon Appétit]. I had to tell them I was pregnant and also that I planned to continue working as long as I could keep working, and that I wanted to come back after the baby was born. I think I was the first at the restaurant to go through a pregnancy.
When I was about six months pregnant, there was one night when I was trying to squeeze between a four-top and the back of someone’s chair at a two-top. I didn’t want to have to ask them to move, and I’m trying to squeeze by, but I was so big, and I got stuck! You can’t suck the tummy in. I was like, I think my time in the dining room is coming to an end. And then I worked on the phones.
I was on maternity leave for three months. During that time, all these Komi and Little Serow people would visit me at home, and in that characteristic restaurant-industry way, everyone was ridiculously generous, bringing us bottles of wine and sous vide steaks and provisions to last a lifetime. They’d come and hang out, and we’d have a snack, and then they’d be like, “It’s okay, you can tell me you’re not really coming back, are you?” And I was like, “You can shut the fuck up and go back there and tell everyone that I’m coming back.” Because I really did want to come back. And I did. And then I worked for three more years at Little Serow after I came back.
On opening Bad Saint with a baby in tow:
My business partner, Nick, was one of the guys who owned Room 11, a wine bar I had worked at before Komi. He’s also Filipino American. Nick approached me in this very sly, casual way. He was like, “Oh, hey, I just came back from New York, and we went out a bunch, and we went to all these Filipino restaurants downtown, and they were just packed with people. And not just Filipinos, like all kinds of people. How do you think a Filipino restaurant would do in D.C.?” And he didn’t know that I had started a folder on my computer of newspaper articles from all over the country of Filipino restaurants that were opening up, just because I was keeping tabs. But I didn’t know why. It was just interesting.
My son, Javi, was one and a half when we signed the lease. I remember the day that we saw the space. I just knew it was the one, but I was hesitant. I was like, “Nothing about this makes sense. Our child is a year and a half. Like, why would I do this now?” And Ben was like, “There’s not going to be a right time to do this. You’re either going to do it or you’re not going to do it. No time is going to be perfect.”
Javi was three and a half when we opened. Honestly, I’ve only just started really processing the grief that I have from all that missed family time.
On the similarities of parenthood and restaurant ownership:
I never thought I was going to open a restaurant, that was not my plan at all. I’m not a very straight-line person. I’m a higgledy-piggledy, meandering person. And in some ways, even when I feel very frustrated with this aspect of my personality, I am very comfortable moving forward not knowing what the end point is. Enough things have happened where the end point was something I never could have predicted, like I couldn’t have ended up here if I mobilized all my resources to accomplish that.
In some ways, I guess opening a restaurant is like when you decide to be a parent: you can’t ever be prepared, and it’s always harder than the hardest thing you imagine. And nothing you could do ahead of time would really give you an accurate sense of what the experience is like. That’s the same for restaurant ownership. I wasn’t prepared for the relentlessness of it. And it’s relentless in the way that parenthood is relentless. But I had two things that just didn’t ever let up. It was really hard.
On your identity being tied to your projects:
I think I put so much of myself into the restaurant, and I really threw myself into it 200% because I felt like so much was at stake, not just financially, but it was incredibly personal to me. My identity as a daughter, as a sister, as a spouse, as a Filipina, as a mother was all wrapped up in it. And I felt like because that was true, that I couldn’t give any less. I didn’t give myself any space to take a break, to ask for help, to do less. As a result, over time, what started as an incredibly energizing, creative project that was so life giving, ended up being the opposite. It was incredibly depleting, incredibly stressful. By the end, well, up until the pandemic started, I was starting to feel like it had really extinguished my creativity.
On how limitations can be freeing:
Before the pandemic, I was very, very adamant about not doing anything besides feeding people in the dining room. No out-of-town events, no collabs, no off-site things. I didn’t want us to take our eye off the ball because we’d get spread too thin, and then this level of experience would go down, and I didn’t want that to happen.
We were very focused on the dining room, but then the pandemic hit, and we had no dining room. The urgency of it made me more willing to try ideas, not just to try new activities that we had never done before, but to try them and also give myself and all of us the space to have them not be perfect and to have them not work out and then just chuck them to the side of the road and try something else. We probably tried at least 15 new things that we never did before.
I wanted to explore this idea of what else a restaurant can be. Whether it was explicit or not, the community that formed around Bad Saint was really a community. So in the pandemic, I started writing a weekly newsletter for the restaurant, but I didn’t just write about restaurant things; I wanted to be able to connect to people directly.
The newsletter started me off on this other path of thinking: what else can this restaurant be? We set up a patio in the parking spaces in front of the restaurant. And I was really curious to see what other kinds of experiences we could give people in this new outdoor space besides just eating. And then we started to have a small series of events. One was with Angela Garbes, the author of Like a Mother and Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change. She wanted to come to Bad Saint on her book tour. So the ticket included a four-course pre-fixe dinner and the book. During the dinner, Angela did a reading and we had a Q&A. She said that of all of her events that she had done up until that point, it was the only one that was majority people of color. And she was so moved by it. And a really incredible, thoughtful conversation happened.
On perfectionism killing creativity:
Before the pandemic, I was such a perfectionist about so many things. And that attitude can take so much energy. Sometimes, when I’m so focused on things being so perfect and I have to obsess about every little detail, I’m just being busy to be busy. It’s not so purposeful. Very often it quickly gets to the point of diminishing returns, where you’re doing more and more and more, but what you get out of it is less, less, less.
Trying new ideas is just a good habit. Even if I can’t prepare for every possible thing that might go wrong ahead of time, which is how I always used to prepare for things before, there’s still so much that can be gleaned from things that don’t go right. And for me, that’s been such a big gift of the pandemic. Fear can keep creativity back.
Thank you for sharing your story, Genevieve!
*Interview has been edited for length and clarity.