When Randy met Mari

By Sarah Bearup-Neal
Sun contributor

When Randy met Mari, it was loathe at first sight.

“She’d just moved back (to Northern Michigan) from California,” said Randy Chamberlain, who is today the chef-owner of the Glen Arbor restaurant Blu. But when Randy met Mari Patton, he was sous chef, the deputy head chef at Windows, an Elmwood Township restaurant. This was the 1980s, and Mari Patton had brought back with her all sorts of West Coastisms, including “purple highlights” in her “wavvy” hair.

“So before there was any interaction or conversation, (I) immediately had an impression of her,” Randy said of Windows’ newly hired server. “It was something you’d sneer at.”

Windows was owned by Chef Phil Murray. The menu fused Creole with French. And “food service was outstanding,” Randy said. “But Phil Murray had a demeanor in the kitchen that was notorious. It was Phil’s way or the highway. Nobody talked back. Mari was the first person I ever remember talking back to Phil.”

The first time Mari “talked back,” “Phil and I both looked at each other, raised our eyebrows and said, ‘Wow. We’ve never hear THAT before,’” Randy said. Somehow, she got away with it.

Along comes Mari. Besides the purple highlights and not being shy about speaking her mind, Randy said Mari symbolized, by default, California Cuisine. California Cuisine: Randy remembers — not fondly — the culinary world gone ga-ga over a new style of West Coast cooking. All the newfangled pizzas with avocados and goat cheese and duck. The insouciance of it all. The strange, um, cavalier approach — as opposed to the tradition-laden, ritualistic priesthood of cooking inspired by the French traditions, where butter ruled, recipes were chiseled into granite and one did not deviate from the text. French culinary traditions were Windows’ underpinnings. California Cuisine was a source of much teeth gnashing, Randy recalled.

“They were getting all the press,” Randy said. “Now (these kinds of pairings are) accepted and universal, but at the time we were working more with the classics of the cuisine world.”

Much like California Cuisine, “(Mari) was brand new, opposing us, and that immediately created a situation of tension,” Randy said. “She wasn’t going to take the crazy, vulgar things we were going to spew out. She was expecting to be treated better.”

Whether Mari’s moxie was nature (raised in the Upper Peninsula) or nurture (the California effect), well, one can only speculate. In the end, it didn’t sit well with Randy.

“I would try to make things even worse for her. And then it turned into a mutual thing,” Randy said. “It was over-the-top.”

In the six-year period from 1988 to 1994, two big things happened in Randy Chamberlain’s life: Phil Murray fired and rehired him two separate times; and his marriage came to an end. The third time Murray rehired Randy Chamberlain came in 1995. Twice fired, sort-of shy, Randy thought about the offer overnight, and this is what he thought about most: Is Mari going to be working there? (She was.)

“I thought this was someone I’d never cross paths with again,” Randy said. “I’d burned too many bridges with her.” It was a situation he wanted to fix. (He did.)

“Without talking to Mari, without addressing the situation, I accepted the job,” Randy said. “At 4 o’clock (on his first day back) she walked into the kitchen with the rest of the service staff. I looked her right in the face and said, ‘Hi, Mari. Nice to see you.’ I was upfront and polite — like I’d never been before. And that was the beginning of having a respectable work relationship.”

Not exactly a charm offensive, but groundwork for an alternative to pitched battle. They began talking more, after work and at parties. Then they went out on a date. Which led to another, which led to leaving assignation notes on one another’s windshields at work, which led to walking about in public.

“We were walking in downtown Traverse City when we ran into someone who worked at Windows during the (early part of their shared history),” Randy said. “You could see on their face that they just couldn’t put (the couple, Randy and Mari) together.”

In retrospect, it also may have been hard for Randy to put the two of them together.

“I’m remembering now that it was very awkward, and we were careful about it,” Randy said. “We had started dating on our days off, but I don’t think anyone at the restaurant knew, at least not for several weeks. We were being quiet about it.

“But like in elementary school, when the girls figure things out, everybody else knows.”

How does hate turn to love? In that question lie the lessons contained in Randy and Mari’s story.

“Mari will say that … I had a lobotomy,” Randy said. “Obviously, I didn’t have a lobotomy.” What he did have were regrets about the way he’d treated Mari, perhaps a backlash from a divorce that left him “brokenhearted.”

“In turn, that made me think of other things I might have done it the past,” Randy said. “I wondered if there could ever be a way we could bump into each other and have a kind word, or work with each other and be respectful of each other.

“It began as a series of steps to try to make something that was very bad right. When we started going out together in the mid-1990s, there wasn’t an attraction there. I just wanted to make amends.”

Randy proposed marriage to Mari in 1997, at Windows by default. A winter storm closed the Antrim County restaurant at which they’d intended to dine that night. She accepted the proposal. On Oct. 25, 1998, they wed.

Phil Murray fired Randy for the third and last time in 2001, then brought him back in 2005 to chef at Windows at Le Bear, the Glen Arbor satellite at the north end of Lake Street. Mari came, too. In the fall of 2007, Windows Glen Arbor closed, and you’d think that’d be the end of this story, but it’s not. Before they could even dust off their resumes Randy took a call from Le Bear’s then-owner, Dominic Moceri who said, and we paraphrase: When Phil closes a Windows, I’ll open a door to a new venture. When Randy met Mari, it’s a sure bet neither one of them could have envisioned this last part. On June 18, 2008, they opened Blu, also at Le Bear. It fuses “European techniques with local ingredients.” Randy is chef-owner, so if he gets fired from Blu, it’s his own doing. Mari runs the front end of the restaurant and is its sommelier.

And, from all appearance, they are living happily ever after. This is Randy’s story. He’s stickin’ to it.

Due to the editor’s error, the print version of this story incorrectly identified former Windows owner as Phil Murphy. His last name is Murray. We regret the error.