Sirens and sandwiches: How a Darlington paramedic became a chef and restaurant owner
By Bobby Bryant, Editor, editor@newsandpress.net
How is being a paramedic like being a chef?
They both are constantly fighting the clock.
“It’s that sense of urgency,” says Candace Gleason, owner and chef at the recently opened Sara’s Porch restaurant on North Governor Williams Highway in Darlington. “When you’re on an EMS call, you have something called the ‘golden hour’ and the ‘platinum 10 minutes.’ You need to get off the scene in 10 minutes with your patient.”
“In the kitchen, it’s the same thing,” says Gleason, 41. “That sense of urgency. You have to get that food out. You have to get it out quickly.”
For Gleason, the whole EMS-vs.-restaurateur comparison is more than just a neat metaphor. She was a paramedic in the Pee Dee area for about 20 years before making the leap to chef and businesswoman.
“A lot of people ask, why did you go from EMS to cooking? The answer is, I got tired of being a part of everybody’s worst day. I wanted to do something that was a part of every good day. People use food as celebration, and I wanted to be part of that celebration,” Gleason says.
Gleason, a Darlington native and 1996 Darlington High School graduate, isn’t fighting the clock on this particular day because it’s her day off. If you can take a day off when you run a restaurant that operates seven days a week, you’ve got 30 employees, you’ve only been in business three months and you’re planning a grand opening soon.
It’s an enormous change. Here’s how Gleason did it.
When Gleason was in high school, she was involved with a Health Occupations class that allowed students to shadow professionals in various fields.
“We got to go spend a week with EMS. The first day I went to do that rotation, I came home and I told my mom, ‘This is what I want to do.’ It was exciting.
You weren’t stuck somewhere all day. You went to different places, you met different people, you got to help different people.”
She started taking EMT classes at night while going to school during the day, and began working for EMS at 18 after graduation. She stayed with Darlington County EMS for about 14 years, then worked about eight years for Marlboro Rescue, the Marlboro County equivalent of EMS. In all, Gleason did about 20 years as a paramedic.
“The calls that you go on, some of them are really bad and some of them are not. You never know which ones are going to stick with you and which ones aren’t. You can’t take every call home with you … because then you would never last. …
“There are definitely cases that when you’re done, you know you made a difference. Even if it was nothing more than an elderly person that needed you to hold their hand on the way to the hospital. … A lot of times, it’s not just medical things that they need. It’s the compassion, the companionship.”
She loved the work, but “it’s a stressful job. I heard it described one time as hours of boredom interrupted by moments of sheer terror.” At Marlboro Rescue, Gleason had a partner she often worked with on calls, and sometimes they would talk about other careers.
“We would have these long transports in the middle of the night, coming back at 3 o’clock in the morning from Charlotte or Charleston, and we would talk about what we would want to do if we weren’t doing this. For me, it always came back to: I would love to open up a restaurant. … It just stayed in my head.”
She started looking at culinary schools online. She liked The Art Institute in Charleston because it was the closest that offered a three-year bachelor’s degree program. “I wanted more than just to learn how to cook. I knew that I would need the business classes to go along with it.”
“In culinary school, it wasn’t about them teaching us specific recipes, but moreso different techniques. … We had Asian classes, we had Middle Eastern classes, we had classes from South America … and a lot of those are not something that I could ever use here.”
(Or can she? “Darlington is a unique place,” Gleason says. “People like what they like. If it’s way outside of that box, they will not try it. … (but) you start out simple. You start out with things that people are comfortable with, and they come in and they try it and they like it. And maybe the next time they come in, they’ll try something that’s a little bit outside of their comfort zone. … We’re gaining their trust each time they come in and they try something a little bit different.”)
After studying at culinary school, Gleason needed to take the next step: Where was her restaurant going to be?
Her husband, Franklin, is a farmer, and as it turned out, his family owned property on North Governor Williams Highway that had once been a convenience store with a small restaurant. It had been called the Town and Country and had operated from about 1984 until about 2012, Gleason said. After an 18-month renovation, it was transformed into Sara’s Porch.
Gleason opened the restaurant Jan. 22. It was a “soft opening” – virtually no advertising, no fanfare. The basic menu: “Meat and three,” burgers, sandwiches, breakfast.
It opened on a Tuesday, generally not a big day for eating out. Surprise: Sara’s Porch served 150-200 customers on its first day.
“I was an emotional wreck,” says Gleason. “The weeks coming up to that were very, very hectic.
“And that first day, it was – I was nervous and scared and excited. I really wanted everybody to be proud of what we had done here. … That first week was one of our busiest weeks.”
Coming up next: Planning a “grand opening” for the restaurant and putting into practice all that she’s learned.
The key thing Gleason learned in culinary school, she says, was “business management. You can have the best food around, you can have the best staff around, everything can go extremely well … but if you can’t manage your business properly, you’ll never make it.”
Then there are the more practical lessons that Gleason uses, and that she says any cook should use. The big one: “You taste constantly as you’re cooking. That’s the biggest key. You taste every step as you’re cooking, so as that dish develops, you can adjust your flavors.
“If you only taste once in the beginning, or if you don’t ever taste at all while you’re cooking, how do you know that you’ve added enough salt? How do you know that you’ve added enough fat? You have to just taste constantly as you’re cooking.”
Sara’s Porch, 804 N. Governor Williams Highway, is open from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Wednesday, 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. Thursday through Saturday and 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Sunday.
