My name is Arthur Robert Mullen III, born the nineteenth day of January 1983, in Manchester, Connecticut.

I dropped out of college for fiction writing in Chicago after a single semester. Turning to nonfiction, I took a job as a steward, washing dishes, at the Union League Club of Chicago.

Other than myself, the ULC stewards were all immigrants from Mexico and other Latin American countries, striving to make better lives for their families.

My managers, brothers Cristino and Olegario Martinez, and my coworkers, generously looked past my privileged Connecticut upbringing. They welcomed me onto the team, shared their home-cooked meals, and helped me learn Spanish.

My time at the Union League Club of Chicago was cut short, when my mother — the kind of amazing, unforgettable middle school history teacher who inspires lifelong learning — unexpectedly passed away. I moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts to be closer to my family.

Around age twenty, resume in hand, I walked through the door of the legendary live-fire grilling restaurant, The East Coast Grill and Raw Bar, in Inman Square. Chef / owner Chris Schlesinger himself, his black Labrador named Chester, and Chef Eric “Goob” Gburski were inside. Chester was retching. Chris asked had I ever shucked oysters.

In my enthusiasm, I may have slightly overstated my experience.

In the decade that followed, while employed at the ECG, I lived alone in a basement apartment on the campus of Harvard University. My burrow was in the same earth that had nurtured the roots of the Washington Elm, the tree under which George Washington had supposedly taken command of the Continental Army.

Before my thirtieth birthday, I was back in Chicago; for most of my thirties, I managed restaurants for Chef Rick and Deann Bayless. My horizons were greatly expanded by their investment in staff education, management training, and annual culinary adventures to Mexico, where we explored the anthropological origins of Mexican culture and cuisine.

In Alejandro Jodorowsky‘s 1970 film, El Topo, the protagonist declares, “The desert is circular… we’ll have to travel in a spiral.”

In 2018, I returned home again to Connecticut, to become the caregiver for my mom’s older sister, Aunt Judy, and I joined the team at the Union League Café.

Restaurants are my second family.

My own story has come full circle: this time at the Union League, however, I’m a steward of history.