Teaching and Feeding the Community Throughout the Pandemic

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Photo by Tyler Nelson

Caitlin Cullen

The Tandem (1848 W. Fond Du Lac Ave.), a Milwaukee restaurant which serves farm-fresh comfort food made from scratch, is Caitlin Cullen’s way to give back to the community. Cullen, who started her career as a high school teacher in Detroit and then in the Dominican Republic, found the education system to be “very flawed.” She made the gamble to become a cook, eventually putting her at the helm of one very exciting little restaurant. Off the Cuff caught up with her, and she agreed to share her experience as a restaurateur and educator in these troubled times.

How did The Tandem come to be?

I was young enough to try a new career path, and I wanted to try cooking for a living, so I came to Milwaukee and worked my way up through a bunch of different kitchens. I lied my way to the top because I didn't know anything about cooking and I had no experience. After a couple years of working in Milwaukee’s kitchens, I decided I wanted to try something new. Running my own restaurant combining my passion for education with my passion for cooking, creating a sort of teaching restaurant where young people who are disadvantaged in our communities would get the chance that I got. I opened The Tandem in November of 2016. We've been doing that ever since.

How do you help disadvantaged young people through The Tandem?

We hire folks no matter their experience or their criminal record. It's really hard to get a job if you don't have any job experience, and it’s almost impossible to get job experience at all without a starting point. So, we hire young people and help them figure out the kinks of working in a restaurant, whether it be behind the bar, in the kitchen or out on the floor service. Due to that, we have an extraordinarily high turnover. We’ve had over 130 employees in the three-and-a-half years we’ve been open. A lot of them moved on because they had that experience and were eligible to get better jobs at places like Uncle Wolfie’s, Doc’s Smokehouse and other places all over the city.

How did you react to the pandemic?

When the pandemic hit, we were really sure we were going to go out of business. The restaurant business is really difficult in normal times, the margins are very low, and our specific mission to help people often comes with a really long training period and a lot of costs. We’ve been open for three-and-a-half years, and for three of those years I’ve been fairly certain that we were going to go out of business. It was a really bad business model for longevity, but we always made it work. So, when the pandemic hit, we started cooking off all the food that we had in-house and turning it into good single-portion meals, freezing them and handing them out to our neighbors.

The pandemic had an unexpected positive impact on The Tandem, is that right?

We were expecting that we would not be a business much longer, and we wanted to do the right thing. Because we were doing work like that, folks took notice and started giving us donations to keep our program going. We stopped actually selling food two days into the state-mandated shutdown, and we started doing free meals for the community based on donations. Thanks to that, we caught the attention of a couple local and national organizations, and they helped pay for that support when other systems of food safety fell through.

We got help from the Greater Milwaukee Foundation, the Zilber Neighborhood Initiative, and the big boy that made all of it possible and paid out more than $400,000 to us was the World Central Kitchen, which is a global organization. We have distributed more than 50,000 meals and contributed more than $430,000 to other local restaurants to help them stay in business and help us keep up with the demand for meals. We contract them for help. So, we are not a restaurant right now. We don’t really plan on being one again anytime soon.

I’ve never been able to pay myself a salary through the restaurant. I’ve literally never been able to take any money off besides taking groceries and booze from the restaurant, and some cash every now and then to buy a pack of cigarettes. I think it’s just important, if I want to be able to criticize structures that are keeping people in our nation in a caste system of poverty forever and if I want to change something, it requires I make a sacrifice. It’s fine, I have never wanted for food—I own a restaurant and bar, so I always have groceries, booze and toilet paper. So when I did decide to start paying myself when the pandemic hit, I decided that it was important to pay myself what I was paying my staff. We have a staff of six, now, including me, and all of us are making $900 every two weeks.

Besides the free meals program, what is in the works for The Tandem?

The big thing that’s coming down the pipeline is our after-school program. Basically, kids in our neighborhood are falling through the cracks during the regular school year. Right now, as things are going digital, even if they’re getting sent home with a Chromebook or an iPad, they are going to struggle to keep up with their schoolwork—even more so than in regular school years because there’s going to be less structure and less help getting them through the work. So, we are working on a program, which is almost ready, where students from all over Milwaukee can sign up for tutoring sessions. The plan is to roll out sessions starting in the second week of September.

How will the tutoring program work?

The tutoring sessions are an hour-and-a-half long, and we offer 60 slots every day. Each session comes with a free meal so that your brain has food in it while it is working, and it also gets people to do tutoring when they might not do it otherwise. The goal is to offer each kid a snack or a meal based on what they like from the day’s selection. We will be using local tutors, either educators who have extra time or college students who know how to use Google Chrome and online classrooms to access schoolwork. The long-term goal is getting this program out to other community centers to help young people survive this school year and possibly next year. We will be trying to meet tutors where they are at; if you can tutor once, great, if you can tutor every day, awesome!

We will be paying volunteers up to $600 to help us educate our young people. With the state of unemployment benefits right now, a lot of folks don't want to be hired for work because they would lose the benefits that are keeping them afloat, especially when work isn't consistent, so the $600 pay means they are receiving a stipend and they are not employees of the restaurant. But if somebody who is a capable, meaningful tutor has to work to support their family and would have to effectively schedule off work to take one of the shifts, I want to make sure that they're compensated for their time.

What should our readers know about your plans going forward?

One of the important things to understand is that this program is something that we are making up as we go. We are doing this just because we care and figuring it out is going to take time to get it right. So, I hope that people will be understanding with us and realize that we’re doing this because we think it’s important and because a lot of bigger organizations citywide that are supposed to be doing this work are kind of dropping the ball right now. So please, be patient with us. If we can all work together on this, we might be able to find a way to improve our education system permanently, as opposed to just a gesture this year.

To support The Tandem and for more information about the tutoring program, visit tandemmke.com or facebook.com/tandemmke.

To read more Off the Cuff interviews, click here.

To read more articles by Jean-Gabriel Fernandez, click here.