When I call Ashley Boyd on a late July afternoon, almost the first thing she tells me is that it’s not an exciting time to ask about her typical day: “It’s right now pretty much just drudgery.” Staff shortages mean the culinary director and managing partner at 300 East now works up to 12 hours a day as a line cook, and she’s quick to point out that the burden doesn’t just fall on her: “It’s hard for everyone in the kitchen.” 

The work doesn’t stop when she gets home. The pandemic required her and her husband to drastically reconfigure their work schedules to support their kids’ at-home learning. Summer offers a reprieve, but her demanding schedule hasn’t let up, an example of the toll the pandemic has taken on industry professionals and working mothers. While there’s no upside to Covid, she says, the challenges “provided opportunities to do things that we needed to do as a business, that I needed to do as a chef. So it hasn’t been all misery, but it has been really hard.”

Here’s what a day in her life looks like.

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7:30 a.m. “I’ve pretty much stopped setting an alarm because my night goes so late,” Boyd says, but she wakes up early anyway. She makes coffee and dives into her inbox, which she keeps tidy. (She recently reached inbox-zero.) She orders from nearby farms like Waxhaw’s Boy and Girl Farm, a longtime partner, but she’s also embraced Charlotte startup Freshlist, a hub that allows restaurants and individuals to order from a wide selection of local producers. Boyd calls their model a double-edged sword: “They do such a great job as a liaison between the farmer and the restaurant,” she says, but she misses the weekly interactions she used to have with farmers. About 40 percent of 300 East’s ingredients are sourced locally, a number that briefly spiked even higher during the pandemic. Local suppliers meant fewer shipping delays and supply-chain snafus. Boyd also takes advantage of the quiet mornings to plan the restaurant’s seasonal menus.

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9 a.m. When Boyd’s daughter, Rowan, 11, and son Emmett, 14, wake up, she has fun making a breakfast they can share: bacon and eggs, waffles, muffins, smoothies. Summer days make for freeform mornings. Boyd and the kids sometimes laze around and watch TV. Other days, they entertain themselves while she cleans and does laundry.

Mornings this past year weren’t always so leisurely. Home-school is a major reason she is essentially an evening line cook: “We really didn’t want to — and couldn’t — just leave the kids at home all day to fend for themselves.” So she and husband Dayne made sacrifices. He went to the office at 4 in the morning and ended the workday at 11 a.m., when Boyd would go to work — a relay she calls “not fun.”

“It didn’t make sense for me to do anything other than cook at night, and it was necessary because that helps save labor costs while we were shut down.” But even though her husband has returned to a normal schedule, Boyd’s late hours have stuck.

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12 p.m. She makes lunch, either to eat with the kids or for them to eat later, then gets ready for work. She’ll often drop her daughter at the neighborhood pool before her commute from east Charlotte to the restaurant, located in a historic house in Dilworth. She takes advantage of the drive to make phone calls. She discusses curveballs with her business partner, Mike Poplin, or checks in with her parents, who live in Charlotte. (Boyd’s mom and grandparents bought the 300 East site in 1985. After studying art in Chicago, Boyd worked at restaurants in Detroit, Charleston, and Chicago before returning to 300 East as general manager in 2001.)

Lately, many of those curveballs are related to the coronavirus. “When the CDC updated their mask guidance, saying that vaccinated people didn’t need to wear masks anymore, that announcement was made and then there was this scrambling period. How do we adjust to that without knowing what our local regulations are going to be? And knowing that whatever we’re doing, our guests may have a different idea of what they should be doing or shouldn’t be doing. That was tough.” They faced similar puzzles when Governor Cooper lifted all restrictions and again when he made new recommendations to quell the spread of the delta variant. Another concern has been how to keep staff safe and comfortable as business seems to increase every week.

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1:30 p.m. At work, “I’ll try to put my stuff down upstairs before I go into the restaurant because I’ll find myself walking around with my bag and computer for an hour,” Boyd says. “I’ll go into the kitchen and put out any minor fires that are happening: staffing or maintenance stuff, because, an old house, something’s always broken.” Between the bar and the kitchen’s server alley, there are four hand sinks, and with COVID, they’ve gotten even more use than usual. “Every day,” Boyd says, “one of the hand sinks is broken and I have to call a plumber.” But she doesn’t hate the old house’s quirks: “I do get frustrated sometimes because it’s not an ideal space for a restaurant or a kitchen, but the restaurant wouldn’t be anything without having that character.”

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5 p.m. 300 East doesn’t close between lunch and dinner, so Boyd helps transition the dining room before the first evening surge — which comes earlier than it did pre-pandemic. “We noticed as soon as we entered this shutdown that to-go orders were really concentrated from 4:30 to 5:30, so we would get an earlier rush.” That trend hasn’t changed, even though the dining room is open. Rather than a flood in all at once, diners come in throughout the meal period. “We actually get our biggest rush about half an hour before closing, at 8:30, and those are not the reservations. Those are all the people who are coming out to eat spontaneously. We’ll know how many resos we have on the books, but with all the walk-ins we do, by the end of the night we’ll typically have done at least twice as much as we had on the books.”

A few nights a week, Dayne drops Emmett off at the restaurant for a few hours of kitchen experience — he doesn’t work with heat heat, but he helps with some of the “basic but time-consuming prep,” Boyd says, “which really takes some pressure off the rest of the kitchen.” She initially had mixed feelings about Emmett’s new role. “It’s hard for me, even though he’s 5-foot-10 and way taller than I am, to put him in a high-pressure environment with an enormous sharp knife in his hand, but it’s been really cool to see how he’s taking it seriously,” she says. “It’s really impressive to see him functioning in that environment, more as an adult than a kid.”

As part of a restaurant family, Boyd’s work and home have always overlapped (her Twitter bio is “Restaurant kid for life”). Even as pastry chef, a position she took in 2007 to give her more time with her young children, she says, the job “could eat up as much of my time as I would let it” — partly because it’s a demanding industry, and partly because she loves it so much. “When you’re in that position, as a working parent, as a business owner, work-life balance for me has always had to come in the form of, Okay, whose needs are the priority today? What’s most urgent right now? Does one of my kids need my undivided attention? Is there a crisis at work? Do I need to take some time for my relationship with my husband? Is there a household emergency? It’s day by day. Like, whose needs are most important today, because you can’t do it all at one time.”

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11:30 p.m. “I’m always the last one out,” Boyd says. She makes sure the kitchen is spotless before heading home to catch an episode or two of The Simpsons with night owl Emmett. She catches up on calories, too: leftovers, takeout, or “a little redneck charcuterie plate” (usually a smorgasbord of pimento cheese or hummus, crackers, salami, veggies and ranch, and “whatever pickled veggies we have in the house.”) Finally, around 1 a.m., she grabs some sleep before getting ready to do it all again. “Anyone you talk to in the restaurant business is going to tell you the same thing: A 12-hour day is just another day.”

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