Jacqueline Goewey, Owner, Made Fresh Daily

Jacqueline Goewey, Owner, Made Fresh Daily

by Andrew Piccone

Tell me about your job.

I was a magazine editor for years and one of my beats at one point for InStyle was food. Every month we would do a story about a party you could host at home from a chef with celebrity clientele. I did a lot of that kind of thing at that job and plus I always loved to cook. It happened that my friend Lauren Bentley who was also in the magazine world and I were both thinking about maybe doing some kind of baking enterprise. She had a little cupcake and custom cake business and I thought maybe we could do something like that. It just turned into us walking past this location, seeing that it was for rent and turning into something that was much bigger. That was December 18, 2008. The absolute worst, the depths of the recession. Do you remember December, 2008? Oh my God, it was completely scary for the first year. It was good that there were very few customers in the beginning, we barely knew what we were doing. It just kind of grew. Now we’re pretty successful. Lauren left to rejoin the fashion world and now I’m the sole owner.

What is the concept of the food here?

We’re going for American food. The term comfort food is so overused that at this point it just means unhealthy, and that’s not what I wanted to do. The idea is that this is the way I cook at home, and I want it to be healthy enough so that my kids can eat it. Not everything is organic, but the things that are important to me to be organic are. Like organic dairy, it just seems important to me. I try to be local, but basically it’s everything in moderation. When I can get local things, I’m very happy. I’m too small to have people deliver to me, so I do a lot of the shopping myself. We still get our dairy from Whole Foods because it’s the least expensive organic dairy out there.

Where in the city do you live?

I live in the Seaport with my husband and two kids and there was just no place in this neighborhood, the Financial District and Seaport, to get eggs, like good eggs. Except for a crappy diner or a high-end kinda thing. Even the places that are higher end around here aren’t open for breakfast. So it started as a place to serve breakfast. Also, I’m well aware the cupcake trend was so 2003, so I didn’t want to focus on just that. So we started out with the idea of breakfast and lunch, kid friendly but not really like kid-focused.

The Financial District is an interesting neighborhood. You’ve got an overwhelming amount of office workers and tourists and it seems like the locals are a minority. Who is your target customer?

Well, it depends. During the week our biggest meal is lunch and that’s mostly the people who work in the neighborhood. There are all kinds of different business people in the Seaport, artists and what not, but it’s mostly Financial District people. Brunch on the weekends is mostly locals. We don’t really get a lot of tourists because they stay mostly on Fulton Street, on the main drag. We get a few, but they’re a little scared to come this far away. I always thought we would be a tourist spot. It’s great because people find it on their own.

Tell me about your staff here.

I love working with people who are collaborative and come in with ideas. I don’t really hire anybody who’s not going to contribute ideas, I want people to be involved. Because we’re so small what we have tomorrow kind of depends on how well something did today. I don’t know most of the time what my menu is going to be tomorrow, we might not know what our muffins are going to be until that morning. There was a review on Yelp from a month or two ago from this person who came in and said he had a dry fritata sandwich. We don’t serve fritata sandwiches, so I don’t know what he had but, OK. Then he goes on to say he returned again and found the place to be an amateurish operation. Well, yes, we are a bunch of amateurs! I was not professionally trained as a chef, we’re figuring this out as we go! I love hearing people say though that our food “tastes so much better than anywhere else.” We do some catering and everyone says that it doesn’t taste like catered food. Our response is this is what food tastes like from people who care. Our staff has gotten so good at everything they make.

I hear that the Matt Damon film The Adjustment Bureau was filmed right around here. Did he or Emily Blunt ever come in?

That’s so funny. Yes, I basically got $500 dollars from the filmmakers because they were blowing up cars on the block for the film. I haven’t seen the movie yet, but they’re saying this whole block is in it. They shoot a lot down here though, on ‘Ugly Betty’ they pretended this was London last year, which really cracked me up. Matt Damon did not come in. We’ve had some random celebrities come in. Mayor Bloomberg came in once to use the bathroom. I think he was at another restaurant on the block that doesn’t have a bathroom, though I’m not sure if I should be talking about that.

Andrew Piccone is a photographer in New York.