When Kendall Delano texted Glendora (CK) Lash to say he had a job available, she turned him down. She was already cooking at The Penalty Box and was very happy. So, he tried again, this time with the promise of a year-round, full-time job. And if the Shack didn’t have enough work, he’d put her in the Market. That willingness (in addition to no longer having to travel to work) swayed her. She started a month after he opened. There are two head cooks: Stephany (CK) Miller who has graduated from culinary school; and Glendora who learned to cook from her mother and has worked her way up from bottom in every job she’s ever had, whether at Maritime Farms Stores where she rose to manager, New England 800 where she became the overnight supervisor, or Circle K where she ended up running the whole operation. Glendora’s mother was from Connecticut, her biological father from Maine. When the family split, her sister followed their father to Maine. Glendora stayed behind with her mother. But there were years when she joined her sister here. And others,s when she returned to Connecticut. When she had her son at 17, something snapped. She suddenly was no longer living for herself. She quit the rocky path she’d been going down. A couple of years later, she moved up here for good with her son. She found work. She fell in love. They had a daughter. They got married. At the Shack, Glendora and Stephany alternate between the grill side and fry side to keep things interesting. The menu is extensive but not fancy. The batters are simple so as to bring out the taste whatever’s being fried. Fried haddock, fried clams and lobster rolls are the best sellers. Some days, Glendora will cook 40 pounds of haddock alone. But what she’d eat all day long? The fried lobster roll –fried lobster in a brioche topped with drizzled butter and mayo.
When I’m frying, I don’t time anything. I’ve been doing it for so long that I can hear how it cooks. Like if the mushrooms are done and the water starts coming out a little bit, I hear ‘em. So I know that’s done. Fish. You have to be really careful with shrimp. It cooks fast. Haddock is a little bit different. You have to make sure you have your timings because if you have shrimp and haddock on the same meal, you have to put your haddock down at a certain time, then your shrimp down. There’s a lot of ins and outs. And if you have appetizers, they go in a different fryolator.
It really is a puzzle. I love it. You have to figure out what’s going with what, how many tickets you can do at once. Because there’s times when we can bang out four tickets. And there’s times when we can only bang out one because we have a ticket a foot long.
The most challenging part is the communication. If I’m on frieds, I’d be like, “Are you good if I drop this? Are you good if I drop that?” Stephy will look at her board and say, “Yup, I got this on, I got that on.” Same thing if I’m on the grill. “I definitely got this. I got that.”
But sometimes you can get a hiccup. You might not say something, and the next thing you know, it’s just finding a way to recover from the hiccup. And sometimes it gets heated. There’s time’s we’re bumping into each other, and we get aggravated. I’m a firm believer if someone has a problem with me, just tell me. We move on. Me and Stephy have known each other for years, so I’ll just give it to her, she gives it to me. Especially when we’re in a small shack, and especially in the summertime and you’re going balls to the wall, it happens. You say what you gotta say. You get it over with. We’re a family. Families fight. Families move on. We all love each other.
I started work here in July. I think I was working for about four months when I got the call that my mom was in the hospital. We went down and saw her. We came back and then realized it was worse than that.
There was times I was gone from work for ten days. Kendall was like, “You go down. You do what you need to do.” If I would’ve been working for corporate America still, I would have lost my job. I mean, I’d go down, then come back and work a little, and he’d be like, “You can still be going if you need to.”
I called him at 3:00 in the morning on January 24th when my mother passed away. He said, “Just go.” And I was gone. I didn’t come back for ten days. And I kept calling him, and he was like, “You’re fine, Glendora. We got it.”
I can never repay that debt to him. That’s kindness.
It’s a very family-run shack. Stephany’s daughter works here. Kendall’s niece works here, and her daughter, too. My daughter works here. And she has had a lot of health issues. A lot of people would not hire my daughter. She’s had three major open-heart surgeries. She has rods up and down her spine. So, she has restrictions. She has never had a job job. And Kendall said, “We’ll give her a try.” She started working about a month after me. The fact that he was willing to try to give her a chance, not knowing how it was going to work out – it’s been great. It’s given her a chance for her own independence. You know, I told her, “You can stay home as long as you want. I’ll take care of you.” My daughter’s moved out. She has her own paycheck.
Kendall will always put us before profit, 110 percent. And that’s odd. That’s rare. In any kind of boss.
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