Telling Women's Lives

Community Leader by Matthew Fernandez

Profile : Cindy Essa

By Matthew Fernandez

It’s 12:30 p.m. on a Monday in a local Italian Restaurant in Greensboro, N.C., called Pastabilities. Whether it’s friends gathered for a bite to eat on their lunch break or assistants picking up the carryout order for the office they work, this energetic restaurant is packed. Guests are swarming in and filling up the 26 tables, along with others picking up their orders in at the bar. It would be chaos if not for Wake Forest graduate Cindy Essa.

Greeting guests, answering the phone for carryout/delivery orders, scheduling catering events, and overseeing six full-time staff members with 45 part-time workers on call keeps Cindy Essa working full time as owner of Pastabilities. Along with running a business, Essa is also devoted to helping the community by sharing business tips and best practices as a member of two local organizations, Business Women of the Triad and Triad Networks.

Essa, a 1988 graduate, had wanted to pursue law school, but her family had other plans. “I did not really have a choice,” Essa said. She had grown up in the restaurant business and worked throughout college for her brother who owned Café Pasta in Greensboro.

Essa began managing Pastabilities in 1995 for five male co-owners who wanted the restaurant to be delivery and carry-out only. She had a different concept in mind. “I suggested that we needed a sit-down service so that people could get comfortable with the food first, before they ordered it to their home or office,” Essa said.

But she had to wait five years – until November 2000, when she and one of her business partners, Dwight Stone, were able to buy the restaurant themselves. As a result, it allowed her to implement her vision for Pastabilitites. “I focused on the dine-in business and began to grow a customer base,” Essa said. Once accomplishing this, she moved to catering and carryout. After being in control for over 17 years now, Pastabilities sales are currently made up of 55% dine-in, 20% catering, 15% delivery, and 10% carryout. On an average day at “meal times,” Pastabilities rings up $500 in sales.

Pastabilities has a wide variety of foods on their menu. Essa has created authentic Italian food with delicious appetizers, salads, homemade soups, and desserts. “Cindy goes to the farmers market every Saturday morning to buy food for the restaurant,” said Jason Dingman, the chef at Pastabilities. By obtaining only the healthiest and freshest food for her customers, Essa strives to limit the preservatives and chemicals added to their food. Essa is continuously helping the community because “she loves to deal with people,” Dingman said. This attitude allows the customers of Pastabilities to gain a trust for her.

Even though there are six other restaurants near Pastabilities, Essa lets her food do the talking. “When someone comes in and enjoys the food we offer, they will tell there friends who might want us to cater an event,” Essa said. “If we do a good job catering, we will gain another customer who will want to dine-in.” Thanks to word-of-mouth recommendations, Essa has landed many catering events in the Winston-Salem area. Essa has planned events in the Bridger Field House for the Men’s Wake Forest Basketball team with over 80 people attending.

One of Essa’s newest endeavors was creating a menu for a catering event for former Wake Forest wide receiver and NFL player, Ricky Proehl. The event will be June 1 at Proehlific Park in Greensboro to benefit Rick Proehl’s P.O.W.E.R. of Play foundation, an organization that provides financial assistance to at risk youths to participate in after school academic and athletic programs.

“I’ve worked for a week to create a barbeque menu for over 300 people,” Essa said. Although the theme “bourbon and beer” is not one of Passabilities specialties, Essa accepted the challenge anyway.

Her work ethic is prodigious. “Even when the dine-in is slow, Cindy is constantly working on new catering menus for events,” said Margaret Essa, who is Cindy’s mother and part time worker at Pastabilities. “She puts in incredible amounts of time into Pastabilities and only takes one week off a year.” Essa devotes all her time to the growth of her beloved restaurant, Pastabilities. It has become her life.

Due to her significant involvement in the business growth of the Triad area, Essa was a one of a few women chosen to be a member of the Business Women of the Triad in 2005. It is recognized as Greensboro’s oldest networking group for women. “I have been able to inspire fellow businesswomen to find resources that will help grow their own businesses,” Essa said. When holding weekly meetings on Thursday mornings at Friends Homes West, each member shares information about her business and respectively takes advice from other female members of the organization.

As a member of the Triad Network, the original referral-based marketing organization for Triad-area businesses, Essa has learned how to gain people’s confidence. She has particularly contributed by giving advice on how to develop a business structure.

“I have been able to promote and establish my business by creating relationships with people,” Essa said.

Those relationships and her loyalty to the Greensboro and Winston-Salem communities for more than 20 years are critical to her success with Pastabilities. As for the future, she says she plans to keep providing a great dinning experience for her customers.

Essa lives by the motto, “If you are good to people, they will keep taking care of you.”

Unfinished Business- Matthew Fernandez

In Unfinished Business, Anne-Marie Slaughter argues that it is necessary that we have social change. I enjoyed reading Unfinished Business because we have already discussed and learned many issues dealing with gender inequality, but this book gave me a greater understanding that it is necessary for men and women to share equally. This is achieved by caring for others, which allows for men and women to live the life that they want. Slaughter gives us an outline on how “caregiving” could help to shift out culture norms. This idea is about investing in others rather than investing in ourselves and goes hand in hand with breadwinning. We have been taught that men are the ones that need to be the breadwinners. Slaughter explains that there are many women at the bottom of the economic ladder that are both the caregiver and the breadwinner. On the first page of chapter 6, Slaughter says “real equality for men and women needs a men’s movement to sweep away the gender roles that we continue to impose on men even as we struggle to remove them from women”. In order to fix this inequality, men need to feel that they have the same range of choices to combine caregiving and breadwinning. We have looked at some examples that women are the ones that need to change, but Slaughter believes that a men’s movement is very important. The assumption that men are masculine and the only way to show that is to provide for a family through money, needs to be challenged. Once we acknowledge that providing for a family through time invested is masculine, we can alleviate the social pressures for both men and women. I think that this movement could truly make head way on this issue.

Farmer Jane Reader Response- Matthew Fernandez

Farmer Jane tells the stories of thirty women that are working to change the farming industry for the better. The essence of the book is that we have become detached from the land that we rely upon to sustain us. One story that I enjoyed was about Anna Lappe, which is located in the Advocates for Social Change section of the book. At an early age, Anna learned from her mother the importance of environmental justice. Anna and Francis set out to find research for their book Hope’s Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet. This led them to travel the world and interact with farmers and community members throughout India, Brazil, Keya, and France. They found that many people are bringing their food closer to home through urban farming. This helped her find out that “hunger is not a scarcity of food, but a scarcity of democracy”. I found this interesting because there are so many people in this world that do not have the luxury of always being nourished.

Another part of Anna’s story that I enjoyed was the fact that she moved to France to strengthen her culinary skills. Anna says that she experienced something new about shopping for food. Anna was surprised how many people would buy fresh food on a daily basis. It did not occur to me until reading this that I had the same experience while living in Barcelona, this past fall. I remember shopping at local markets for fresh vegetables, fruit, and meat with my roommates for dinner later that night. We would only buy what we were going to eat for dinner and almost never had any leftovers. Now coming back to the United States, I almost never get fresh food to cook at night. I think Anna’s story is important because she has dedicated her life to create an improved food system.

Matthew Fernandez- Reader Response

I found the article “Why are there still so few women in Science” truly shocking when reading the disproportionate facts about women pursuing careers within sciences compared to men. I was caught by the quote “American men can’t seem to appreciate a women as a women and as a scientist; it’s one or the other.” I believe this is becoming an issue especially with the way media portrays women as either being incredibly gorgeous or extremely intelligent. There seems to never be a spot in the middle; where women aren’t judged for the way they act or dress. It is unbelievable the unequal treatment that Megan Urry had to face when pursing her career because of the fact that she is a woman. When reading this article, I thought that the reason women didn’t want to pursue sciences was because of lack of interest. After finishing it, I knew that this was naïve of me, due to the fact that that women face a great deal of criticism in STEM careers.

The other article about Megan Urry and what she has noticed with the lack of women in her workplace was a very interesting read. I did not realize that women could be put in such predicaments when harassed by their superiors who have full control over the careers of their employees. This is an issue that is hopefully becoming non-existent in the workplace. We must try to end the bias and discrimination so that women are free to pursue careers that are more mainly dominated by men. This will help change the way people think of women in the sciences.

Matthew Fernandez Student Profile: Rachel Daley

I plan on doing my student profile on Rachel Daley who is a junior at Wake Forest. She is the director of the analyst program and the sophomore mentoring program for the finance club. She also works as a leasing/marketing coordinator for Deacon Station. I am looking forward to learning more about her life because she is truly interesting and notably involved on campus.

Matthew Fernandez: New York Times Profile: Renee Rabinowitz

Renee Rabinowitz is a retired lawyer who suffered discrimination when she got asked to switch seats on her El Al fight from Newark to Tel Aviv because of her gender.