Mary McLaughlin-- Restaurateur, painter and modest creative dynamo.
“I’m a professional dilettante,” says local restaurateur Mary McLaughlin—with a twinkle in her eye—when asked to describe her job. Perhaps it was growing up as the eldest of ten children in an Irish Catholic American family that has given McLaughlin such a modest and unassuming view of herself. You would think that being co-owner of two of Munich’s most popular café/restaurants—the Baader Café in Gärtnerviertel and the Löwengarten in Neuhausen—running a small art business and raising her two sons (Max, 14, and Sam, 8) would give McLaughlin every reason to be full of herself.Born and brought up in a suburb of Chicago, McLaughlin came to Munich in 1977 to study at the Art Academy. “I thought Munich was the center of Europe, the center of the art world,” she says, smiling in recalling so much youthful enthusiasm. Although the city turned out to be less dazzling than she had anticipated, and despite the fact that she did not know a soul, McLaughlin stayed and moved into a Wohngemeinschaft (communal apartment sharing). This was an experience she recollects as being a rather scary introduction to the earnest and politically aware German youth culture of the 1970s. “I was asked things like: what are your expectations of your Wohngemeinschaft? I just wanted a room!”
Determined as she was to make a go of things, McLaughlin stuck it out and pursued her art studies, later setting up her own etching studio—a business that is still up and running today—before being drawn slowly, but irrevocably, into the world of restaurants and cooking. Maybe the fact that she met her then boyfriend and now husband, Peter, in a Munich café had something to do with this career choice. When Peter opened the Baader Café, a popular and inexpensive student haunt, with some friends in 1985, they needed someone to do the cooking, so McLaughlin stepped right in. Having already worked as a cook in a music café in the States, this was not alien territory for her. Moreover, she possesses the one credential that is essential for working as a chef: she is passionate about good food. Asked to name her favorite dish, she mentions turbot, then grins sheepishly and says that she can’t make up her mind.
Five years ago, McLaughlin, her husband and two of their associates set up Löwengarten, a café and restaurant around the corner from the couple’s home. It is loved by insiders for its great food and friendly service. “We were looking for a little place to have a drink after the kids had gone to bed,” she says, sitting at one of the scrubbed wooden tables in the large, high-ceilinged premises of the airy eatery. Although the space was certainly much bigger, more expensive and more difficult to run— because of its size it would clearly need to offer a full menu in addition to drinks—than the quartet had bargained for, this petite but determined American expat was not daunted. In fact, if you examine her track record, the ability to adapt to her environment seems to be a forte of McLaughlin’s. When the Asian kitchen staff at Löwengarten began adding exotic, Far-Eastern touches to the restaurant’s Bavarian menu, she was happy to take this in stride.
With so many claims on her time—she mentions in passing how frustrating it is trying to find good schools for her two boys—McLaughlin has little left to indulge in hobbies. She loves music, especially bluegrass, and collects works of modern art, but says the best she can hope for right now is to entertain artist friends at the Löwengarten or go to the occasional concert. Although the energetic restaurateur has little or no time to draw or paint herself these days, she clearly does not regret the path her life has taken and says that her artistic expectations of herself are so high that anything she created would probably not measure up. This disarmingly open—and at the same time ambitious—attitude, which embraces both a realistic and a perfectionist view of the world, neatly sums up what McLaughlin is all about.
