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" Ashley Paige White-Stern, 28Hometown: BostonHostess At: Island Creek Oyster Bar, Boston ESQUIRE: Are you a fish fan? ASHLEY PAIGE WHITE-STERN: I am a fish fan. I&amp;#039;m a reformed vegan. ESQ: Whoa. APW: Yeah, but I&amp;#039;ve kind of dived right into the local and sustainable fish scene here. Excuse the metaphor. I&amp;#039;m kind of obsessed with our no-shell mussels. There&amp;#039;s like saffron and roasted pepper and smoked paprika in them, and it&amp;#039;s creamy and delicious. ESQ: So, how&amp;#039;d you end up there in Boston? APW: I&amp;#039;m from here originally. I went to college in Chicago at University of Chicago, actually. I studied film and media theory there. ESQ: What&amp;#039;d you do after Chicago? APW: A couple of years in New York and then I thought I&amp;#039;d start a PhD program so I found myself at UC Berkeley. I fell totally and passionately in love with the food industry. There&amp;#039;s this joke that I was the hostess with the mostess while I was in this PhD program and you know, one thing led to another. I decided I was going to follow my heart, come back to Boston, and get involved in the food scene out here. ESQ: What is it about oysters that gets so many people excited? APW: Oysters have this really special place in American culinary history, so you can go back to New York of 19th century and oyster saloons were on every single corner, the same way that you would have bodegas or pubs on every corner of New York now. There were just hundreds of oyster beds that went all up and down the East Coast. The Industrial Revolution and overfishing destroyed a lot of those, unfortunately. ESQ: What really goes into being a ma\u00EEtre d&amp;#039;? APW: I get to be the face and the voice that most people interact with so I get a lot of personal requests, which is really fun for me. It&amp;#039;s a part of why I got into the job. It&amp;#039;s something I&amp;#039;m really passionate about. I find human beings totally fascinating. I get to be the fulcrum between the public \u2014 the people outside and the guests who come in \u2014 and also our whole staff. ESQ: You&amp;#039;re like the point guard. APW: Exactly. ESQ: Working in the restaurant industry, closing late \u2014 it&amp;#039;s not exactly conducive to a good social life outside of work. Do you still go out a lot? Or do you stay home and, I don&amp;#039;t know, practice yoga? APW: That&amp;#039;s kind of my thing. I balance my intense nights at work with my zen moments in the morning. That&amp;#039;s the balance I&amp;#039;ve struck for myself. ESQ: Does being zen help with navigating the minefield of hospitality? APW: I think it&amp;#039;s a crucial thing. I liken a really busy night to working in the ER. There&amp;#039;s so much going on: so many fires you have to put out and be aware of, so many amazing things that are going on, a problem that needs to be solved immediately. I think just staying in the zone of not getting worked up and knowing that you will get through it... ESQ: Do you extol that kind of virtue on your co-workers? APW: I try. Some of them like it and some of them get really annoyed. I just tried to do a breathing exercise with them the other day and some of them were super into it and the others were like, Enough already. I try not to beat them over the head too much about it. But it works for me. There are some good tools there \u2014 let&amp;#039;s not just throw it out because it sounds like hippie nonsense. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/food-drink/restaurants/interviews/a10016/island-creek-oyster-bar-053011/>