Summer has officially settled over Boston with a heavy, muggy, thunderstormy sigh, and while it first inspires five-minute cooling breaks hiding in The Shipyard’s walk-in freezer, it also inspires a carefree sense of warm-weather abandon in the city’s residents. Case in point: early this morning, two tiny, blond-haired, blue-eyed, Dennis the Menace lookalike boys strolled past the front windows of the store with their nannies as I stood at my register. Some classic rock song that makes the rounds at bar mitzvahs and weddings everywhere was playing softly overhead and I absentmindedly bopped along, quietly tapping my fingers and watching the T trundle by while I waited for another customer. Suddenly, I realized that two Dennis the Menace butts were staring right back at me.
Just yesterday, I watched some teenager plant ubiquitous flowers around each of the trees near our store, sweating furiously as he planted those damn pansies in earnest for his seven bucks an hour. Today, I was watching two little boys pee all over them.
The nannies were surreptitiously glancing up and down the street like that camper who just spread a layer of toothpaste all over the camp toilet seats, and I realized that they were the ones who had suggested this venue for the boys to take a leak. Cars were whizzing by, pedestrians were maneuvering around them, and the whole bizarre thing seemed to last for an eternity.
Fast forward about a billion minutes, and I’m helping two pruny and fuzzy sweater-wrapped (in this heat!) grandmothers use the credit card touch screen while I bag slimy packets of smoked salmon and almond biscotti. They’re giggling away and chattering to each other, completely oblivious to this display in the window, ten feet to their right. Out of the corner of my eye, I note that the boys have now hiked up their mini cargo pants and the group has strolled right into the store. Clearly our bathroom ambiance doesn’t hold a candle to the great outdoors. I’m still hoping it was some kind of political statement about city maintenance in the not-so-humble suburb where The Shipyard makes its home.
Housekeeping: All you folks out there who are jonesin’ for a good scientific study on this site, to elevate this collection of tales to a medical/world-saving/most prestigious of the prestigious research journal level, your time has come. I will soon be unveiling an analysis of—wait for it—the categories of shopper, distinguished by their behavior at the register. (A very highfalutin' study paid for by your tax dollars and insistance on organic brown rice bread, naturally.) Are you a self-bagger? God, Allah and Chuck Norris bless you, I should give you all the Bed, Bath & Beyond coupons I just received in the mail. Daydreamer? Fine, I sympathize, but please wake the hell up for two minutes and press "no" for cash-back. If, however, you like watching your 32,437 items pile into an amusing likeness of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and then adore following my every movement with a bemused twinkle in your eye as I bag every last bit of it, you may not want to tune in next week.
Big news, people.
The Martini Shaker, home to so many shameful evenings and questionable ethics, has been sold. After a good year or so of sliding down the cliff side of bankruptcy and poor management, the venue has folded its hand and given in. It means a new name, a new menu, a new look—but most importantly, it means that all the dirty little secrets that went unpublished thus far (for fear of the health inspector or the Boston Police Department coming down on our heads) are fair game. We shall begin our trip down memory lane with a classic relic of full-scale disgrace in the Martini’s recent history: Halloween 2009.
The evening began innocuously enough. Alice and I showed up early to help tape the tacky Bacardi-sponsored decorations to walls and mirrors and begrudgingly shove ourselves into our mandatory costumes, the DJ arrived with his equipment, and all the dining room tables were whisked away to any spare space in the building.
We opened the doors, the usual refuse poured in decked out in his-and-hers costumes and skanked out variations on anything and everything, tossing the twenty-dollar covers at us faster than we could slap on wristbands. For five straight hours we saw nothing but the occasional bad dance move as we looked up from taking cash, counting it, and handing off wads of it to a manager when the feeble moneybox started to overflow.
As the end of the night drew near, the crowd thinned and my makeshift coat-hanger-wrapped-in-saran-wrap fairy wings were beginning to seriously pinch my shoulder blades. Last call came and went, and I stayed, helping clean up as I sipped a monster rum and coke from the bar. I left with the rest of the staff around 2 am, and we competed on the crowded downtown street for cabs—an impressive feat on that particular night of the year.
It wasn’t until the next morning when, nursing a rum and coke headache and lying in bed, that my phone buzzed on the nightstand and it became the most momentous Halloween of them all.
It was Alice, working the brunch shift.
After we had all left for the night, the post-Halloween dawn breaking and my body glitter glinting off of all of my clothes, we had been robbed. Not just angry-employee-siphoning-off-funds robbed, but good, old-fashioned, held at gunpoint robbed.
Apparently.
The story came together in bits and pieces, but here was the general gist we managed to cobble together: Jared, a manager at the time, had been downstairs in the office counting the nights money and locking it away in the safe at around 3:30 or 4 am. Suddenly, a man in fatigues and a ski mask burst into the room (through the locked doors upstairs, and the door to the basement that is supposed to be locked, and the actual door to the office) and demanded that Jared hand over the dough. The way it was told, the masked gunman was quite the sweetheart, apologizing and shaking during the entire encounter, and only tied Jared up for good measure before bounding into the night. Oh, that is, after he disabled our security camera system. Undoubtedly a straight-A student in burglary school.
Now, this was all well and good as it spread like wildfire along the Martini grapevine, and tales of the ligature marks on Jared’s wrists and his two-week vacation soon after were all accepted with nary a whisper of doubt. The original sum the staff understood to be stolen—after harassing the other managers nonstop for information—was a petty $1,600.
The truth? Try adding another zero. Now the elaborate robbery began to make some sense.
Weeks passed and no progress was made on the case. Jared began spontaneously offering a clean-cut version of the story without being prompted, and soon the familiar Martini theories began to emerge. Wouldn’t it make sense for our penny-pinching owner Jack Bugiardini to orchestrate the robbery, allowing him to take a profit under the table while insurance paid for the theft? Wouldn’t involving Jared, a single father with bills to pay and a financially colorful past be a simple way to up the authenticity?
Why yes, yes it would. Even stranger was Bugiardini's uncharacteristically stoic response to the robbery.
And that, as Sherlock Holmes once mused, was the curious incident of All Hallows Eve 2009. Or something like that.
Working the early morning shift means two things, primarily: I never, ever will have time to down a cup of coffee before sprinting to catch the bus at 5:45am. Second, the customers who arrive promptly when the store opens are, for the most part, on the ripe side of 60 and tend to pay in exact change that’s plucked from a tired looking Ziploc baggie.
They are also the decorated veterans of grocery shopping. They know what they’re looking for, how they would like their things bagged (“in a plastic bag, inside of a paper, and then inside of this reusable one I brought please.”) and they know that you will never completely understand what they mean. “I know this cereal is here,” one woman told me, a determined and flustered cloud settling over her head. “I always get it here.”
Now, this is probably true. She looks like she has her wits about her, and her nails are long and pink and sharp looking. Her earrings tell me she has money, and people with money are always right when it comes to things like cereal, right? This is when we smile and nod and offer to check in the back to see if the item is temporarily out of stock.
Magic words, people. Now, I’m not insinuating that I want the search for a specific kind of cereal to be unsuccessful, not at all. However, I’ve found that helping people in this setting gives you about .003 seconds to determine if the customer is going to be difficult.
The other day I was working in the produce section, unloading cartons of strawberries onto the shelf, when a confused looking elderly gentleman approached me.
“The smaller cucumbers,” he says.
I give him my best quizzical customer service eyebrows and put down the box of strawberries.
“They are…smaller. Than these.” He points disgustedly at the normal sized cucumbers nestled innocently next to the broccoli and zucchini.
“Oh, the Persian cucumbers?” I ask. “They should be right over…”
I turn to where these lovely varietals usually sit, and find nothing. “You know what? It looks like we might be out of them for today,” I tell him. “But we might have some more coming out. Would you like me to check in the back?”
He says nothing, just stares for a second. He turns and walks away.
“Aaand that’s a no,” I mutter as I return to my strawberries. Chef, a coworker next to me putting up another box, snorts out a laugh and we went back to work. No more than five minutes later, the gentleman was escorted back to us by another coworker, who informed us he was looking for Persian cucumbers. Apparently the man had taken it upon himself to search the back stockroom himself for this salad staple and had been promptly redirected back onto the floor.
By this point, Chef had a box of standard cucumbers in front of him, and was stacking them a few at a time. The man hovered over his shoulder for a second, huffing a few open-mouthed breaths, then, seeing the cucumber he wanted in Chef’s box, reached down over him and snapped it from the pile. He tossed the cucumber in his basket and shuffled away.
Now, to be clear, I love the customers who come through the Shipyard. But this is mostly standard behavior, it seems, and to be expected if you’re putting up something like a box of new green bananas. People expect the very best produce, and will sniff it out faster than sharks in blood-infested waters.
When it comes to feeding ourselves, we take no prisoners. And absolutely nothing is going to prevent us from finding that cereal that we know is there. Nothing, you hear me?
So, readers, wherever you are, I have some news.
After countless weekend evenings moving amongst the city’s scuzziest cocktail-swirling bar frequenters and serenading them with the same top 40s mix every night past ten o'clock, I have left the Martini for another sector of the food industry: a very well-respected and groovy grocery outlet.
Now, I know some of you may see this as an interesting move, considering the positively overflowing wealth of story material that presented itself during each shift at the Martini. Don’t get me wrong: I do miss the dysfunction dearly. Probably too much. But, every writer needs a new muse every now and again, and it seems it was time for me to get my ass kicked by hauling around boxes of bananas instead of chirping into the phone like a Chihuahua and assuring the guy on the other end that yes, there is a dress code. Sneakers are ok to wear. No, baseball hats are not. Yes, we have valet parking. No, I cannot stash your gym bag, suitcase, jacket or laptop behind the host stand.
Restaurants are very good at revealing very specific aspects of a person, or a family. Who we are when we eat out is a distinct version of ourselves, and it plays off whatever mood our meal companions happen to set. Diners, perhaps unrealistically, often expect a private experience in a public place. “We’d like a private booth so we can talk,” a grabby and slobbering couple will beam at us hostesses, but everyone knows that eating out is, in effect, a performance. Some are better at it than others—the grumpy older man who can’t read his menu because the lights are too dim and probably wishes he was home instead comes to mind—but we’re all aware of it, subconsciously or not.
Now, watching grocery shoppers up close is something very different indeed. Already into my second week (with…for our purposes, I’ll call it The Shipyard), I’ve noticed a radically different affect among the customers. When we shop for ourselves, we’re preparing for an extremely private experience: a dinner at home. Our decision-making process is honed, specific, written down on slips of paper. We’re mostly reluctant to stand out.
What that means for me here at Balls in Your Coffee is a new set of lifestyles to accommodate—no longer the young banker wanting to get as plastered as possible as quick as possible, but more eco-conscious twenty-somethings with ear gauges, energetic screaming children, stubborn elderly Russian women in colorful scarves, and bright-eyed couples playing house by going domestic and buying bagged arugula and french bread together.
And there are neon mesh shopping-cart-collecting vests. Oh yes.
Let the games begin.
“Our party consists of three elderly people with limited mobility. One of them cannot eat garlic and has a server allergy.”—recent OpenTable reservation note.
Server allergy (noun): a sweeping pandemic affecting a subset of diners that often accompanies an economic depression or self-entitled douchebag-ism. Common reactions include sneezing, watery and itchy eyes, headaches, bad tipping, dissatisfaction with anything coming from the kitchen, lack of patience, a dangerous disdain for those handling your food, and stuffy, awkward dinner conversation, making it impossible for a server to interject or announce their presence.
Goodness, it’s been a long time, and I apologize. To be completely honest, my time at The Martini these past few weeks has left me so drained that the thought of typing out anything remotely concerning the place activated my gag reflex quicker than the dead mouse smell that briefly wafted around the upstairs bar last night.
Granted, mine is not the most battered soul currently employed by The Martini, by any means. My job as hostess is relatively easy; not only do I get paid to watch mind-numbing ESPN Sports Center by the hour, all the customers with bad attitudes only occupy my attention for 3 minutes, max. I don’t have to tip anyone out and walk with less money than I came in with. But lord, let me tell you, staring at the front door and shifting my weight from foot to foot every 10 minutes praying that something will happen or a customer will at least walk in is torture. On a night shift earlier this week, I finished an entire book, start to finish.
Business has not been good for us lately. Whether it’s the weather (which never seems to affect the restaurants around us) or the economy, a curse has befallen the eatery. I’m not sure it can even be attributed to plain old karma anymore. While working a double yesterday, one plagued by chilly and torrential rain, we entertained a mild rush around lunchtime, then watched the place clear out for hours. I watched the door, chimed “Stay dry!” cheerfully at each customer as they left, and perused the Open Table website, making a mental list of possible new employers.
Around 4 pm or so, the evening shift servers began to arrive, all damp from the rain and looking flustered. Tom walked in, umbrella-less and soaked to the skin.
“You know there’s a pile of vomit outside, right?” he told the manager as he passed the host stand.
The daytime manager, a petite Brazilian woman who once shrieked at a to-go container with a few sugar packets in it when she was told it was an entrapped mouse, dashed to the doors to peek outside and investigate. There it was. No wonder no one was coming in. Moments later, she had a busboy dumping a bucket of water over the vomit, encouraging it to find its way to the gutter. I could not for the life of me remember anyone having too many brunch cocktails and staggering out to puke in our doorway.
The evening progressed without much fanfare, although the storm provided a small amount of amusement. We watched as hapless umbrellas whipped around in the gusts of wind, getting caught in tree branches and leaving their owners looking both amused and embarrassed as they fought to right the flimsy wire spindles in the sheets of rain.
While I'd like to tell you a witty story about some customer who made an outrageous scene and was thrown out by the bouncers, or who fell asleep in the bathroom, that would mean that customers would have to be in the restaurant. And this, hopeful readers, was just not the week for it.
But! Fret not! For this upcoming week is Restaurant Week, The Holy Grail of all server's nightmares. For one week, we shall offer meals at a flat price all over the city, encouraging diners to try new things and widen their horizons. Restaurant Week brings out the best in everybody, and I will be taking notes.
