Capital Coffee’s kitchen is very small, and Sal Mustachio likes working as quickly as possible. That means a menu with lots of quick sandwiches and lots and lots of eggs. Bagel egg and cheese. “Breakfast wrap” (an omelette in a tortilla). Ham and egg croissant. And so on.
Sal is a pretty decent cook. Twenty years on the job has made him very good at multitasking. There are constantly two pans on the burner at all times, and Sal is liberal with the Pam spray (“it’s cheaper than butter,” he tells me. “they want butter, we charge them extra.”). On the other side he’ll be dicing carrots for the chicken/tuna salad. It is ironic that the cafe’s signature item, the “chicken salad sandwich”, is the only food prep where Sal pays no attention to hygiene. He wipes his hands on a bleached towel and then, sans gloves, starts folding massive amounts of mayo, pepper and carrots in with the chicken (or tuna) to make a week’s batch at a time.
Capital Coffee is “famous” for its chicken salad. Why does every restaurant have to pretend they serve a famous food item? Famous because that’s the only thing you make with pride? Are food places worried that if they don’t have a ‘famous’ item, people won’t eat there? Why is our culture so obsessed with fame? And is it a coincidence that a cafe desperate for money is also desperate for superficial recognition?
So many questions.
(also fyi a google search of best coffee shops in DC will not yield the actual name of this restaurant. so maybe not so famous after all)
If Capital Coffee were to be famous for anything, it would be their signature coffee beverages and fancy espresso machine. One of the owners, a throaty Philadelphia native named Agnes, taught me how to pull shots and steam milk. I learned from Agnes the difference between coffee and Americano, which I’d not known before. I still probably couldn’t tell you the difference between coffee and espresso beans–they taste better???–but I now though that a cafe Americano is an espresso shot with hot water, while regular coffee is just whatever slop is brewed in the pot that morning (I’m being mean our coffee was fine).
The hardest part of the job was learning how to foam milk. I was very frustrated; how could this stupid task be so difficult? Thousands of people in every city in the world can do this, so why was I having trouble? One problem was that even when I was foaming the milk correctly, Sal was telling me I was doing it wrong, because he thought that would be a good motivator. Or he just assumed I was doing it wrong. Because we couldn’t waste milk, Sal would have me practice only when we had actual drink orders and then the first week would just grab the milk tin from my hand and finish it himself.
What Sal should have told me, and didn’t, is that the trick to foaming milk (if there even is a trick) is simply to listen for the right sound and make sure a whirlpool effect is going on at the surface of the milk. And it’s kind of fun. I probably enjoyed foaming milk more than anything else in the cafe.
Milk foam, by the way, is, according to Sal and the owners, used exclusively for cappuccinos. Which makes me feel like there isn’t much point in ordering a cappuccino instead of a latte, which is espresso served with ACTUAL milk, unless you just want to be a fancy asshole. Which is a fine thing to aspire to be, since cappuccinos look nice good baristas can make “latte art” on top of the foam.
Now let’s get to the fun part, because there isn’t much more to say. Here is what I think was going on:
The cafe has been unusually empty this summer. The bosses are stressed out about business. For one reason or another, Sal Mustachio hates one of the two lady owners, and they have different ideas about everything; how to make drinks, how to put lettuce on the sandwiches, how to crack an egg. So unbeknownst to me, I was being judged under competing sets of criteria. More on that in a moment.
Something about the bosses’ car was an issue. There was a lot of staff turnover going on at the time I arrived. Construction going on above the meant occasionally plaster would fall from the ceiling onto an unsuspecting customer. There were a lot of signs of strain. The bosses were made at the staff, more generally, for a few reasons including the fact that one of the cafe phones had disappeared the week I arrived (they didn’t blame this on me).
Two weeks in, I had been trained on all the machines, used the cash register, managed inventory, dealt with bank money, etc etc, and wanted to know where I stood with the cafe. When was I no longer a trainee?
“When you stop breaking things!” said Sal angrily, which was strange, because I hadn’t broken anything. (To be fair, I had almost broken several things, but that is not quite the same).
The next day was my first day shift without Sal looking over my shoulder. The atmosphere was noticeable more relaxed and pleasant. We handled a busy lunch rush, satisfied the customers and held down the fort. I managed to carry out six orders at one time without making an error, working nonstop in the kitchen and I was excited for the opportunity to relay this story to one of my superiors. That is, until Bad Cop Boss came in to shout at us that the tables outside the cafe were dirty and we were doing a horrible job.
And things went downhill in a hurry.
Actually, at first, nothing went downhill. I pressed the button several times and still, nothing in the coffee grinder came out. I did what I’d been told, shuffling the plate back and forth, but then I asked the boss for some assistance, and that was a big mistake.
“Why are you trying to grind coffee beans when the machine is only half full?” she asked me.
“So we can have more coffee?” I asked, unsure if that was the right answer. (it wasn’t)
“Why are you trying to grind coffee beans when the machine is only half full?” she repeated. And then she opened the top to show me. “You always fill the grinder all the way before you grind the beans. Also, never touch any other part of the grinder. All of this should have been obvious to you by now. You’ve been here, what, two weeks? Three weeks? Are you actually this stupid?”
I thought this was a rhetorical question so I shrugged. Apparently it wasn’t a rhetorical question.
“I asked you a question!” she yelled at me. “How could anyone be so stupid?”
Stay calm stay calm stay calm stay calm stay calm.
“I don’t know.”
“Think!” she said. “Use this!” and she pointed to her head. “I worry about you.”
I was worried about me too.
Worried because while I was being lectured on the coffee machine I was also supposed to help a customer with an ice tea.
“Why are you grabbing a mug instead of a jelly jar?” she asked me. Another non-rhetorical rhetorical question.
The answer was I was flustered. Which is sort of what I told her. She didn’t like that answer. So I kept my mouth shut. She didn’t like that I kept my mouth shut. So I ran to the kitchen. She decided to watch me in the kitchen.
The boss found a lot that was to her disliking. I was cooking the eggs wrong. I put the lettuce on the wrong piece of bread. I had the toast on the wrong setting. I was stacking the turkey the wrong way. Then cutting the sandwich at too sharp an angle.
“Who told you to do this this way?” she demanded. I tried Sal. She didn’t like that answer. So I said one of the other co-workers. She liked this answer a little too much. She brought in the other guy and tried to get me to name names. I played dumb.
“Think!” she said. “Use this! Fucking hell!” and she pointed to the door. I was to speak with her in the dining room.
While she was chewing me out, a woman came in with her son and left.
“You just lost us a sale,” the boss told me. “Did you see that? You just lost us a sale.”
I saw it. And I saw myself out the door later that day, hoping I’d made it through a rough day at work. Alas.
My only regret is that if I had known I was going to be fired, I would have requested to smash a plate or steal some money from the register. Something that would have earned the temper tantrum. Instead, I learned that when the boss starts a tempest in a teapot, the boss never loses. Never.
Is there a lesson to any of this?
How about, in the battle between the big corporations and the little man, it is not always a fight between David and Goliath. Instead, the little man is mad solely because he is not the big corporation. David wants to be Goliath. And if David is just a pint-sized Goliath, simply too puny to be much of a bruiser, then why should we care if in this version of the story, David is trampled underfoot?
Sometimes the illusion of Cowboys vs Indians is really just a fight between outlaws of different degrees.
Degrees of a boiling, burning morning Joe.
Culture Time 
Good blog!
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