The first restaurant job I ever got in New York was at a Belgian spot in the East 20’s in the winter of 2012. My buddy Mike got me a gig working the take-out counter, where my responsibilities included scooping gelato and making espresso drinks on a shitty old dual-grouphead machine. On my first day, someone from the kitchen showed me how to dispose of the glue traps under the bar with not-entirely-dead mice stuck to them. Later, a couple back-waiters tried to show me how to steam milk but none of them could agree on how to do it or what milk texture was desirable or which YouTube video explained best.
Mike and I were in undergrad together, both saddling ourselves with debt to complete our BFAs in theater. We worked at several more of the same restaurants before he left the service industry for good to perform in a touring a cappella group. There are probably new mice in the traps as I write this; I don’t know if any of them had artistic aspirations.
A couple years later, on the morning of my graduation, I stopped into Blind Barber on Lorimer Street, the Brooklyn “daytime” outpost of the famous East Village nightlife joint where I’d been working for a couple of months. I was wearing my conspicuous purple gown and carrying my cap to preserve my pomaded hair, which had been cut and styled by one of our barbers the night before. Whoever was managing that day—I think it was Vinnie—gave me a dap and congratulated me while Dave poured me my gratis coffee in an eight ounce cup. Maybe it was the buzz from the anticipation of the rest of my life, but I remember that visit being the first time I felt a sense of belonging at any job I’d ever had.
For the three years I worked at Blind Barber, we retained almost all of the same front-of-house staff. All of us were artists, most at least semi-professionally. There was Colin, the lead singer of several bands in Williamsburg; Tim, a spatial designer and occasional stick-and-poke artist; Cody, a singer-songwriter with a prolific Soundcloud output; Ofer, a drummer for an Israeli band that played packed shows in Tel Aviv; Tadhg, a cartoonist we celebrated the night after his illustration ran in the New Yorker; and Rick, a misanthropic improv performer and aspiring comic. Even Matt, the owner that hired me, was a former actor who’d stepped down from running a prominent downtown theater company just months before we opened.
Off the clock, we listened to each others’ music, pulled up each other’s shows, and even came together one weekend to make an absurd short film commemorating Colin’s last day in New York. In the middle of service, we shot a scene where Colin steals all the money from the register in the middle of a brunch shift. Nobody got mad. We were a family.
My artistic life regularly inserted itself into my little Blind Barber universe, or maybe vice versa. I was steaming milk—this time, expertly—when John Patrick Shanley called me on my cell phone and asked me to be in the play he’d just finished writing. I was lamenting to Hank, an OG regular, about an audition for this show Red Oaks I’d just bombed, when a guy named Esmer yelled from down the bar: “Red Oaks? I’m in that show!” I meted out the first act of an art heist movie with another regular, Steph, who sat perched on a stool next to my register editing her manuscript, only for her to tell me I was pitching the plot of The Goldfinch and would have to scrap my whole idea. (Not satisfied, I ran it by another regular, who responded by giving me two hours of notes and taking me to an opening at Barbara Gladstone).
A year later, after numerous auditions, I finally booked a tiny part on Red Oaks. I don’t know whether he put in a good word for me or not, but when I made it to set there was Esmer, beaming and introducing me to everyone without revealing how we knew each other. A few months later, Steph’s book was published. It was called Sweetbitter.
Business was a little erratic as the neighborhood continued to gentrify and new cafes began popping up around us, but even in the slowest stretches, we never lost our small core of regulars from the neighborhood. What became clear as the years dragged on was that most of our customers weren’t there for the coffee, or our custom-brewed signature IPA, or the bacon-egg-and-cheese sandwiches Haveen used to cook on a little hot plate behind the counter. They were there to see us.
When Blind Barber Brooklyn closed its daytime operation in 2017 (it would shut down for good the following year), I got a job working at a soon-to-be esteemed restaurant in a major New York museum. The qualifications for front-of-house staff listed in the ad I’d answered included bullets like “well rounded” and “knowledge of music, art, fashion, literature, news, etc.” Though this seemed like ludicrous criteria for what was primarily a coffee job, I liked the idea of a bar packed with people smarter than me who might fill in gaps in my cultural education and help complete my transformation into an erudite New Yorker.
That never materialized. On the cafe side of the restaurant, most of the people whose orders we took and whose drinks we made barely noticed us. When we did entertain guests who lingered at the bar, we performed our roles as learned New Yorkers to people who asked us questions like “where are you really from?” and “has anyone told you it’s illegal not to take cash?” But the dining room was gorgeous, the pastry case smelled like cardamon and cinnamon every morning, and the management took good care of us. Slowly, over shakshuka family meals, clandestine paper cups of Cava, and a meme account called versace_foreskin, my co-workers became my friends.
I made espresso behind that marble bar on and off over the last three years, right up until a month ago, when the museum shuttered with practically no notice.
When I showed up for what would be my last shift, there were more employees on the floor than guests. I disinfected the entire bar while Jack told me about a short story he’d written at Oberlin, which he promised to send me. I made Tomi her last iced latte with oat milk, though I forgot to ask her to make her “botox face,” a flawless imitation of one of the Park Avenue queens whose forty-pound J.P. Morgan Reserve cards I swiped all day long when business was good. I texted Melissa an eerie picture of the empty bar where, one night after clocking out, she stole my pen and drew portrait of me on receipt paper (which she didn’t think was good enough to let me keep). I said a sad little goodbye to Erin, a fellow theatermaker who was once my only friend in the audience at one of the scariest performances of my life. She gave me a hug. It was the last meaningful physical contact I’d get before going into quarantine.
A few days later, just before Cuomo and DeBlasio made it the law of the land, we shut our doors indefinitely, with no idea of what the future held for us, for our jobs, or for our industry. And while a cloud of anxiety about what might happen to us and the places we work will continue to hang over us until this pandemic is over, this much is certain:
We are ambassadors for the image of New York that is proudly telegraphed to the world—the cultural Mecca of North America, the concrete-jungle-where-dreams-are-made, the town where the guy pouring your wine or pulling your espresso can tell you a thing or two about Cezanne’s apples, about Laura Wingfield’s glass unicorn, about Gershwin’s trills and Cannonball’s timbre and Nas’s ad libs. We’re expected to have an opinion and crack a joke and eventually go off and make it so you can say you knew us when we still had coffee grounds under our cuticles, but if we get hung out to dry, you won’t have anyone to bring you oysters with szechuan mignonette, nor will you have Cody’s bars or Ofer’s step-kick or Melissa’s oils or my voice, because we will have awakened from the dream and found some other way to survive, and by then? New York will be another place entirely.