#72 "Gettin' the Band Back Together II" September 18, 2013

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I probably shouldn't write this post. Not because it's childish, highly unlikely, or even based anywhere in reality, but because I don't want to give away my plans. I don't want someone to read this and steal my idea so that when the day comes, I'm left out in the cold. Yes, I am talking about the Zombie Apocalypse. As a New Yorker, the Zombie Apocalypse is going to be a trying endeavor. There are 20 million people living in the TriState Area, and so when the outbreak comes and most of the population are turned into zombies, New York City is not going to be a great place to be. Unless you find yourself at the Cafe Loup.
A couple years ago, some friends of mine and I found ourselves at the Loup talking about this very scenario. We had all seen countless zombie movies and T.V shows, so we knew the risks of being in a big city. One of the best portrayals of New York during the post-zombie-apocalypse is in the movie "I Am Legend" in which Will Smith ends up being the last man alive on the island of Manhattan that has been overrun with zombies. He fares rather well, and I think anyone who has seen the movie would move to Washington Square North as well. However, before you can become "the last man standing," you need first to survive the initial scourge of zombies. That is where the Loup comes in. Some people are going to think that going out and fighting these undead former finance bros is going to be the way to go. I am here to defend the opposite stand; that of laying low and surviving. Battling zombies on the streets of New York is going to be difficult at best. There are not enough firearms in the city and there are too many variables. Zombies could get at you from literally any angle; from the sewers, dropping down from buildings, jay walking, or from behind the wheel of a large automobile. No, being on the streets after dark during these troubling times would be unwise at best. The better solution is to lay low, wait out the initial push, and then return to the world when the zombies have been starved out of Manhattan and have moved on to the suburbs. Hence, the Cafe Loup.
The defensive capabilities are pretty solid at the restaurant, although there will have to be some preparation, and you are going to want to have a couple people to help. With luck, the Zombie Apocalypse will happen at approximately midnight on a Sunday night. This way, me and a handful of good people will be there and we can keep the riff-raff out, e.g. you, dear readers (as zombies, remember; but you won't care because you will be undead). We have a steel door that will need to be pulled down and locked from the outside. Then, we will need to just go ahead and break one of the front windows. They will be broken soon enough once the zombies start realizing there are people with deliciously edible brains inside, so what's the harm in speeding along the process? Once back inside, the front windows are going to need to be barricaded. We will use as many, if not all, of the tables, chairs, refrigerators, and stoves from the dining room and kitchen as necessary. This barricade will hopefully keep out the undead hordes, but in the unfortunate event that this barricade does not hold, there is still hope! As a couple people are barricading the front of the restaurant, a second team will be taking all of the food, water, and booze downstairs into the basement. This is where everyone will be living for the next 6 months (or as long as it takes for the brain eaters to move out to Long Island). Once the front alcove is sufficiently barricaded, the basement door can be shut and the second defense can be started in the stairwell. Once everyone is downstairs and the two-system barricades are in place, everyone can relax a little bit.
But not for long. That's when siege mentality is going to have to take place. Now, if the Zombie Apocalypse does happen on that fateful Sunday night, we won't be as stocked as possible, but we will be stocked for a good 6 month, subterranean vacation of misery. Yes, we will be alive and that will be exciting, but the 6 months in the dark of the basement might not be what you would call a vacation. However, we will be well stocked with foodstuffs, clean and safe drinking water, and of course a ton of booze. I think on Day 1, you drink the best stuff you've got, as a celebration of surviving the initial outbreak, barricading the place and ending up in a safe spot underground. Then, on Day 2, you start emptying the well liquors and liqueurs, so as to save the good stuff for a couple months from now when the cabin fever and the rank odors of your co-inhabitants is going to be irritating. I think there would be enough food for 6 people to live down there for 6 months. Granted, we wouldn't all be eating "escargot followed by cassoulets and chocolate pudding for dessert" every night, but there is enough dry and canned food that we could all not starve. Yes, we will be losing some weight, a lot of weight, but we will come out on the other side alive and not zombies. And what a glorious day that will be! The day that we finally emerge from the basement into the Post-Apocalyptic Dystopia! We'll remove the refrigerators from the doors, and armed with knives and hammers, we will spill out onto 13th Street and greet the new world with squinty eyes and emaciated faces. But we will be alive!
(Wouldn't that be the worst if that in that 6 month stretch, a cure was found and New York City hadn't actually been overrun by zombies? We finally hack our way out of the basement and find that life had just gone on as normal, and people simply thought the Cafe Loup had closed? But, if New York had been completely consumed by the zombie horde, it'll be nice to know that we can get all the great apartments now.)
In all of New York, I truly believe that the Loup is my first choice of places to be when the Zombie Apocalypse happens. As for all of you, if you would like to be invited into the elite club of zombie survivalists on 13th street, I would recommend coming in every Sunday night, just in case "Patient Zero" tastes the first brain somewhere in lower Manhattan and plunges the world into total and utter chaos. Wouldn't it be nice to spend the next couple of months in a dark basement sipping on the daily ration of Creme de Cacao instead of roaming the streets in search of brains?

#71 In Color!!! September 10, 2013

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"Water World"

In any good restaurant, there should never be a dull moment. Actually, the only dull moment should be closing up for the evening without a hitch; locking the door, and peacefully walking away, leaving the space to breathe overnight to get ready to do it all again the next day. The rest of the time should be a non-stop hive of activity. Ordering, delivering and preparing the food, cleaning the place, making it look good for the guests, and eventually serving as many meals as humanly possible. All of this usually goes on without incident day in and day out. There are some days, however, that try their hardest to mess up the natural flow of the normal day in the restaurant. One of those days happened just this week, and I was there to witness it.
There have been a handful of times that the restaurant has closed because of natural disasters. The Cafe Loup was open on 9/11, and from I heard, they were packed. The place doesn't have a television set, and my guess is that people needed to get out of their apartments and be with other people on that day, and so they congregated at the bar and in the dining room trying to make sense of the events of the day. I started working there a couple months later and business went on uninterrupted until August 14, 2003. I was taking a shower, getting ready to go to work when the stereo went out. I didn't think much of it until I got outside and saw that the traffic lights were out. It was the Great Blackout of 2003. The entire Northeast was blacked out, the biggest power outage in American history with over 50 million people without power. On that day, though, we all thought the power would be back on in time for service, so I went to the Loup to see what I could do. I found Lloyd there that day sitting outside on the sidewalk with his little battery operated television set that we would watch the World Series on a couple months later. Sure enough, the entire city was without power. I went into the darkened restaurant that was being lit by the emergency floodlights, but the kitchen was pitch black. There would be no service that evening. A couple regulars came in and we gave them some drinks, and drank a couple beers, since they would all be warm in a couple hours and then sat outside on the sidewalk to watch the endless streams of people walking home. That little forced night off wasn't such a big deal, the power returned the next day and the restaurant went on with the usual business that evening.
The next time wasn't so easy. Flash forward nine years to October 2012. A storm people were calling "Frankenstorm" was making it's way up the East Coast. The closeness to Halloween was the reason for the name, but once it hit New York City, the humor of the name was quickly forgotten to the actual name of the storm, Hurricane Sandy. This hurricane, when all was said and done, ended up being the second costliest hurricane in American history, runner-up only to Katrina which essentially leveled New Orleans. To this day, there are still people in New York City living in hand-made shelters that they built after their homes were destroyed, and this is going on 3 years since the storm. I was lucky enough to be out of town when the storm hit, and although the storm water didn't affect the Cafe Loup, the aftermath certainly did. The water flooded the streets on the south and east side of Manhattan, causing one of the power stations to explode and shut off the power to lower Manhattan for a week. Just our luck, the power outage affected everything from 14th street on down to the southern tip of Manhattan. As you know, the restaurant is on 13th Street. Lloyd estimated that he ended up throwing out over $7,000 worth of food that started to go bad a couple days after the power went out. Then he had to buy all that food again and start over. And we were the lucky ones! Minimal to no water damage, and everyone survived.  Pretty good for a city where 100,000 homes were damaged or destroyed, and 71 people died.
Finally, and this is why I even thought about this subject in the first place, are the events that took place this past Wednesday evening. The previous two events cost the restaurant a lot of money and stress, and so this little thing that happened on Wednesday is essentially a non-event, but it was pretty eventful anyway, and it made me think about how sometimes it's the unexpected events that make you enjoy the quieter moments. What happened is that at about 7 o'clock on Wednesday night, a water main broke on 13th St. and 7th Ave, flooding the subway and draining the neighborhood of its water. Our building still had hot water, but there was no cold water and no water in the toilets. I was working the door, so I would tell people this as they came in, showing them videos from Twitter, and letting them know that the toilets were essentially not working. Not one person was disuaded from coming in and enjoying some drinks and dinner. Every once and a while, Tim and I would go into the bathrooms and manually fill up the tanks, and rinse out the urinal, thus trying to create a sort of normalcy throughout the night. The kitchen guys filled up as many receptacles as they could with the water that was remaining since they knew it would eventually run out as it had in the smaller buildings on the block. For the most part, I was impressed by everyone who helped out to make a possibly disastrous situation completely reasonable and incident free. Some of the guests didn't even know anything was amiss until they were leaving. Writing about this night coupled with the previous stories seems like they aren't related in the slightest, as the other two were disasters on a national level, while this water main break only affected an extremely small amount of people and was essentially a nuisance rather than an all out life altering event. But it was exciting. To be put in a pressure situation and come out on the other end not only successful but also making such a small impact that many people didn't know there was a problem was pretty cool. It certainly makes you appreciate those nights that nothing out of the ordinary happens. Oh, to be boring!

#65 "Happy Campers" In Color!!! June 27, 2013

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Oof. That last post stressed me out!

I was inspired to write a post in the style of a short story instead of a blog post, and for some dumb reason I decided to write about being in the weeds. Well, it was like I was reliving being in the weeds, and the customers were real! Even the guy who tugged on my apron was a real person and I can see his face now! Argh! That is one of the challenging things about this project: I am forced to think about work while not physically at work. One of my favorite parts about being a server and bartender is that when you leave the job, it doesn't go home with you. I don't ever have to work from home. If I am not at the restaurant, I don't have to serve people. It really is a great thing. However, with this project, a little bit of the restaurant is with me all the time here on my computer. I am sure I have mentioned that I rarely draw people I know on these pictures because I don't want to have to think about them when I am at home. Don't get me wrong, Tim and I have inadvertently drawn customers and friends on these drawings before and probably will again, I am just saying that I don't usually do it on purpose. I would feel bad if I drew someone I like on one of these drawings and then all of a sudden, the drawing progresses and that person that I like finds themselves in some crazy scene like the one pictured above. On the other hand, if we draw someone who we don't like very much or who is a difficult customer, then I have to see them, color them in, and make them fit into the crazy scene like the one featured above. That means that I have to spend time with them that I usually would not do. I try to avoid difficult customers. I do not want to hang out with them in my own home in my free time, and they probably feel the same way about me. 

When we do get difficult regular customers at the restaurant, we usually will trade them out. For instance, if you are a problem customer for me, but Mike doesn't mind you, then you will usually have Mike as your server even if you are not sitting in Mike's section. The same goes with me. I will take Edie's problem customers and vice versa and on and on, amen. This makes the night better for everyone, including you. I mean, you don't think that you are a problem customer! You think that you are Cafe Loup's best regular and life of the party! But I am here to tell you that you are someone's problem customer. I think that I am probably someone's problem customer. I walk into a certain bar on a certain night with a certain someone behind the bar and they roll their eyes and say, "darn, that guy is back! Why can't he come in here on my night off?"

It's just part of life. You think you are a good person, a generous person, and a person who is liked by all people and babies and small animals. But you're not. Someone thinks you suck. And I think this happens a lot in restaurants because people who are problem customers don't know that they are being obnoxious a lot of the time. Sometimes it's the alcohol that makes them difficult. Maybe that one night they had a couple too many and started talking crazy to their server. Maybe they were just really hungry that one night and weren't in the mood to small talk and so they got a little snippy with the waitress. Well, whatever it was, your server remembers. 

Being a server is a hard enough job as it is without difficult customers. When I have a full section, which is 12 tables with up to 36 people in my section AT THE SAME TIME, I do not have time to have difficult people. That is 36 people all needing something and all at different times, so I am trying to figure out the timing of getting 36 people one thing at a time. A lot of the time, I have half of those 36 people being regulars who know me, and see that if I do have a full section, they'll be more patient than usual. And yet, with 18 people on my side, all it takes to throw the whole night off is one problem customer. Since the job is all about timing, and making sure everything is landing in the right place, one person making crazy demands or keeping me at the table longer than necessary is a formula for throwing off the entire night. On the other hand, if I mess things up on my end, the same is true. There is a very delicate balance and if as little as one thing disrupts that balance, a good night can turn into a bad night in a matter of literal seconds. 

That is why when you are a problem customer, your server will never forget you. There are people who have been coming to the restaurant for years whose face gives me a visceral reaction of dread and yet I can't even remember how they spited me. They may have done something 10 years ago, and yet, when I see them, I hand them over to Mike or Edie. Yet, even as I say that, I am looking down the pike at future T&J drawings and see more and more real life people making their way into the drawings. However, as you will see in future blog posts, the people who do make it into the drawings come with an interesting story. So, even though they might be awful, at least their story is interesting. Maybe it will be about YOU!

#61 "Richard of XIII Street" In Color! May 30, 2013

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Coloring this one was very satisfying. I got to really bring out Tim's welt, bring out the insanity in Richard, and costume all of the super heros. Although I am almost most proud of the scaffolding behind Richard and the wall behind that. If I told you that this was a picture of 13th St. any time between now and 2010, you would say, "Of course it is, there's the scaffolding." As anyone who frequents the street knows, there is scaffolding there all the time. At the time of this drawing, there had been scaffolding around our building on the corner for years. They were replacing the windows or something. Then, when those were taken down, they did the same thing to the building across the street so up went the scaffolding for another couple of years. I am not exaggerating when I tell you these are up for years. In fact, people would come into the restaurant when the scaffolding went up and would express their shock and concern for the place. Because, you see, 13th street in the past 15 years has been almost constantly under construction. The fact that the restaurant has survived through this constant work zone is a testament to the owners and the regulars who frequent the place. Without hard work from the staff and the loyal patronage from the neighborhood regulars, this place would've folded like so many uptown places that can't survive the constant construction (yes, I am talking about those poor guys stuck in the way of the forthcoming 2nd avenue subway line).
When I first started, there was an awning like the kind you see uptown; it stretched from the building all the way to the edge of the sidewalk. You could fit ten smokers under there if it was raining, and it looked grand and inviting. That was replaced with the one that hangs there today during the first round of construction. That was when the MTA was putting in ventilation fans for the New Jersey Path train that has a station underneath 13th Street and 6th Avenue. The underground system is massive and so although the train station itself is across the street on the opposite side of 6th, the underground network stretches far beyond that. In fact, during the blackout in 2003, I saw angry commuters being shepherded out of a hatch on the corner of 13th, a block from where they usually emerge. Anyway, the construction of the ventilation fans was the longest and most detrimental to the restaurant. The whole sidewalk was ripped up and the north side of the street was essentially closed, which meant that any new customers were not going to be walking on that side of the street and thus not coming into the restaurant. The owners had to refinance their apartment to keep the place afloat, and were even interviewed for the NY Times. We survived that storm, and soon the fans were up and working (to the dismay of unwitting women with loosely fitting skirts who sometimes find themselves in "Marilyn Monroe on the vent" situations).
The next project started not too long after that, with the building in which the restaurant resides deciding to  tear up the whole sidewalk in front of the place so they could replace the marble facade along the base of the building. So now there was no sidewalk again and a wooden plank leading up the the restaurant. I was still a smoker in those days and would smoke in the little pits on either side of the plank. People would come in and ask what was happening out there and our go-to response was that we were putting in a pool, so just wait until summer! The truth, of course, was way more mundane, but the people who were asking usually were the same ones who had been coming in during the ventilation fan debacle so they were essentially in on the joke. Or, they were at least sympathetic about the whole thing. This lasted a year or so, and then they had to replace the windows, so for almost a decade, the restaurant was blocked from the street by some sort of construction. When the scaffolding went up, Phillip would joke about putting problem customers on "The Deck." That would have been great, although they probably would have liked it so much that we would have to take calls for years with the person on the other end saying, "Can we have a table on the deck... what do you mean you don't have a deck? I remember you having one... I am a regular there and I know you have a deck.... Can I talk to Floyd?"

P.S. There is currently scaffolding up in front of the restaurant because part of the parking garage next door fell off onto the sidewalk. So, expect to see some scaffolding next time you're on 13th Street (it'll no doubt be the same purple hue as pictured above:).

#54 "The Ones That Mother Gives You" In Color! April 11, 2013

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Speaking of drugs, let's talk about coffee. Most of my life would not be possible without coffee. I feel like a lot of Americans share my love of coffee and would agree that caffeine is hands-down the best drug around. It's legal, accepted, and you can get it almost everywhere. Now, what bugs me is decaffeinated coffee, but we'll get to that in a minute.
As a waiter, I like to have a nice double Americano before I start working. I used to drink a double iced latte to start the evening's shift, but then I decided I was lactose intolerant and I had to cut the milk out of the equation. That was bothersome for a while, but now I have learned to like black coffee and black double Americanos. I will agree with true coffee purists that all of these names, Americano, Macchiato, Cappuccino, are supremely annoying. Then, put Starbucks lingo on top of that and you have reached the pinnacle of obnoxiousness. However, I don't work at a Starbuck's and I rarely go into one, so I am relatively safe from them. But not really, because they have infected the minds of the American Consumer, and that affects me directly as a waiter. When I first started waiting tables, there were two options for coffee; regular and decaf. Now there are seemingly endless combinations. And none of them irk me more than decaffeinated cappuccino. I get one or two of these orders during a shift, if not more. It used to make me physically upset. I would grit my teeth and be so mad at the person who ordered it from me. I would think that they were doing it to spite me, like they knew how much I hated hearing those two words and they were getting joy out of my misery. Not only are they a pain in the butt to make, they are time consuming and when I have a full section on a Friday night and I have to stop and make a couple of these drinks, it can send me directly into the weeds; do not pass Go, do not collect $200. I realized one night after someone ordered a decaf cappuccino that it was affecting me so much and I thought that was a bad thing because people are not going to stop ordering the darn things, so I had to stop being such a baby about them and deal with it. I didn't know how to deal with it at first, because it was and still is an annoying beverage. I realize that people don't always want the delicious buzz that regular coffee gives you. I realize that some old people can't drink regular coffee any more and that after a lifetime of drinking it, they still get the pleasure out of decaf, because it actually tastes like coffee. I get this. I realize that some people don't drink coffee at night because they'll stay up looking at the ceiling in the dark and think of things like last years taxes and did they say the wrong thing at that party last week? I understand all of this. But I don't have to like it.
I finally figured out how to deal with the situation using reverse psychology. I now offer people decaf cappuccinos. That's right, I beat them to the punch. How can I be angry at them if I am the one who brought it up. By that logic, I should be angry with myself for even broaching the subject, but I like myself so I am not going to be mad at myself for something so trivial. I have much bigger issues to be mad at myself for, so offering a sweet old lady a decaf cappuccino is really low on that list. I have even been stepping it up a notch by offering decaf macchiatos, the crowned champion of obnoxious coffee beverages. I mean, really people, a miniature cappuccino? Get a life! I find that using this technique truly works, and I am no longer physically angered by orders of decaf anything. I may still find it annoying and time consuming on a busy night, but I am no longer shaking with rage when I hear those two bitter words. There are so many annoying orders that people come up with, and so many annoying people in the world, it's best to just accept this fact and try not to get so upset by these people. I mean, they have to deal with themselves, which must not be fun, so why let it affect you adversely? I understand that this is sometimes easier said than done, especially in the heat of the moment, but it's good to step outside yourself every once and a while and remind yourself that eventually, everyone will eventually go home.
But you order a "hot water with lemon" and so help me....

#46 "Sacajawea's Nightmare" November 23, 2011

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It has been a while since I posted last, and I just want to apologize to my 8 readers. Sorry! I guess the last time I posted, summer was here and I just needed to get outside! Yeah, right. I spent a lot of time at the Cafe Loup this summer, more than any summer since that year I only had one weekend off all summer. When was that? 2002? Oh well. It was a good summer, though. We had some fun and even when we were incredibly short staffed, we managed to eke out some dollars and cents and have a decent summer. That time of year is always a little slow at the Loup. People want to eat outside, our regulars go away to houses on the beach or in the mountains, and we are left on 13th Street with the scraps! That's right, tourists and the locals who don't go away. We had a good name for them over the summer. It was: The Leftovers.
I'm not saying that leftovers are bad. I have pizza in my refrigerator right now that is going to be an incredible snack later that will fill me up with food and leave me happy until dinner. On that same note, I have pickled herring in a jar that I never ate and has been expired since 2010 (which I should probably get rid of but there's sentimental value there?). Of course, we have plenty of regulars who stay the summer who are amazing and always a pleasure to see, but The Leftovers are the bad ones. The ones who we would see night after night and cringe at their very presence. Of course, going up to their tables, we put on a happy face and ask them how they are beating the heat, and boy was it hot out there today! That's the thing about waiters; they can be total con artists. I consider myself a pretty amiable guy; I like most people. This is the main reason I moved to New York City. I didn't move here for the Theater District or the lovely weather. No! I moved here for the people! Can you believe it? I had been living in physically beautiful places like Cape Cod and Colorado, and I gave all that up to move into a little apartment in Brooklyn because I like to be around people. All people, any people. Some days when no matter what I do, I can't get around all these people, I wonder what I was thinking back then, but most days I am happy with their company. Anyway, back to the con artist thing. Nine times out of ten, when a waiter comes to your table, they greet you with some pleasantries and a smile at the very least. They tell you some things and take your order, smiling and being nice. I don't have to tell you that 5 times out of 10, they are putting that face on and as soon as they turn their back, the frown returns. It's not that we don't like you as customers. No. You are the people paying our bills. We live on your tips to make ends meet. However, being nice to everyone all the time can get tiresome. You know the feeling. You have coworkers that you hate, but since you see them every day, you play nice so that the day passes without incident. Now, multiply that by 100 and you are a waiter. We not only have to play nice with our coworkers, but also the people who will eventually be paying us: You. That's where the con comes in. We have a lot of misbehaved customers and regulars who routinely make our lives at the Loup miserable. These people made up the majority of The Leftovers and are the people we constantly have to con, although most days you wish that they would find another place to haunt for a while. But no, we smile and chat and they would never know that they are the Problem Child to our John Ritter. So, I guess that doesn't make us con artists because we are still providing a service. I guess that makes us insincere. However, wouldn't you rather be lied to than have us be openly hostile to you? Wouldn't you like think, "I'm not the one who causing these people stress, it's that guy over there."? I guess that IS a con afterall: making you think and feel that you are a special flower, if only for the time it takes to have dinner. News flash: you ARE a special flower (but only during dinner at the Cafe Loup).