The Coffeehouse, or, "Cooking on Mushrooms is a bad, bad idea."
The Coffeehouse, Norfolk, VA. 1996
I was 23 when I was hired for my first restaurant job as a server… and I was not good. I had a customer once get up from a table of her friends and leave I was so bad. It was pre Internet or I’m sure I would have been famous on Yelp. It was better than my other job of bouncing frat guys and sailors out of a bar though so I learned and got better. What couldn’t get better was the name of the place. “Thank you for calling The Chesapeake & Atlantic Coffee and Tea Company featuring the White Moustache Café” was the hideous name and how we had to answer the phone…every time. Amongst ourselves and our friends it just became known as The Coffeehouse.
The Coffeehouse was in a beautiful building, the first Jewish Temple in Norfolk, and I often wondered if building a bar on Holy Ground was why nothing ever lasted there. It also had an identity crisis from the beginning. The primary owner wanted a coffeehouse so it would open at 7am with 4 flavors of freshly roast coffee available all morning, serve breakfast until 11, lunch until 3, then dinner until 10. On the weekends however, the G.M. wanted to make money so this quaint and quiet coffee shop with the French Presses, Espresso’s and Cobb Salads would become a bar at 10pm and bands would play in the loft until 2-3 in the morning. After cleaning until 4am we would crash on the couches upstairs and hope the beer and cigarette smell would go away before the Brunch crowd started arriving in a few hours. In the daylight we would finish cleaning the parking lot of empty cups and bottles sometimes minutes before the first customers arrived. It was madness.
The first real sign of trouble was when they fired the Chefs about 4 months in. Suddenly the G.M was picking up shifts in the kitchen but still keeping a smile on her face. The kitchen was her and Rahim, one of the only cooks who wasn’t let go. I saw they could use a hand and offered to pick up some shifts too. G.M. said sure, they would love the help, and I couldn’t be a worse cook than I was a server…Touché, Boss. Touché.
Within a week of my first day in the kitchen Rahim and I were scooping out a grease trap by hand.
“OH MY GOD!!” yelled Rahim.
“I HAD NO IDEA SOMETHING COULD SMELL SO BAD!!!” I yelled back.
“WHY ARE WE DOING THIS?? WHAT IS WRONG WITH US?” Rahim asked.
“I DON’T KNOW (GAG) THIS IS BAD. THIS IS SO BAD.” I came back.
“ARE WE GOING TO DIE? I FEEL LIKE WE ARE GOING TO DIE!” he wasn’t crying but I was.
Rahim’s face was puckered up as he tried to pinch off all the holes of his face and breathe through his eyeballs. Smart. I was trying to not retch with every breath and losing. I didn’t quit though. This was a test…of comradery, of gumption, of stupidity. I didn’t throw down my apron and walk the fuck out and beg someone, anyone, to be able to go back to school. For whatever reason I was sticking with this cooking thing. Rahim was teaching me everything he knew to make me almost useful in a kitchen and I wasn’t going to quit yet.
It was a simple menu, heavy on breakfast and brunch, and I learned how to make an epic stuffed omelet. It took me a while to handle portion control….the first few weeks I was pouring way too much egg into the pan and my “2 egg” omelets were coming out the size of dinner plates…but they looked damn good. I was learning as much as I could and soon I thought I was at least competent. Looking back the most comprehensive dish I made at the time was a Tuna Melt but it was a sexy goddamn Tuna Melt.
One day I came into work for sunday brunch and G.M. was giggling uncontrollably with the nar manager. We were setting things up, cooking bacon, the sun was bursting through the glass above the bar and into the kitchen. It was a beautiful morning and those two just would not stop laughing.
“Okay man, what is wrong with you guys? What is so damn funny?” I asked G.M.
She was a forty year old woman who just looked at me like a kid with her hand stuck in the cookie jar. She had a slightly sheepish but mostly mischievous smile as she answered,
“We ate some mushrooms.”
Nice, I thought. Explains the giggling. ”Well, where are mine?” I said and held my hand out.
“Oh, yeah, sure, here you go…” She said as she pulled a baggie out of her purse and handed me over a few caps and stems. I wolfed them down straight. The shrooms soon made their way through me and I was starting to feel nice and mellow. Before long I was the one giggling uncontrollably. I mean I was getting downright laughy. Everything was laughy. It was absurd what was going on and I knew that but I was laughing so hard I had tears rolling down my face. And then the tickets started coming in. I looked at G.M. and she looked at me and we looked at the bartender and we all burst into laughter and I said,
“All right, lets’ fucking do this…oh man this is gonna suck so awesome.” I just stood there staring at the first ticket like an idiot trying to figure out what it said and why there were rainbows coming off it.
One of the servers was looking at us lose our collective shit and asked “What is wrong with you people?” and I thought of Mr. Hand from Fast Times at Ridgemont High and said to myself “Drugs man. We’re all on drugs.”
After a few rough starts (“Why am I trying to flip this omelet with a fork?”, “When did the bacon say it would be ready?”, “What the fuck am I cooking??”) things were actually going smooth. I don’t know how dude was holding it together at the bar having to actually talk to people but G.M. and I were finally nailing shit down and having a blast. Pretty soon though, the needle started climbing into the red for both of us. At one point she threw a skillet down in front of me and said “Here plate this omelet.”
I’m not one to argue but I was a little maxed out at the moment and said “Why can’t you do it?”
She answered “I can’t get it to stop moving.”
That was fair. I looked down in the pan and the omelet looked back…and started beating. Fucking shrooms. I got it onto a plate with potatoes and fruit and hit the bell. I don’t recall being told we fucked anything up that day…I think we were paying such extraordinary attention to detail it would have been impossible. Every ticket was scanned at least 10 times. “Are you SURE this omelet has goat cheese, zucchini and sausage? That sounds ridiculous. What the fuck am I doing…let me see that ticket gain…”
When it was all over, when the last plate was served, and the last customer was paid out and gone, we were sitting at the bar, slugging back Mimosa’s, looking through the bar doorway at the kitchen that looked like a food bomb had gone off in it.
“Do we really need to clean? I don’t want to clean. I think I saw pesto on the ceiling. Let’s just clean tomorrow.” I said.
“Let’s just close.” G.M. said flatly.
I guess the Shrooms had opened her eyes to some new possibilities because it wasn’t long before we did close. The boss convinced an old friend named Dennis, a 6’4 mountain of pure, uncut Brooklyn, to buy into the Coffeehouse and he came in like a tornado. Dennis would usher in the next stage of this building’s restaurant evolution when he dropped a hundred grand on a redesign, brought up a Chef from the Breakers in Palm Beach, and turned the Coffeehouse into fine dining when he changed it to Brownstones. I would totally fuck up there too.
