I am unsure of whether it is because of the rain this week or the upcoming Martin Luther King holiday. The X-mas rush/crush was back.
My Saturday shift is eight hours long and from 10:00AM-6:30PM (with a 30 minute lunch break and 10 minute recess in between) Drenched in sweat and out of the breath from pedaling up the slight grade from my home in Hancock Park to the shop in Los Feliz, I slip off my long sleeved blue denim shirt and remove my wet tee. My cold is nasty. This is my second day with a slight fever and it hasn’t abated. I hope that I will have it more together and less embarrassed today than yesterday, (where I forgot to check in and dropped two ribeyes and two carton of eggs on the floor)
The Saturday shift is Larry, Drew and I working out front. Jim the cheesemonger has left the store for another gig. Kenya has the day off as she has moved to evening assistant manager. Ernesto, Bart and Danny are around the table cutting the meat and fish. Olin will pitch in when necessary. He and Danny will come out the to the counter when a lot of customers are waiting to be helped. I go to the meat case and begin tagging the steaks and other beef cuts. New cuts to the case today include skin-on pork belly, Wagyu ribeye cap and porcini and gruyere beef sausages made from boneless short ribs. I want to see if there is any beef belly left. Olin fried some yesterday and it tasted awesome. No-go today. It’s not in the case. I make a mental note that I can bring this beef belly to Dr. Abu when I visit him in Stockton next week.
Larry notes that we don’t have a lot of fish to sell today. He’s covering tagging the fish in the fish case. Drew is finishing off tagging the fowl and sausages.I look at the retail shelves and wonder if I can do any stocking before we open. I see that it is 10:25AM. We open at 10:30. It’s not going to happen.
The doors open and 3–4 customers enter. I am cursing to myself that I am still sweaty and did not Old Spice my pits. We all settle into a flow of grabbing cuts, weighing them, plastic wrapping them and paper wrapping them. A lot of the pastry items in the pastry case have gone up in price.. We’ve got to be on the ball about that and not charge original prices. Nathan and Karen have decided that we will be going credit only due to the break-in on January 1. It’s not a big thing on our end. 95% of the business here was being done with credit. Customers are asking why and then understand why the store made this decision. I hear Nathan telling one customer that 5 restaurants on Colorado Blvd. in Eagle Rock got broken into all in one night.
By 2:30PM, we are up to Christmas numbers in customers and none of us know why. Drew takes his lunch. I take the time to talk with customers in the midst of the action. I spend time with the sparkly eyed woman with the fantastic smile. She tells me about her Irish stew. I tell her about the Netflix show, “Lords and Ladles” and who have a specific segment devoted to this stew. She gives me her email before she leaves. Jimmy and Delphine come in. I know both from the Hollywood Farmer’s Market. I ask Delphine if she liked the picture I sent her. It was of me wearing an olive wreath washing her feet with raw milk. The photo must be ten years old. (I was selling raw, unpasteurized milk then). Olin asks us what we are talking about. Delphine begins to tell her the story. I go to shake Jimmy’s hand. He has a garden and landscaping booth at the market. I ask him ho was business that day at the Santa Monica market. He gets his two NY Strips wrapped separately.
We are still going full bore now with the customers. Implying that we should all have some shots after work, I ask Olin, “You got any whiskey”
“All out, Moe”
“That’s unacceptable”
We both laugh.
The customer wave continues. We all drop into that rhythm…dancing around each other, arms and hands moving as quickly and efficiently as possible, all done to the soundtrack of Danny sharpening his knife, the sound of the saw as he saws a piece of rib eye off an 8-bone rackrack, or the tap of the knife hitting the board as he finishes cutting through a piece of shoulder chuck. Anticipated Larry’s need as I finish wrapping a rib eye while hebegins wrapping his customer’s branzino, I pass across the roll of tape from which he’ll soon take off a three inch strip to finish his wrap. I find myself adding flourishes…slamming a cut on the table before I plastic wrap it justust loud enough for the customer to hear, looking away while I tie a plastic bag of ground lamb, and lifting my hand a foot above the scale and holding it there for a moment before I punch in the per pound price for the monkfish. I feel like I am in a summer stock musical again highlighting the dance, song or lyric a little more pizazz.
It’s 4:30PM. Olin is getting off work. She mentions to me that she’ll be back later,
“I’ll take care of you”
That leaves four of us out front, Danny, Larry, Drew and I, with Gaspar the dishwasher in the back room. We don’t have to deal with the despised Justin, the customer we always rag on. He always comes in five minutes before we close, is extremely picky and order 5–7 cuts that we have but are at this time are rarely in the case. He came in earlier today with the crowd. I wondered which one of us were going to help him. It was Olin. He handled him with exceptional aplomb. In the final hour we never know what to expect customer-wise. There’s a randomness similar to the end of a farmers market where customers haggle, ask for impossible things, or just want to talk not cognizant of our fatigue. An example is when the cutting tables are cleaned and closed, there are rib eyes in the case, and a young guy comes in with his girlfriend and asks if we have thicker rib eyes. We reply “Yes, we can cut some for you” hoping he’ll see that we are 5 minutes from closing with the tables cleaned (anticipating this fact), and to cut a thicker rib eye will have to make us start the whole process over. He doesn’t notice and with a whiny voice say, “Will you do that for me?”
We are lucky tonight. Like I said, Justin has already shown up and had Meagan cryovac everything he bought. Jaspar is out in front of the cases sweeping the floor waiting for the clock to reach 6:30 so he can pull the blinds and lock the door. I get the plastic shoe boxes ready so the pastries can be stored overnight. It’s 6:30PM. Jaspar locks the door and we go to work doing the full clean.
I haven’t been out front to stock and restock the retail shelves the whole day.
Danny, Drew and Larry begin the pull the meat, fish and fowl from the cases to wrap and store overnight. The black risers that elevate the back meat trays follow. I am stationed in the pastry kitchen, Danny brigs back the sliding glass case doors, and Larry brings back the metal grates. I cater wrap the now filled pastry shoe boxes. (Cater wrap means to plastic wrap the item 3 times.) Drew and Danny begin to go to works putting away the meat while Larry moves to clean the inside glass and sides of the display cases. I go to work windexing the sliding door glass and then cleaning and sanitizing the grates. No booming rap music tonight. We are all pretty quiet. It usually takes an hour to do the work. I finish cleaning the grates. Larry finishes cleaning the cases. I insert the sliding windows, cussing as I attempt to fit the doors for the fish kit back into into the sliding grooves of the case. The grates are put back in. The black risers follow. The rinse water is dumped. All the product has been stored in the meat walk in freezer. Orderly touch-ups are done while Danny goes through closing checklist to make sure that all aspects of the deep clean are completed.
Olin surprises us, walks in, and slams a six-pack of craft beer from San Francisco on the cutting table.
“Here you go, guys! You all crushed it today. Thank you”
We clock out. We divvy the cans up. I do the ritual of tapping the top of the can to ease the pressure inside. Of course the beer tastes good. We stand there and bullshit about music with me preaching about Frank Sinatra. (I’m 56, Danny, Drew and Larry are all in their late 20's.) I tout how his popularity was a perfect storm of voice, orchestration and technology, how his voice failed him at the end of his career, and how Tony Bennett can still bring it in his late 80's. Danny hands out the leftover baguettes. I take one and add it to my backpack along with the loaf of rye bread that had fallen on the floor earlier in the day.
It’s time to leave. Hand slaps. Fist bumps. And the five of us walk out into the night.
