From the Barista’s View

Ah, the good old days of being a barista. Writing this series about coffee shops and the history of coffee has brought back some memories. The bookstore that I worked at decided to expand and install a coffee shop, and I was asked to manage it. My initial reaction was one of absolute terror. I understood cooking, and could follow a recipe, but steaming and frothing milk; now that was something totally out of my comfort zone. Still, the opportunity to earn tips was a great motivator.

I spent a rather intensive weekend training to be a barista. Learning how hard to compress the espresso was probably the most difficult part of the process, but muscle memory quickly made it easy. What I thought would be hardest, learning the recipes, turned out to be a piece of cake. So, you had, basically, two different drinks to know: Latte and Capuchino. Latta was espresso, with a lot of steamed milk and a little froth on top. Capuchino was espresso, with a little steamed milk and a lot of froth on top. Neither drink was shaken or stirred. The goal was to basically have everything in layers, so you would taste different things as you progressed through the layers. Think of, “Variations on a Theme of Paganini.” The various different drinks were, basically, “Variations on a Theme of Latte.” You were basically making a Latte with different flavorings in it.

We would have a tip jar by the cash register. It would sit empty for quite a while, until we figured out the secret of “Priming the pump.” I would bring a dollar bill and a dollar in change with me to work. Shortly after opening, I would drop the dollar in change into the tip jar. Maybe after another half hour or so, I’d add the dollar bill. Often people wouldn’t tip unless they saw that others had tipped. At the same time, they were observant. If they saw money in the jar as soon as we opened, they knew that it was primed, so, yes, it was a matter of playing mind games with the early customers.

Perhaps the most difficult thing was when we would have a customer come in who got a drink at Starbucks and wanted us to replicate it. Well, we didn’t have the Star Trek food replicator, so often times we would have to ask what was in it. I quickly got a notebook for behind the register and we would put in the customer’s name, the drink name, and the ingredients. I would also put in the pricing for each size. Nothing was worse than getting yelled at by a customer when the price for the same size drink would change from barista to barista. I would always try to find a drink of ours that was fairly close to what they wanted, simply to minimize the extra ingredients that we would have to charge for the drink. For example, a customer might want an apple-cinnamon latte. I’d see that we would have a peach latte. The notes for the apple cinnamon would be see peach latte recipe. Substitute apple for peach, add cinnamon. That way the customer gets charged just for the cinnamon, instead of getting charged for a plain latte with both apple and cinnamon added. It would save them maybe 30 cents. But it would save the barista’s from having to argue with the customer about why the price wasn’t consistent each time.

There was also the ability to create drinks, especially cold drinks. My personal favorite was a frozen creamsicle. If you grew up with ice cream trucks in the 1970s, you probably remember the creamsicle—vanilla ice cream with just a hint of orange sherbert mixed in. My version was ice, half and half, and a shot of orange flavoring. Blend it all together and it would bring back the memories of chasing down the ice cream truck on a bicycle.

I guess my one pet peeve from those days was when a customer would come in and ask for a drink using Starbuck’s size names. I’m not a coffee drinker so I’ve never been to a Starbucks. A customer would come in and ask for a Venti or a Trenta. Sorry, my Italian is limited to spaghetti, ravioli, calamari, mangiare, and avanti. I would never go hungry in Italy. I would have to ask, small, medium, or large. Probably close to 50% of the time, the customer would repeat the size using the Starbuck’s name. So, I would just smile and make a small drink; then when they would complain about it, I would politely tell them I didn’t have the time to guess what size they wanted. I would ask one time. You either answer right or you’re getting a small drink.

I do remember one guy. He would come in every day, get a small coffee, go and put two packs of sugar in his coffee, and put about a dozen packs in his pocket. It took us a while to catch on to him, but when we did, the store manager got the sweetest revenge. She was waiting for him by the condiment stand. He put the two sugars in his coffee, and started to pocket the others. The manager told him that he couldn’t pocket the sugar; he would have to put it in his coffee and drink it. He protested that he was saving it for later at home. She explained to him that the sugar wasn’t free to take home. Long story short, we ended up banning him from the store. Some might say that we were cutting off our nose to spite our face, and that’s a valid argument. The flip side of the coin is, five pounds of sugar in the individual packages costs close to twice as much as a regular five pound bag from a grocery store; there’s the principle of the thing—we’re providing the condiment for you to use in the store, not something for you to take home and use at your pleasure.