It was nice while it lasted

I started at Barboncino in early April, the world wet and blooming through concrete. I’d been in the city for almost two years and had been miserable the whole time. Maybe I had been miserable my whole life, leading up to Barbs—at least, there were times that it felt that way. I was miserable and alone, moving from one almost-right space to another: summer programs, then college, my brief stint doing activist work in Minnesota, back to the familiarity of the city for grad school. I was used to emptiness, and I was used to doing work that I loved but that I felt no one around me understood. To me, Barboncino would be a job of convenience, like any other; a restaurant gig in my neighborhood, instead of commuting uptown, while I finished my third semester of grad school.

My first shift was with Ike and Aidan, who struck me at the time as an almost pirate-like duo: Ike, bear-like and friendly in a striped t-shirt, Aidan, lithe and pale and anxiously charismatic. They taught me about the morning shift, the lame manager, the way the restaurant had weathered the pandemic like a “wild west”—the “inmates were running the asylum,” in what I would later understand to be an eminently Aidan turn of phrase. Aidan told me he was going to see the Mario movie with friends; he had a ring of teeth tattooed on his wrist.

I met everyone knowing they would be important. It’s hard to know what’s projected on the past and what’s simply being recalled; but I met Kemmett and it felt like a new essential character was being introduced. Alex was from the same part of Minnesota as I was; Sal was ageless, had a smoker’s rasp and a Mew tattoo. Andre got hot-and-sour soup in his eye while I told him about getting a black belt in karate but was too polite to say anything. Andrea, tall and fierce, didn’t say a word to me until the end of my first shift, then insisted on buying me a drink.

There was John, who I was a little in love with despite all reason. There was Jada with her nieces and her girlfriends, Benny in his mania. Erica came back from Mexico City in the summer, and we found ourselves coming to work in matching outfits so often people began to think it was planned. There was an employee height chart on the wall where Briana scrawled my name half an inch above her own. I quickly came to love this place, skipping summer plans and date nights to go to union meetings, staying up until 4am, sober. I had never known this kind of love; being part of something bigger than myself, a job whose economy is secondary to its purpose, a place that felt like home.

So now that it’s all ending, I’m struggling to look it in the eye. I’ve lost many of my homes and I’ve always been looking for new ones. I wonder about early childhood development, psychoanalytic theory: could it be because we moved three times before I turned four? Because my dad travelled for work? I haven’t been inside my childhood home for over ten years; my mom sold the house and left the state not long after my dad died. And when I went back to visit the town I grew up in a few years ago, where I’d walk along train tracks next to the lake and eat ice cream as a reward for cleaning the cat litter, they were building a 9/11 memorial in the center of town, a thousand miles from Ground Zero. When I ache for home I soothe myself by knowing that most people hate the suburb that they grew up in, that I would probably hate it too if I still had access to it, that I do hate the 9/11 memorial and the new condos and the evangelical conservatism. But I still have dreams where we own that house, where I run through the backyard picking worms from soil.

I’m always looking for home, and I only found it once, and it was my service job. So all the more cruel is the reality that the people who love the place, who dedicate their lives to it, are not the people who hold the deed; that the people who own it can, and will, and did, take it away just as quickly as they bought it. The owners that I worked under, a husband-and-wife team, took over the restaurant about six months before I started; they were young, “hip,” with nose rings and tattoos. The wife interviewed me; she said I seemed like a great fit, and she said she had “no idea” how much front of house made in tips. I decided this was normal. I decided that these owners would be enlightened, that one was a doula, that they were self-described “industry people,” though I didn’t think to ask how industry people could afford to buy one of the most successful restaurants in the neighborhood.

I do know now that owning a restaurant is not the same as loving it, needing it. They invested an enormous sum of money into a space that they didn’t understand, so that they could convert it into an umbrella company with outposts in other neighborhoods and an HR rep to screen their emails. They told us that they had bought the restaurant because they saw “potential,” that they knew they could “revitalize the restaurant for years to come.” They told us this in the email they sent telling us that they were shutting the restaurant down. They told us, in their email, that they had had a vision.

Their vision didn’t work. Barboncino didn’t need updated graphics on their pizza boxes or cloth napkins; Barbs ran on $2 Narragansett and free brunch, on community goodwill. It ran on the labor of the workers, who dedicated their time and therefore their lives to it in exchange for $10, $15, $20 per hour. It ran on community, on regulars, on neighborhood industry workers coming in for late night, on wood-fired pizza made by people who need a job or want a job but also need a family, and we all need a family, don’t we? That’s the great tragedy. It is a material crisis to lose one’s job; it is a spiritual one to lose one’s family.

The owners will keep their family because they weren’t part of ours; they were above us, refusing to openly discuss workplace issues, coming to the restaurant once a week to meet with the managers before service started. They didn’t know how their restaurant ran, and they didn’t seem to want to know, if it meant spending time with us. They made fun of a staff member for requesting Mondays off to play Dungeons and Dragons; they didn’t seem concerned when a manager they hired texted them that she wanted to push an employee down the stairs. They didn’t like our family, even though they bought it. When they heard we were beginning the process of unionization, they planned to fire us all and replace us. The only reason they didn’t was because their chef, who’d worked at the restaurant for a decade, told them that if they fired his friends, he’d quit.

What they didn’t understand, and what the chef was trying to tell them, is that their staff was what made Barboncino; that the people who do the work are the people who run the business. The people who give their time and energy, which is to say give their lives, are the people who create the space. I quote David Graeber’s “Bullshit Jobs” like an evangelist, spreading the good word: “Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don't like and are not especially good at.” I believe in doing work that I believe in, and I have a pathological inability to prevent myself from caring, and all I received in return was resentment. What the owners didn’t understand was how lucky they were to have a staff that cared. We are Barboncino even if they hold the deed, and even if they invest millions of dollars, and even if they gut and sell the physical space for parts.

It feels silly to mourn a workplace, to call it a home, especially when the work you did there was largely thankless and redundant. You’re not supposed to love your service job; you’re supposed to clock in and out, and do your job, and leave like you’ve had a zipless fuck, like you’ve been on a Hinge date and will go on another tomorrow. But I went there almost every day, either to work or to sit at the bar; I had meals with my friends, twice per shift if we were lucky, and drinks after. I spent my time trying to make a restaurant run, helping my friends with their work, letting them help me. I spent my hours there which means I spent my life there. We would tell stories, talk about movies, about politics between taking orders. I met my boyfriend at the bar, then started going to the bar with him.

Few people are able to feel this way about their work. Jobs are supposed to be a means of earning, as Audre Lorde laments, “bread or oblivion;” they’re the thing that takes you away from “real life,” or financially supports it. It isn’t supposed to be “real life,” even if you spend 40 of your most productive hours a week there. Work friends aren’t a given; workplaces rarely feel like home. I’ve been thinking about life after service for a while and have struggled to imagine myself in an environment where I have to vacate myself, where I have to maintain “professionalism,” clock in and send emails and clock out so I can return to my “real life.”

The luxury of a service job is that your work is the environment in which others play; your work is someone’s “real life,” so why can’t it be yours? Service work is meant to be transient, a stepping stone on a path to a “real life” of spreadsheets and suits or destitution or, if you’re lucky, some kind of artistic success. You’re not supposed to serve because you love serving—who would love serving? But I do, and I love serving because I love giving and I love giving to my friends most of all. I love working on a team; I love working with food. I love when a customer is cool and I love talking to my coworkers about them and I love eating with everybody, even the coworkers I don’t get along with, even the ones who think I’m a bitch. I love it because it’s work that provides value, to feed people who are hungry. I’m using my body and my mind and my time to give people meals, to provide an experience, to create comfort. The days are hard and the pay is shit, but at least I know that I’m doing something with my time. At least I know I exist in the world, that my work is doing something for someone, however small. At least I’m confronted by the reality of human life, human need and lust and inanity. I’m not supposed to feel this way but I do; I want to give my life to a labor that touches others. There’s that tweet that’s like “I don’t dream of labor” but I do. I dream of a hard day of work and then respite with those I worked alongside. I dream of life as a daily creation; I dream of labor as care. I dream of a world where we feel connected to our work—where we have control, where we are encouraged to care rather than to let it wash over us so we can continue to be exploited. I had it. I had it. It was taken away, but I know it can be built again.