English Garden Madhouse

Waitressing shoes.

Many, many, many people work in restaurants at various points throughout their lives and if you have or do you will probably relate to this post. I am going to devote some writing here to my newish restaurant job. I love food, and I love eating out, and I don't mind waiting tables and I am often pretty good at it. Although I am qualified to do other perhaps more fulfilling work, (I should note here though that working for a really good restaurant, where excellent ingredients are used and real care and creativity are put into the food and the place is mindfully and compassionately organized is as fulfilling as any other work I've ever had), because I am juggling grad school and family life and occasional health issues waiting tables is pretty much the best way for me to make some money on the side. It's flexible and generally the financial return on the time and effort put in is pretty good. Plus, there's good coffee and free food!

Because restaurants are so team oriented and relatively high paced and high stakes, (reputation, which is all important, can be marred or ruined in an instant), this kind of work creates an immediate little family whose roles and duties and personalities are all intimately enmeshed and interdependent. Like all families, these groupings are often dysfunctional and serve to bring out the best and the worst in it's members. I have worked in quite a few restaurants, and they all have their own interpersonal feel to them. My new place of employment though, Doyle's Cafe,(all names changed here), is perhaps the nuttiest in my experience yet. Granted, I just came from Maine where I worked for a wonderful restaurant with a very sane,(for a restaurant), and nurturing environment,(oxox Mel and In Good Company), so I am a little bit spoiled. But after only two days of searching out here, where there are no jobs at all, I wandered into this little place just a few blocks from my house and was almost immediately offered a serving position. Convenient! So convenient that I can overlook a lot of madness and thus am still working there. But, I'm getting ahead of myself.

They call Doyle's an English Garden Cafe. It is an intimate affair of a cozy hallway opening onto a brick patio overflowing with white lattice work covered from top to bottom in ivy and geraniums. Covering the patio are wrought iron chairs and tables with little flower pots on top and flowered cushions and a fountain flowing. It's very beautiful and peaceful and feels very much like you've stepped into an English garden except that the weather is so great and you can see palm trees peeking in overhead from the patio. In the midst of this proper and pretty Englishness is Doyle, the owner. He's English all right, but not exactly proper or pretty. Doyle is a very large, slightly grumpy, unwashed looking fellow in his 60's from Cockney with the accent to prove it. He's actually very generous and a big softy but you might not get that at first. Before owning a restaurant he apparently made quite a bit of money supposedly selling Italian shoes in south London and then doing some real estate deals down in Baja, all of which required him to do business with some famously shady characters in Naples, Italy and in the regional Baja government in Mexico. That put together with the neighborhood he grew up in and the colorful companions of his youth could give you a vague picture of the kind of folks he can hang with, to say the least. He's basically a hard working, regular guy though and at this point it appears that he is retired from any former occupations and lives comfortably in a nice but not ostentatious house in Pacific Palisades with his family and their mercedes and jags. This brings me to his wife of many decades, Imogen. Imogen actually is proper and pretty and also English. I think she was beautiful once, and she has a dry sense of humor and can be quite fun. Her main contribution to the cafe seems to be watering the plants and drinking wine. They have a couple of sons, born in London but raised here in CA. One of them I have yet to meet, but the other, Oliver, I've had plenty of opportunity to get to know. Dude is 38, lives with his folks, and helps them "manage" their cafe. His "managing" seems to consist of not showing up for work on time, or at all, and making lots of free coffees for himself and his girlfriend, Daisy. That brings me to his girlfriend. Someone else at the cafe rather aptly described her as "a piece of work." I'll just leave it at that. Bless her, she does absolutely adore Oliver and sees something in him that convinces her that he is a prince. There was a period where Oliver's old girlfriend and he and this new one were all working at the cafe at the same time, but thankfully that's over. Apparently Imogen was a bit depressed over the new girl at first, but now Daisy's devotion has convinced her to cut her losses and slug back some more wine and encourage the match in hopes that Oliver may actually leave the house someday. Soon.

And that pretty much covers the leadership at the cafe. Oh yeah, and none of them had ever owned or even worked in a restaurant before opening this one a year ago. But, luckily they hired a bunch of nice, young, football loving would be actors from Texas. These are real stand up kids and they have held this place up quite a bit. It works for them because they are all friends, they can all work together, the money is not too bad and they don't have to work nights much so they can go to rehearsals and classes and auditions.

The real backbone of the restaurant though is the kitchen, and like most kitchens in L.A., and everywhere else in the country, world maybe, this English Garden Cafe is going Mexican. Three young guys from Oaxaca are there often more than 12 hours a day. They trade off being cook, prep and porter. Two of them are cousins and the other is a friend. The kitchen is a totally different world from the rest of the cafe. The guys listen to Mexican radio all day long and gossip in Spanish about friends and girls and joke with each other and the waitstaff while they make quiche and sandwiches and salads and wash dishes and mop floors. They themselves eat guacamole and rice and beans standing up at the counter. The cousins were abandoned by their parents at an early age and raised by a traditional grandmother and thus grew up speaking not Spanish but an ancient Mayan dialect that they still use privately between the two of them. The oldest one, aged 21, is living on his own now with his pregnant girlfriend. He supports his family back in Mexico and is putting his younger sisters through school. He beams with pride and joy over his impending fatherhood. You would think that since this 21 year old guy bearing the financial responsibility of his entire family, working 12 hours a day and taking a bus from Hollywood to get there can show up on time at 8:00 am, then Oliver, at age 38 with no financial responsibilities and his own mercedes and living around the corner could get to work by 11, but no. Funny how that works.

Oh, I almost forgot, the last addition to the extended family is the woman's boutique owner next door, Diana. Diana invested in the restaurant to start with and now she is entitled to whatever she would like to eat, whenever she would like it, for free. She really takes advantage of this and appears to eat most of her meals there. She has an amazing, uncanny ability to come in and take a long time to order something complicated and not on the menu just as we are getting really busy. We bring the food and drink to her, and she leaves the dishes on the doorstep for us when she's done. So thoughtful. Oh yeah, and she doesn't tip.

The last addition to the family are the customers. Hard to exactly put a finger on that group. The Palisades are full of very rich people dressed very casually. A few specifics come to mind: soccer moms lunching, older couples getting out, people writing screenplays, people making high end real estate deals. Pretty normal stuff except for the high occurrence of millionaires in leisure suits. And dogs. We allow dogs.

Anyway, this is the Doyle's cafe family. It's like a weird but probably not atypical little cross-section of L.A. The maybe ex- English mafia parents and rich, failure to launch son, the "piece of work" girlfriend, the batty, clueless boutique owner next door, the wholesome future actor kids from Texas, the Oaxacans speaking Mayan in the kitchen, producers and real estate moguls in leisure suits on the patio.... oh yeah, and me! It's a madhouse, but most of the other nutjobs there are growing on me.