The Incident: As Told By Leo

        The guy who got me into Backstreet, just to reiterate, was George. I was working at a cafe in the city called Hash from December to March and George would come in with his wife a few times a week to get a single origin latte. His wife would get the same but weaker. They were quiet at first, but I broke them down with my raging fist of charisma (that's how charisma works, like a battering ram or a heavy steel drill) until by the end of my short stint at Hash we'd shared like, probably three conversations. I hated the manager at Hash and he hated me, so I was surprised when a few weeks after our “Parting of Ways” he messaged me – confusingly in all caps and from an unknown number – saying to “CALL GEORGE THINK HE WANTS TO OFFER YOU A JOB”.
        George was also a regular at Backstreet, he lived upstairs in the apartments above the cafe and came down every day with his laptop to drink lattes and work as a financial consultant... or something. A financial something, which evidently he did quite well at because he drove a Jag and could always afford plenty of Old Spice. He spoke in a calm, extremely quiet voice, which I assume was at least partially calculated to convey an air of strength, like a constant reassurance that Everything is Under Control.

        When George explained the position to me that first afternoon when I walked the forty minutes to Backstreet from my house, he told me that he was helping Stu out with his finances as a favour to a friend. It was made clear from the start that the business was not in good shape, and George said his only wish was to get the place making money so he could, “just sit back and enjoy the coffee.”
        He was doing all the staff rosters, controlling the social media presence, and designing new menus etc. as well as pushing ideas like Pizza & Pasta Sundays to try and bring in more customers. The Instagram struggled, the Pizza & Pasta never happened, and every now and then due to a lack of staff, George could be found in the kitchen.

        One morning Leo came into the cafe with an even grander opening flourish than usual, looping Wallis the Dog's lead around the leg of one of the bar stools before gleefully turning to me with a barely-suppressed smile: “So! Taco! Did you hear what happened last night!”
        Leo belonged in the theatre.
        For the next twenty minutes Leo fed me details of the previous night's dinner service one by one. A group of six had come in, apparently having booked the private downstairs room for dinner weeks ago, but the booking hadn't been written down in the right place, so no one knew, and nothing was ready. The table wasn't set, the food hadn't been bought to make the menu they'd requested. Nothing.
        “And WHO – can you tell me?! – was in the kitchen, Taco?!”
        “George and Stuart.” [laughter]
        “That's RIGHT! And are George and Stuart qualified to cater for a function of this kind, Taco?”
        [out-of-the-nose-laughter] “...no.”
        “No they are NOT!”, Leo's eyes were alive with joy, laughing.

        Immediately Ginette – the regular waitress most weekday evenings – offered the group free drinks as she told them there would be a wait while the room was set up. They were led down and it was explained that they would have to order off the regular menu as the chef had called in sick. Commonplace industry lies.
        “They were down there for two hours!” Leo struck a note of disbelief. “And you should have seen some of this food they were being served... one of them ordered their steak well done WELL. Big Mistake! I've never seen anything like it, curled up like a piece of leather, and served on a plate by itself WITH NO SIDES ! Oh Taco!”
        Apparently When they'd sent one of the dishes back because it was cold, more free drinks were taken down, but Ginette finally reported back upstairs saying the guests were sitting in cold silence with their coats on not speaking. She refused to go back down because it was too embarrassing, Leo giggled at the bar drinking wine.

        After hitting me with all the main points of the story he started jumping about the chronology trying to wring out every last bit of schadenfreude: “...Taco, I tell you now, I've never seen anything so funny in all my life as the look of sheer terror on Stu's face when those people walked through the door!”
        “...and when they went downstairs, he opened the book to find their booking, and then he started PUNCHING THE BENCH!! – 'WHY DIDN'T ANYONE TELL ME ABOUT THE BOOKING!?' – like a MAN POSESSED I tell you!”
        “And when they all came upstairs to leave, the woman in the dress stopped in front of the till and said, 'surely we're not paying for the food, it was awful!', and Ginette said 'Well of course not.'... and then the woman says, '...well and as you said, the drinks were free, so we're done.' And they walked out!!”

        Over two hours, six awful meals, and a bunch of free drinks later, and they left without paying a cent.

        When I questioned Stu that night about the steak he said, “Steaks aren't meant to be cooked well done!” So from what I can gather he turned it into a piece of footwear as a kind of punishment to them for calling such an abomination into existence. George adamantly defended his chicken spatchcock, reviewing his effort as “Primo”, before cooking some for me to sample as proof during the quiet afternoon;
        “You try that and tell me it's not on the mark. That's exactly what I cooked them last night mate.” Whether the chicken was good or not seemed to be a matter of semantics when the undeniable fact was that the customers left without paying, but fair play to George, his chicken was pretty good.

        Leo's greatest joy came from explaining to people that there was no danger of a bad review because if anyone from the group thought to post the details of their evening on the internet, the truth would be so absurdly terrible that no one reading would believe it.
        I was upset with George for a time, I thought it was arrogant of him on some level to think he was fit to step into the kitchen and cook restaurant-level food with no training. My assumption there was that it was an active decision on his part, as if he intentionally put off hiring another chef and decided to jump in himself to save money. I soon discovered that persuading quality staff to come and work in the hospitality equivalent of a burning treehouse is much more difficult than putting an ad in the window. In the coming weeks I was tasked with hiring a new full time barista, and in selling the job to people I had to search myself for my own reasons for staying at Backstreet.
        “Why AM I still here? Can I persuade others to join up for the same reasons?” Turns out not everyone likes their life to be stupid.

Click here to read the next part - Hiring and Firing

The Legend of Tim

        A little history on the place would be a good starting point. Leo was a daily regular in backstreet, he was definitely my favourite of the bunch of old cooks who linger around the counter every day – dude loves to gossip. He'd evidently spent a lot of time sitting at the end of the bar with his dog Wallis tied up at his feet, talking to whoever stood in front of him. I loved to prod him for stories.

        The place was initially owned by a guy who I never met, his name was Tim. Backstreet was his second venture after a wildly successful cafe called Birdman, which, as Leo grandly proclaimed, was one of the first places that kicked off “that” Gertrude St hipster-revival a few hundred metres back towards the city. When you start delving into local history, the locals, revelling in their role as historical gatekeepers, tend to over-contextualise.
        Tim was, “the best waiter you've ever seen!”, declared Leo. He was graceful, dancing through tables with plates up his arm, seemingly stuck there like a beautiful porcelain skin-growth – oh Tim! Half man, half crockery. He opened Backstreet as the logical next step after building his first place from nothing, and Backstreet, Leo said, was, “Tim's Baby.”
        Tim was an architect, and “frightfully intelligent”, but, Leo added, “with absolutely no moral compass.” He designed the whole interior to be reminiscent of Japanese paper walls, but with the furniture retaining an old-world European homeliness. The concept for the place was big, hearty meals. Lots of meat – steak, sausages. Leo claimed to be among those who warned Tim that these kinds of dishes weren't what people in trendy Fitzroy were looking for. “We'll see.” said Tim.
        “...and yes, we did see.” Leo shook his head with a chuckle. Told ya.

        When Backstreet opened, Tim had taken his head chef and floor manager out of Birdman and put them into the new venue, taking them out of the place they were comfortable and succeeding, and dropping them into something new against their will. Backstreet wasn't an instant success, and Birdman started to suffer without the people who had initially made it great. Money became tight. Tim decided to cash out and sell after his head chef quit in a rage – he later admitted to Leo that moving his staff into the new business was the worst decision of his professional life.
        Failure made Tim desperate; he needed a successful sale to make it out comfortably so he started fixing the books, doing things like running up the tills with his personal credit card to make it look like the place was making more money than it was. Rhys had told me that when Tim was in charge the wine list was always exciting and new, because Tim would burn bridges with every wine supplier, leaving bills unpaid for months. When the suppliers came in to collect, Tim would cheerfully write them a cheque on the spot, which would reliably bounce, leading the suppliers to return angrier, to more empty promises.

        This was the mess that, almost two years ago, Stuart walked into. From the rough timeline I've pieced together from various conversations with him, he spent the major part of his 20s managing rough scum-bars in shitty parts of Melbourne, then driving garbage trucks, and finally something to do with mortgages. He bought Backstreet off of Tim, who not only made the business look more profitable than it was, but fudged over a few of integral details like how the rent was set to double as soon as the business changed hands due to a bit of fine-print in the contract with the building's owners. Tim trusted Stu to not look too carefully into those details and, whether through Stu's carelessness or Tim's meticulous deceit, the sale went through.
        I remember laughing with Rhys until we were both red in the face about how Tim had raised everyone's hourly wages when he sold the place to Stuart, saying that's how much they'd always been paid. I guess Tim liked the people who worked for him, and wanted them to be paid well, as long as it wasn't ever coming out of his own pocket. “Oh it was awesome!”, Rhys struggled to hold back laughter, as he always did when telling a story, “I loved Tim for it until three weeks after he left and I still hadn't been paid for the last weeks he was here... he owed me $1800!”

        I don't know whether that ruthless scumbaggery is just what it takes to make it in the business of hospitality, but by the sounds of it that's how Tim managed. He now runs a restaurant in his hometown of Albury on the Victoria/NSW border – it's the restaurant inside the new multi-million dollar cultural centre. He beat out almost fifty other potential operators for the contract to run it, apparently pulling some hometown strings including having the committee in charge of awarding the contract in to Backstreet for multiple lunches and dinners while he was dressing the place up to be sold. He was a charismatic man, so the legend goes.
        No one from Backstreet has ever seen this new restaurant. Rhys almost went up with a group of guys to fetch his $1800, but was saved the trip when Tim finally came through with the money. Stu has claimed he's set on having some people head up there to “teach that man a lesson”, but I think that's just the vodka talking. If I ever find myself up that way I hope to make it in, ask for Tim, and tell him this story. From what I've been told I bet he'd find it hilarious.

PS: My Mum (oh god I'm pathetic) reckons I should change the names in this to keep Stu and the venue anonymous. I like how the names ring, and I can't think of a good replacement for Stuart that shortens to a nice single-syllable in the same way. I think I'm being a princess and I'll be able to think of plenty when I'm being sued, but on the other hand everything I've said here is true. What do you guys think? Comment on facebook.com/ajtaco with any thoughts.

Click here to read the next part - The Incident: As Told By Leo

Stuart and the Burglary

        I started working at Backstreet a couple months ago after being effectively headhunted by George – a regular at a cafe I'd been fired from earlier in the year. George liked my coffee and after a confusing series of upper-case texts from my old boss, I came to understand that George was offering me a full time barista role at a place listed on Google under the wretched name, 'Backstreet Bar & Grill'. I went in that afternoon, made a coffee for the owner, and while he shook my hand his mid-life ponytail emphatically shook with him. His name was Stuart, and his cafe is completely fucked.

        After the first week Rhys, the Kiwi guy who was training me, told me that I'd be working almost entirely by myself in the days and that the owner only came in at night to do the dinner service. After the second week I realised the place was so quiet I could sit down and read in the afternoons while I waited for customers to trickle in. The third week I was there I walked in to work on Saturday morning and the first thing I heard was Rhys' call from behind the counter, “No cash payments, only card – we've been robbed.”
        Rhys had come in that morning to open the shop and found the front door already ajar. He'd gone behind the counter and grabbed one of the heavy steel handles from the coffee machine to use as a bludgeon in case the burglar was still... “at large”? Do I say “at large” here? Gosh, that'd be fun wouldn't it?... Rhys went downstairs clutching the handle and told me he'd honestly thought Stuart might be laying unconscious after an altercation. He wasn't, but the safe in the cupboard was bashed open, the money gone, and the till had been jimmied open too. They'd left the gold coins though, which Rhys made a point of saying he thought was nice.

        Rhys had called Stu, who didn't pick up, so he called Harry the assistant chef, who told him to call the police, who came in and dusted for prints, threw together a report, and left just as the customers started to trickle in. I arrived a few hours later with breakfast just kicking off and we did the day like nothing had happened. Stu didn't wake up to Rhys' messages until 2:30 in the afternoon. He didn't come in until 6pm, like always, and when he did come in – and this part still kills me... When Stuart arrived at 6pm to his business which had been burgled the night before, he didn't call the police, or the insurance people, or go watch the security footage, or talk to the guard for the building. He didn't even get angry or flip out and start crying.
        When Stuart came in at 6pm, he took the bent metal casing off of the front of his till, put it on the bar, and with a few customers still sitting in the cafe as the sun went down over Fitzroy, Stuart pulled out a hammer, and started beating the metal casing back into shape. BANG BANG BANG!! BANG!! BANG BANG!
        “Stu what are you...”
        BANG BANGBANG!!
        “...Stu... that's not gonna bring your money back.”
        BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG!!
        After the beating the metal casing never fit back on the till, if anything he made it worse.

        Rhys went away to Asia at the end of May and I was left to run the cafe by myself. Stu would come in at 6pm Wednesday-Saturday and do the dinner service, but Wednesday to Sunday from 7am-6pm I was, as Rhys put it, the Big Dog. I hired a few people, fired one, then hired another, ordered stock, and dealt with angry suppliers who hadn't been paid, all the while slowly realising the full extent of Stu's financial fuckedness (read “fuck-ed-ness”, thankyou). His business was HAEMORRHAGING money. Like... fuck, I was paying for fruit and veggies with cash out of the till, while fending off calls from the gas company, meat suppliers, milk suppliers – everyone... “Sure man I can pay half of that invoice from a month ago right now, can the other half wait until next week? But can you also please give me some soy milk today please because we're going to run out in about twenty minutes. Thankyou, I really appreciate it.”
        I learned to be more polite and humble than I've ever been in my life, for fear that if I slipped up just once and turned one of these people against me, I'd have to tell every customer who walked into the shop for the next two days that hey I'm terribly sorry but we don't have bacon because I don't know if you've noticed but we aren't actually a cafe in the STRICTEST sense of the word, more an embarrassing joke with umbrellas. And a broken safe... oh yeah, THE SAFE IS STILL IN THE CUPBOARD, BROKEN, ALMOST TWO MONTHS AFTER THE ROBBERY!!

        Fuuuuuucckkk...

        But Stu is not a bad guy, and he's not even a bad boss. He is a bad business owner, and the fact that his business is going down the tubes is no one's fault but his own, but I can't hold that against him. While he is directly responsible for his failure, it doesn't necessarily follow that he deserves it's consequences. The guy's got a family – a wife and some kids. A wife who he once said, from inside a jittering cloud of cigarette smoke, he is lucky hasn't left him; “she's a good woman, so she's stayed.”
        This story feels over, to be honest, because I've left, which is a very selfish thing to say, but it's the truth. The suspense for me was in seeing whether the business could hold long enough for me to get paid up until the week I left, and now that that's happened, for me, the conclusion has been reached. But Stu is still trapped back in that place. He needs to sell it to have any hope of saving his house, which he told me he has gone from owning outright to having mortgaged for almost the full value – all of that money is gone.

        I guess what I'm trying to figure out here is whether it's possible for me to justify the amount of joy I've gotten out of working at Backstreet, and in standing by as a witness to some Last-Days-of-Rome type mayhem as this man's life crumbled around me. “I've never laughed harder in my life than I do every day, at Stuart.” That's what I used to say before Rhys left, when we would regularly fall to the floor laughing red-faced at our boss' attempts to turn his sinking ship around.

        We laughed and laughed and laughed, now here's the justification.

Click here to read the next part - The Legend of Tim