Episode #003: Stories from behind the cafe counter, Part One
After running coffee houses for over 10 years, Nick and Linda spend time remembering some amusing stories of interaction with different customers and some bare neighbours. To finish they do some quick questions with our current duty manager Christina.
Guests (customers) are the heart of every cafe on every local high street. It is the reason cafe exist and why they are so endearing. The fact that you can get people of all walks of life, sitting sometimes at the same table (Wagamama helped pave the way for this to be more acceptable for us more private Brits). Its fascinating as the cage manager to watch interactions and the generally different characters in one local community.
Nick & Linda Castle, have been running CLO (Cielo) cafes for over 10 years in and around Leeds. Because it can be inappropriate or invasive to find out customer names, the staff team naturally default to describing a regular customer by their drink. “Nutmeg cappuccino”, “skinny, wet, mint mocha”, and “Dry cappuccino” are all genuine customers, which most staff would know when discussed.
Some customers went beyond their drink - Wee customer (not because she was small), was the affectionate name of an elderly lady who used to come in for her small latte and unfortunately more often than not would leave a wet patch behind, which we took in turns to clean up. It was always more bearable knowing she had really appreciated her visit to the cafe, and seen chatted with whoever she saw.
One morning, on opening, the shop was quiet and our manager happened to say “look at the window in that building opposite”. In hindsight I wished he hadn’t said it. There in front of us was the bare frontal of a large woman stood right up to the bedroom window, staring across the road. Fascinatingly she just did not move. It was one of those memorable moments in the ‘running a cafe’ life which you can’t unsee but wish you could. We never saw her again… fortunately she were saved the awkwardness of her ever turning up to order a latte.
Christina, a Duty Manager at CLO, also tells a story of when we had an issue with a wasp that wouldn’t go away, one hot summer’s afternoon. Working with so many staff and volunteers, you are never short of a laugh, but on this occasion, it was a fine line. Of course, the wasp was pretty annoying and some customers were a bit concerned, so one of our volunteers decided they would take the situation into their own hands. No, they didn’t reach for the glass and paper method, or the fly swat. They decided it would be a good idea to spray it with our table cleaner spray. However they also didn’t think about the fact that the wasp was in our cafe, and Christina looked up at the moment that the volunteer squeezed the trigger of the spray. Aiming at the wasp, they actually sprayed the entire face of one of our regular customers. No exaggeration. It went all over them. Fortunately the customer was fine and saw the funny side (after an initial awkward situation).