Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like, Episode 32 Something Fishy

This blog parses the changes in my middle age–how I went from working as a columnist at a major daily newspaper and a leading cheesemonger to being a craft beer buyer at a fancy grocery store–and how I maintain hope of finding happiness. It’s underpinned by an element of confusion fatigue, frustration fatigue and fatigue fatigue, but it’s about life and downward mobility in New York City, which is never, ever dull.

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like, Episode 32: Something Fishy

“Customer service at the seafood department please”

It started innocently enough. I had rushed from the beer aisle to seafood department because well, someone needed to do it. By the time I arrived, I was prepared to explain that I was the craft beer buyer, not a fishmonger, so if you needed some shrimp ladled into a cup and weighed, I could do that. I also have enough cheesemongering experience that if the customer needed oh, say three quarters of a pound of salmon, I could readily plop a side on a butcher block, and cut them a filet. But, if you wanted to discuss the virtues of wild Atlantic Char or the differences between the styles of shrimp we carry, you’d need an actual fishmonger, not a craft beer buyer with knife skills and an eagerness to demonstrate his versatility.

The eagerness to display my versatility part was somewhat new and innocent too. When I started at the store in 2014, I had been working in the New York City specialty food business for 30 years, long enough to know that anything that could be lumped on to your plate would be lumped, often unceremoniously, on to your plate. I could work at pretty much any counter, I could run a cash register, I could program the scales, I could analyze a P&L sheet. I kept all of that under my hat. I had a beer section to manage, and the store was near a Trader Joes, and two Whole Foods, one of which devoted an entire corner of its facility to a craft beer section. My plate was full enough.

Seven years later, much had changed. The beer section was world renowned. That Whole Foods beer corner had been shut down (and replaced by a coffee kiosk). Our selection far outflanks our larger competitors and I’m on the aisle three evenings a week, happy to make a quick recommendation for a good pilsner or local hazy IPA or to explain the Reinheitsgebot, the German beer purity laws and their importance to the American craft beer movement. So yeah, when the desperate pages went out for assistance at the seafood counter, I may have been looking to diversify my focus just a little. Also, I was older. At 54, I was eager to stake a flag in some terrain; now at 61, I was more interested in displaying my adaptability.

The calls were a result of staffing cuts that left the store running on a skeleton crew. It was commonplace to find a manager or two spending hours of their shift on a cash register or stocking shelves. I figured ladling shrimp or cutting pieces of salmon would be my extra mile. What I didn’t count on is it becoming a permanent part of my inbox. One Friday evening, I was reminded by the Assistant GM not to forget to close the fish counter.

I raised an inquisitive eyebrow, and was instructed to talk to Salvador, the fishmonger for instructions.

As it turns out, it was pretty easy. Anyone who has closed an artisan cheese counter, and I have closed many, wouldn’t be challenged. The salmon went in one bin, the whitefish were wrapped and put in another, the shellfish had a space for their bins. And that was the hard part. The real fun was beginning to assume some knowledge of seafood would be expected of me. I began enhancing my somewhat sketchy take on seafood. Salvador goes home at 4; afterward, my responsibilities extended beyond Aisle 2 to the seafood station, which was in the back corner of the store

The timing for this well, deep dive, was perfect. Cooking salmon had been a weekly ritual during the pandemic. I began creating recipes involving ginger, onions, peppers, miso broth, and even kale and baby bok choy. Cooking cod, tilapia, and scallops were well within my repertoire too. But our fish counter showcased flounder, trout, lemon sole and other fish that wouldn’t benefit so readily from my throw the refrigerator into a pan and see what happens approach. The same sort of dialogues I have with many of my beer customers about navigating the wide range of local brews we carry found a parallel in the back corner, where I learned that celery salt and smoked paprika make a good rub for salmon or char and that a creamy saffron sauce is easy to make for Chilean Sea Bass. I also found reinforcement for the restraint of limiting the seasoning on some fish to simply cracked pepper, sea salt and olive oil.

Cooking salmon has become a weekly ritual

The other aspect of my home away from my usual home away from home was that I liked was the tactile handling of food. It brought me back to my cheesemonger roots. Beer is safely stored in bottles and cans—or rather cans and bottles given current trends—unless dropped, they are pretty much indestructible. Not so much with fresh fish, which require the level care and attention to detail that I once brought to clothbound cheddar and washed rind cheeses. I began wrapping the cod, trout, banzini, et al with great care, frequently doing old school Italian packaging for each style of fish as if they were a cheese being loving packed away for overnight storage.

The further benefit of being on the fish counter was that I was out of the fray, so to speak. Rather than being in the middle of a heavily trafficked aisle and descended upon by lost customers and bewildered Post Mates shoppers, I could actually hear myself think. When I was on the fish counter, I began to reflect on my career trajectory, the various roadblocks I have smashed into and where to go from here. I’ve been reflecting on the idea that after several attempts to move beyond Aisle 2 that craft beer like artisan cheese and like—let’s face it, many other walks of life—simply doesn’t have a role for an older, professorial African American. It’s unfortunate; I could probably boost any brewery’s sales by 100K a year. Yet, the same was true for artisan cheese and that led me on a path out of that world and into craft beer. I think these realizations amid the chaos of the aisle would be frustrating. Instead, in the serenity of fish counter, I began seeing them as just another set of obstacles to transcend.

A couple of weeks ago, Salvador asked to speak to me. He had a concerned look on his face. He told me that he’d prefer that I wrap the whitefish somewhat simply as he’d instructed. “It’s easier,” he said. I responded that I didn’t mind bringing great attention to detail and wrapping the fish so carefully. Then I looked at him and I realized that he didn’t mean it was easier for me (though this was true), it meant it would be easier for him first thing in the morning to unwrap five packages of fish rather than the 12-15 I was leaving him. This was true, we all had too much on our plates at the store. I smiled and promised to be less precious with the fish. He smiled back as if to say that he appreciated the care and attention I wanted to provide his product.

Salvador is a spry middle-aged man. He demeanor and eloquence suggest that he had no intention of spending his 40s working in a grocery store. I wanted to ask him what he thinks when working in solitude on the counter, but my suspicion is that the conversation would take up time that neither of us have.

Martin Johnson is a freelance writer whose work on music, sports and culture has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, NPR, Wine Enthusiast, Jazz Times, New York Times, Newsday, New York, Vogue, Rolling Stone, Huffington Post, The Root, Slate, The Atlantic, and numerous other publications and websites. He also blogs at Rotations, and he can be contacted at thejoyofcheese@gmail.com.

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like, Episode 31 Attack of the Karens

This blog parses the changes in my middle age–how I went from working as a columnist at a major daily newspaper and a leading cheesemonger to being a beer buyer at a fancy grocery store–and how I maintain hope of finding happiness. It’s underpinned by an element of confusion fatigue, frustration fatigue and fatigue fatigue, but it’s about life and downward mobility in New York City, which is never, ever dull.

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like, Episode 31: Attack of the Karens

It was the Sunday of a winter three-day weekend (New Year’s Day, the King Holiday and President’s Day all kind of smush together even in recent memory), and a coworker and I were chatting the back corner of the store that I use as my office space. We had just made an important discovery; we had both watched and loved Queens Gambit and were plotting our paths to follow in Beth Harmon’s chess master footsteps.

That can be a long conversation and somewhere in the midst of reveling over our favorite lines of the Slav Defense (2…..c6), we realized that we had been off the sales floor for about ten minutes and reflexively began to walk back to our stations, him to the front and me to Aisle 2. As we turned down the beer aisle, I was reaching into the distant reaches of my chess prodigy mind—territory that had gone mostly unexplored for decades–to explain the development of the middle of the board in that formation when I heard my coworker change his tone to address a customer. I heard him say, “ma’am can you please put your mask on.”

In an instant my mindset when from nerdy teenager perusing his dog-eared copy of Modern Chess Openings, to middle aged floor supervisor at a grocery store during a pandemic. I stiffened my posture a little to reinforce my coworker’s request.

“Oh, I don’t have to wear one,” the customer, a middle-aged white woman, responded.

“Fuck!!” I thought to myself as images of Anja Taylor-Joy and chessboards vanished suddenly. It isn’t too uncommon to spot a customer either with a poorly worn mask or none at all, but all of them are usually receptive to our rules and readily either fix their mask and take one out of their pockets and put it on. Resistance. This was new and not in a good way.

Over the next two or three minutes, the customer escalated the fight in utterly nonsensical ways. She claimed that she didn’t have to wear a mask in New Jersey, which was both not true and entirely irrelevant since the store is in New York City, where there are mask mandates and have been for months. She claimed that she didn’t have to wear one on her last visit, which may have been true if her last visit was in 2019, but you’d like to think she’d notice that the world is different now. Her voice rose with each silly contention; it was obvious she was trying to create a scene. I looked and saw no one filming the situation with their phones. In fact, the three of us were alone on the aisle as other customers, all wearing masks, of course, were avoiding the scene.

She had two bags of popcorn in her arms and asked why she wouldn’t be allowed to buy her popcorn. My coworker calmly noted that she had no right to put our cashiers well being at risk, at which point, at the top of her lungs, she screamed “this is discrimination!” I’m Black, my coworker is Asian. I wasn’t sure what I could say at that point that wasn’t confrontational, but my coworker found a path of least resistance. He directed her to pay for her popcorn at a particular register (it has the biggest plexiglass screen), and it usually run by managers. She did, and she left.

For the rest of the day, my coworker and I struggled to shake free of the exasperation. It was less that we had essentially resolved a conflict by letting the guilty party get what they want, but the ramifications of the Karen factor in a hip Manhattan neighborhood. Wasn’t this sort of thing restricted to the suburbs?

Evidently not. About a month later, I noticed a customer who frequented the store Mondays late in the evening using a flimsy scarf as a face covering. I was usually preoccupied around that time as it’s the final hours of my workweek. My schedule is Friday, Sunday and Monday, which leads to a bit of a reverse workweek. As my clientele are easing into their weekends on Friday late afternoon and evening, I’m hunkering down, and then something like the reverse happens on Monday except I’m not easing into a weekend, but rather consecutive days where writing is my primary focus and I don’t set foot in the store (I do take care of some emails and the like).

One evening I saw her, and after we exchanged pleasantries, I asked why didn’t she buy a mask? She was always fashionably dressed. I’m sure she could find cool masks to match her outfits. She explained that she had a medical condition that prevented her from wearing a mask. I’ve been at the store consistently throughout the pandemic. As have many of my coworkers, I’ve kept up with all kinds of news pursuant to COVID in New York City. I hadn’t heard that one before, but I figured, I should keep an open mind, and on the train ride home, I began Googling.

For the most part I came up empty. So, I resolved that if I saw her again, I would ask for specifics. Sure enough, I saw her again, and again it was on a Monday evening about half hour before I made my exit. She recognized me and asked how I was doing. I told her I was happy as I was about to finish a big story. Instead of factchecking her medical condition tale, we plunged into a conversation about my freelance journalism. She mentioned that she had a degree in journalism from Northwestern, a school I hold in very high esteem. Then she asked if I was going to write about the truth of what was going on.

A voice in the back of my head screamed “Run! Get out while you can.”

I have a bad track record of listening to those voices; they screamed the same thing about journalism 20 years ago and the cheese business eight years ago. In each case, I ignored the warning and soldiered on.

Instead of politely excusing myself from the conversation (I did have about 45 minutes of stuff to do in that half hour), I simply inquired what truth she had in mind.

Within seconds I was sorry that I didn’t listen to the voice in the back of my head. She dove headlong into a COVID conspiracists rant. In fact, she went further than I had heard most people go. When she began contending that 97% of intubations were unnecessary and that no one had really died of the virus, I began wondering if I could make a few calls to Evanston on Tuesday and have her degree revoked.

Instead, I opted for boundaries and explained that I had a lot of work to finish before I punched the clock at 10. She headed on her way, seemingly oblivious to my vibe of skeptical annoyance.

As I finished up, I began to wonder. I had long held out hope that New Yorkers would be the leaders in getting vaccinated and getting back to whatever the new normal is. With those encounters as well as a few with coworkers who were choosing not to vaccinate, my hope was beginning to fade. I thought about recalculating my hopes, but then I realized the music on the PA was Derek and the Dominoes “Layla.” I decided that rather than engage in philosophical algebra and my city and the virus, I should drift away for a few minutes admiring the slide guitar work of Duane Allman. The path of least resistance has its uses.

Martin Johnson is a freelance writer whose work on music, sports and culture has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, NPR, Wine Enthusiast, Zagat, Jazz Times, New York Times, Newsday, New York, Vogue, Rolling Stone, Huffington Post, The Root, Slate, The Atlantic, and numerous other publications and websites. He also blogs at Rotations, and he can be contacted at thejoyofcheese@gmail.com.

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like. Episode 30, The Long Hot Summer Part Two

My Brooklyn neighborhood in September; it’s a great setting to walk and think.

Life on Aisle 2 Episode 30: Aisle 2 During the Long Hot Summer Part Two

Continued from Episode 29

Where Were We? It was the long hot summer of 2020 at the store and managing through COVID times had become routine. My roommate chuckled about how I sometimes failed to take my mask off when I got home from the store because well, I was just used to it; grabbing hand sanitizer on my way out was as automatic as grabbing my keys. What knocked me askew was the offhand way an editor at a site I’d applied to repeatedly shrugged off the lack of diversity on his staff. “It’s not open mic night,” he told the New York Times. I had been laden with guilt for not overcoming the barriers my parents overcame, now I was just seething mad. Then an out of the blue text and email late one Friday afternoon arrived from a friend about a job possibility with a leading media trade publication. I’d given up on pushing that rock up that hill; I spent the weekend reconsidering my retirement from the Sisyphus Games.

All day that Saturday, I thought about my friends who had staff jobs as well as those who had had them for decades before getting pushed out. What skills did they possess that I didn’t? I couldn’t think of any short of they got connected while I was cutting cheese or opening stores (it amused me at the time, though not so much in retrospect that people thought I preferred to flail away at near minimum wage employment rather than enjoy the salary and benefits of a real middle class, full-time job). Here was the chance to correct them, and prove that at 60, I was still employable for something better than lugging cases of White Claw to a sales floor on Friday nights.

Sunday morning before retail, I composed a note to the GM of the outlet citing my pal; I was pleased at how charming and enthusiastic the first draft was. Monday morning, I sent it very first thing. I opened the computer, sent the note, then went to the kitchen get my first cup of coffee. When I returned to my terminal coffee and oatmeal in tow, I was excited to see a response to my dispatch. A dialogue ensued. After four or five exchanges, he looped in his Executive Editor. Ah, I figured, now I’ll get ghosted. Well, this was fun.

Nope, Tuesday morning, the Executive Editor responded and brief exchange about craft beer, baseball and food ensued. Wednesday morning, I was on the phone with him for what was supposed to be a 30- minute interview. We were still chatting after an hour. I was indeed expert in the fields they were looking to cover, sports, politics, and culture, but my actual hands-on editing experience was minimal at best. Nevertheless, I have written for the Wall Street Journal since 2002. My articles there are read initially by three editors, the rewrites by two and the final draft gets another once over. Writers cringe when I tell them of the regimen, but my editors are GREAT; every piece reads like me but better. When I told Executive Editor that I had taught at NYU in 2013 and several of my students praised my ability to improve their writing, he asked me to schedule an edit test.

I was stunned. I had won two rounds. I scheduled the test for Friday and Monday mornings. I had a WSJ review due on Friday, but I figured I’d finish it on Thursday. Then I took the afternoon off to wander the streets of my picturesque neighborhood. I sat in the outdoor seating of a coffee bar and wondered, maybe the long game was going to work out after all. Everything seemed charged with possibility. I savored the moment. Then I went home to get back to work on WSJ review.

I finished my review early Thursday afternoon and spent rest of the day looking to sharpen my line editing skills. The Friday morning test was rigorous, clean six pieces of somewhat sloppy copy in 90 minutes, but that went well. I was cleared to move on to part two. By this time, my progress wasn’t so surprising. I steeled my mindset over the weekend. I wanted to ace part two of the test and figure out how to give notice at the store. I looked at my budget could I afford a week off to refuel before I started if it came to that. Two would be better, but that didn’t seem reasonable.

I sailed through part two of the test, designing the section. I was somewhat happy to have a demanding day of retail to occupy me afterward. I was as usual racing around the store all day and around six, I checked my phone for updates. There was an email from the Executive Editor asking me how much I wanted to get paid.

Well, this too was different. I get that question in retail sometimes, and I just say 275 million over 10 years, Alex Rodriguez’s famous salary from the Yankees in 2007 (yes, citing Mike Trout’s contract or Gerrit Cole’s would be a tad more au courant, but not as iconic). I knew what to expect, but just to see I took A-Rod route. I knew Executive Editor was a baseball fan; I even joked that the famed sports negotiator Scott Boras was my agent. Executive Editor responded cordially, and we worked out a number that was substantially less than what my friends who still had full time jobs made but way, way more than what I was making at the store.

Thoughts of abandoning Aisle 2 for an office danced in my head.

Then the line went dead. I reached back at the end of the week and was given the “we’re evaluating other candidates,” response, which made sense to me. It also ended the period of giddy optimism. The city is sprawling with un and underemployed experienced media professionals. One of them, I reasoned, might be able to hit the ground running faster than I could. Sure enough, I got the thank you for your time and efforts or something like that email a week later.

My friends thought I was crushed, but it was the exact opposite. Age and race had nothing to do with me not getting the job. In fact, a tenet of my campaign, “I’m 60 but I can grow into this job,” was persuasive; I told them that I’m a fervent believer in the Bob Dylan line “a man not busy being born is busy dying.” I was far from a perfect fit for this gig, but that didn’t matter; I had made the finals. A door that I feared was permanently closed was in fact, ajar, if not open.

I subscribe to music journalism and sports journalism newsletters and there are job listings. I resolved to look at them with greater interest. Also, I began subscribing to journalism job boards again. Maybe 37 years of doing this stuff made me of interest rather than irrelevant.

I never thought for a second that I was over the hill, and I hoped that the world didn’t think so either, mounting evidence notwithstanding. Now, I had reason to believe that the world saw things my way.

Martin Johnson is a freelance writer whose work on music, sports and culture has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, NPR, Wine Enthusiast, Jazz Times, New York Times, Newsday, New York, Vogue, Rolling Stone, Huffington Post, The Root, Slate, The Atlantic, and numerous other publications and websites. He also blogs at Rotations, and he can be contacted at thejoyofcheese@gmail.com.

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like. Episode 29, Aisle 2 During the Long Hot Summer pt 1

During the summer, the agenda changed mightily, fitfully and for the better

Life on Aisle 2 Episode 29: Aisle 2 During the Long Hot Summer Part One

First off, what happened to this blog? When we left off, I had just received my first negative test for COVID (I’ve had three others since), which was a huge relief since I thought I had symptoms (a friend reminded me that just because there’s a lethal pandemic out there doesn’t mean that the common cold has gone on vacation). Sure enough a few days of rest and beginning a new vitamin regimen had me feeling like I was ten years younger. Another great thing happened too. While I was away from Aisle 2 awaiting my results, a colleague from well, ten years ago, who now works at Huffington Post reached out to assign me an appreciation of Bill Withers, which I was delighted to write.

No other work at HuffPo came from that, but plenty did from other outlets. Unlike my primary writing outlet, the Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post doesn’t have a paywall, so suddenly my brand was ascending again, just as it did earlier in the year when I was on an NY Times podcast. Within weeks I found myself with an inbox full of assignments from new places like NPR and Wine Enthusiast among others. Retail had become a happy zoo of work with customers coming from all over the city to visit our beer aisle to buy beer that was once exclusive province of high-end beer bars, and suddenly, after several years of underemployment on that count, my writing work had become a non-stop medley of completing exciting assignments rather than proposing them.

It was only when I lifted my nose from the grindstone that the grim realities of 2020 hit me in the face. It wasn’t just the ghostly streets and the empty subway cars; friends and acquaintances and classmates all began dying of the virus. The grief only exacerbated the existential dread that underpins so much of my life, and it tempered the joy I felt over my professional success. Even so, the bullhorn in my head that greeted me as I awakened with screams of “you fucking failure,” vanished. The weight of unfortunate career choices, lessened. The medical emergency in which I carried on daily life, kept me focused.

The unrest that followed the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis became a watershed moment in many, many ways. As someone who has had cops pull guns on me on multiple occasions I was delighted by the outrage and the protests. I didn’t take part because of my previous experiences with New York’s Finest, but I rooted them on and emailed links to some of my “work nephews” at the store, so that they could easily vanquish arguments from others at the store about property damage invalidating the agenda of the protesters.

The locked down city locked down further after the police murder of George Floyd

I took all of this in stride; it was just another complication in an intensely complex year. Yet, my equilibrium was completely rocked when the editor of a famous sports and culture site when asked about the lack of diversity on his editorial staff told the New York Times “it’s not open mic night.” I had long grown accustomed to swallowing the pain of never getting a staff job at an established media outlet. I was usually told through contacts that “they weren’t looking for a diversity hire at that moment,” which I took as code, for “you’re way overqualified and our culture can’t deal with that right now.” One well known newspaper in the Midwest told me to my face that I wasn’t a good fit there because they needed someone who could work hard. When I responded that I was the son of two workaholics and kid brother of three others and noted that I typically worked six or seven days a week between retail and journalism endeavors, my interviewer shrugged off my contentions with the all too familiar, “you’re freelance; it’s different.”

I was taught to play the long game, and it worked for my father. University of the Chicago education notwithstanding, he worked in the post office for 15 years before landing a job commensurate with his skills. Upon his retirement, 25 years after beginning his ascent in corporate America, he was a senior executive at AT&T who was feted with a series of banquets across the country. I was 30 when I was told that I didn’t work hard. I figured just keep plugging away and good things would happen. Many did, but the big things weren’t sustainable, and the ones that were lasting were freelance gigs. Then post dotcom crash and Great Recession, media gigs became scarce and capricious. Suddenly, 40something journalists were getting buyouts. I gave up on the dream of a staff job and began focusing entirely on the arduous task of paying rent. Whether it was via work in cheese, craft beer, writing about music, cinema, basketball, it didn’t matter as long as I piled up enough dollars to meet my overhead costs. I’d pursue gigs when they seemed like a good fit, but I rarely heard back from the outlets and never was the news good.

“Oh, I get it,” I seethed to myself during the summer. It’s not open mic night.

As the summer wore on, things at the store began to feel somewhat normal again. Meaning instead of staring at empty aisles and figuring out how much less than usual to order, I began bouncing around the place, getting a bit of a cardio workout. Deliveries were still a primary source of business, and small armies of Postmates and Instacart shoppers dotted the aisles. It usually fell to me to show these poor miscast young people—many did not understand what “produce” meant and responded to product location directions for lettuce with blank stares– where basic items like milk and tomato sauce were.

One afternoon while taking a quick break from running to and fro, I checked my messages and there was one from a former media biz colleague. She was asking if I’d received her email. Well, no. I’d been running laps around an 18,000 square foot store often with a case of beer on my shoulder. I checked my email. In it she wrote that she’d mentioned me to a friend who was the GM at a key trade publication. He was looking for someone to edit their section dealing with culture, food and politics.

I responded to the text noting that I was a good fit, but not a perfect one.

She insisted that I contact her friend.

I mentioned that I was 60.

She repeated her insistence.

It was 5:30 on a Friday afternoon.

I knew what the first agenda item on Monday morning would be.

To be continued.

By late summer the appearance of “normal” returned

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like, Episode 27, Life During Wartime Part 2

20200407_182814 — The Atlantic Terminal Area at Rush Hour

Continued from Episode 26

When I arrived at my doctor’s office for a COVID 19 test, I found a substantial line, and I could see that there was a sign on the door. Not only am I a New Yorker, but I’m a music journalist when not working in the food biz. I’ve squirreled my way past many a line. I walked straight up to the door to read the sign despite a few people in line protesting.

I don’t remember the words of the sign, but the gist of it was simple, wait your turn in line.

It wasn’t tersely phrased, though some of the commentary from people in line was, that’s not my doctor’s approach. She’s remarkably affable. I often tell people that if I didn’t see her twice a year for checkups, I’d want to get coffee from time to time. I care about her and her kids, and the vagaries of being a single middle aged Mom in Manhattan. It makes people think that I have a crush on her; I don’t. If I had a crush on every attractive middle aged woman in New York City, I wouldn’t have headspace to accomplish anything else.

I got in line and made a joke to the woman in front of me that I felt like I was at Trader Joe’s again. She snapped back, “are you talking to me?”

Yeah, I guess this was a tense situation; comparing it to getting frozen burritos or jars of Thai green curry sauce wasn’t entirely appropriate. The line began to move slowly. I estimated that I was about 45 minutes away from seeing the doctor, and I drifted away in thought. My mind teetered on falling down several rabbit holes. For one, there was the discouragement that a job in a grocery store may has resulted in such potentially deadly circumstances. Did I work myself to death? I put those thoughts out of my mind. My nephew upon finding out that I was being tested texted me reminders that four out of five people contract COVID without needing hospitalization. Still, Gil Scott Heron’s “New York is Killing Me” echoed in my head. I thought about people I know who have not left their apartments since mid-March, and I wondered why I lacked that kind of prudence and discipline. And finally, I saw a wealth of woulda coulda shoulda’s during my professional life; I’m used to dismissing those. I’ve made a lot of really good moves too.

Yet then I found myself on a mental road that wasn’t so easily escaped. I pride myself on my adaptability and embrace of my vulnerability. I seemed to have failed at both of those qualities this time. Why had I fallen into the foolish pretense of bulletproof-ness at such an inopportune time. I looked down. I took a deep breath of resignation, fully aware that I was resisting the symptoms and looked at the line. It was shorter.

The woman in front of me, looked at me again. Her expression had softened. It looked like she now agreed with me; some light conversation might break the tension. She too worked at a grocery store, and she was with a younger coworker whose aunt was a patient of the doctor. I told her that I had been a patient for more than 10 years and thought the world of the doctor. That seemed to put her mind at ease. After a brief discussion of the weather the conversation fizzled. The thick air of tension seemed to be receding as the line shrunk. There were only three of us left; it was well after 9 p.m. The woman went in ahead of her colleague.

When she came out, she began raving about how great the doctor was. She was impressed by her cordial manner, especially since she had been working for nearly 12 hours. I smiled knowingly. The fact that my doctor closed her private practice to protect her staffers then found a way to be an asset during the crisis was her in a nutshell, but the loyalty she builds in her patients via her demeanor is more than icing on the cake. She saw me and smiled cautiously. She seemed happy that a regular would be the end of her workday.

Inside, we chatted about her kids, my family, my work. She asked if I was feeling symptomatic. I told her that I felt feverish the day before. She took my temperature—it was 97.9–and she gave me a look like “tell me again, why are you here?” I reminded her that I work in a grocery store. She ran down a questionnaire of telltale signs of the disease. Body aches? Not really. Taste/smell? Just fine. There were about ten others. She seemed pleased with the results. Then she broke out the monster sized Q Tips. After I shook off the effects of the nostril probing, we talked about when I could set up an appointment for a regular visit. Two months seemed like a good timetable. I was encouraged that she felt I’d be alive in two months. Her original email announcing the testing promised results in 24 hours; she said that since there was more testing—I smiled at that good news—results probably wouldn’t be in for three to five days.

I wended my way home through the ghost town that is today’s New York City, frankly too mentally tired to catalog every surface I touched. I simply resolved to give my jeans, boots and jacket a solid wipe down when I got home. It was 10, which meant it was too late to get takeout; I’d have to cook, but I was used to that by now.

I woke up Friday and texted my boss at the store that I’d gotten tested and expected results in a few days. He told me not to come in until I knew that I was healthy. A day off, a Friday off, was an especially good thing. It put in position to write an appreciation of Bill Withers for Huffington Post, an unsolicited assignment that came in just a I would have been wrapping up the writing part of my day to go to retail. And I began reading and listening to COVID narratives from people that had suffered from then beat it. I began to understand my doctor’s skeptical look. The symptoms I did feel were minute compared to what others had endured. Still just because I was relatively asymptomatic didn’t mean I wasn’t infected.

I awoke Saturday with the kind of shot out of a cannon energy I hadn’t felt in months. It occurred to me that it had been a long time since I had had four days in a row off from retail and slept in my own bed during that span. I felt great on Sunday too. My roommate and I began discussing our gameplan for what we’d do if I tested positive. It was during one of those discussions, which took place with me in the kitchen cooking something and him on the sofa grading papers, our usual positions, that the call came from the doctor. I didn’t get it as the phone was in the bedroom and my ringer was turned off.

I took a deep breath when I saw that she called. The vibe from many of my friends and a few relatives was that I could beat this thing. I looked at my text-based voicemail. I had to read it and reread it to absorb the answer: I was negative. I told my roommate to put the plans on hold. He was grinning ear to ear. I went to the bedroom to text my family and email some friends. In the email I said that I’d dodged the bullet, but I had many more trips through the battlefield. I poured a beer (Other Half DDH Oh, in case you’re wondering) and began to examine if there was a way out of this mess. My body seemed up to the challenge, but my nervous system could use a break.

To be continued

Martin Johnson is a freelance writer whose work on music, sports and culture has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Newsday, New York, Vogue, Rolling Stone, The Root, Slate, The Atlantic, and numerous other publications and websites. He also blogs at Rotations, and he can be contacted at thejoyofcheese@gmail.com.

20200324_194349 — Day or night, there’s always a line to get into Duane Reade now

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like, Episode 26 Life During Wartime

The view from just south of Union Square on a Friday night.

For years, I used the term existential dread metaphorically. It was in reference to a way of life from my late 30s and early 40s that I still feel closely attached to two decades later. My increased attachment was in response to the reality that those days–and my lifestyle from that era–were as gone as jitterbuggers, Edsels and reel to reel tape. Still I felt somewhat prideful that my nostalgia was for my early middle age, not the giddy post-collegiate years that many of my friends yearned for. Yet I dreaded that that existence was gone and wasn’t coming back. Each major cataclysm—the dotcom crash, 9/11, the Great Recession– bore the era further and further into the fog of history.

The new cataclysm, the onset of the novel coronavirus and COVID 19, has me using the term existential dread in a far more representative way. Aisle 2, in case you’ve forgotten, is in an 18,000 square foot grocery store. So, while millions of American workers got used to working at home, and millions of others got used to navigating the bureaucracy of unemployment applications. I got used to my roommate reading up on whether jeans or yoga pants should be my work clothing since the viral material lasts longer on synthetic fabrics. It’s not a minor concern. He has risk factors; hell, I have risk factors. He’d rather not risk catching the virus at home. Hell, he’d rather not catch the virus, and needless to say, I share that sentiment even though I travel via the subway to a risky work environment in the age of a lethal, highly infectious disease.

The weeks since the mid-March shelter in place orders have left me feeling that what used to be routine, banal even, has now become life threatening, both for me and for those around me. My rides on the subway are positively harrowing because whether day or night, the cars are empty; and now the wait at 1 pm is about the same as the wait used to be at 1 a.m. The streets are deserted. There’s a real sense that the zombie apocalypse is upon us and everyone else got the memo while mine went to spam. And that sense intensified as the few eateries that initially remained open, closed their doors. I was here for 9/11, and it wasn’t anywhere near this desolate.

At the store the vibe is completely different. The crisis has yanked the store into the 2020s. We’ve gone from something like 80% walk in traffic and 20% deliveries to something like (the caveat is that this is based on observation, not data) 65/35 the other way. It’s meant creating a fulfillment staff on the dead run, and it’s left me to patrol far more than Aisle 2, assisting many more customers throughout the entire store, often at a distance of less than six feet. The job is already exhausting and stressful. This has added new layers of tension to it.

Oddly, those episodes are completely contrasted by the sheer phenomenon on Aisle 2. Alcoholic beverage sales are up during the lockdown anyway, and my craft beer program has become a rock star again. With on premise consumption of well, anything, banned, and many bars either closed or only open for retail purposes, many brewers whose divine nectars I used to beg for, are now sending me their cans on a weekly basis. So sure, we’re selling lots more Victory, Six Point, Bells and Lagunitas, but we’re also selling lots and lots of Other Half, Hudson Valley, Aslin and Equilibrium. People are coming from well beyond the neighborhood and loading up six, eight, even 10 or 12 cans at a time. And other top brewers that we routinely carry like Finback, Grimm, Lawson’s and Industrial Arts are flying off the shelves too. The crazy thing is that close to half of my regular customers are away, sheltering in place somewhere out of city, which is an epicenter of the virus.

The emotional swings from euphoria on the beer aisle to alternating currents of panic and gratitude elsewhere in the store, to something bordering on fear on the streets and in the subways exhausts me, but I can’t be. I try and carefully catalog what parts of my body have come in contact with surfaces of uncertain cleaning. I used to sit on the trains, enjoying the rarity of it, but I began wearying of wiping down my jeans and the back of my jacket. Now I stand, and I’m not the only one enduring the absurdity of standing in an empty subway car, so that the only surface was a gloved hand. Then upon exiting the subway, I change gloves. The busses are free, and it’s impossible to stand and maintain expected social distance, so I sit on the edge of my seat as if I were watching a close NBA game (and I rue the nostalgia of watching NBA games period).

For a couple of weeks, these meticulous endeavors were evolving into a ritual of security. Then, I began noticing that I felt more tired in the latter stages of my retail shift. Not knocked out tired, but wearier than I’d been. My uber rational inner voice rationalized the fatigue as only natural. On my retail days, I work on writing endeavors for five or six hours then run around the store for seven or eight. I was almost 60, and I ate less because all my go to places for a quick snack, a wrap here, noodles there were closed. I felt moments of headaches and sore throat, but uber rational voice dismissed them as momentary. Then one night I ran a fever for about an hour before Tylenol restored order. My uber rational voice was quiet.

I’m especially fortunate. My doctor had shut down her private practice to minimize the exposure of her staff to people with the virus, and she was now doing tests for established patients and anyone else who wanted it. I went online to make an appointment immediately. My doctor is great and like me, she’s a workaholic. My appointment was 8:30 that Thursday night. I figured I’d be the only one there. I got there and there was a line, not a Trader Joe’s level line, but a considerable line. It gave me time to gather my thoughts.

To be continued.

The Q Train leaving the Barclay’s Center stop midday.

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like, Episode 25 Flavor Matters

20190513_184831 — Garlic, onion, ground beef, chopped tomatoes, bell peppers before they meet the pasta

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like Episode 25, Flavor Matters

About six years ago, I was in a small, Upper East Side wine boutique hawking some artisan cheese as a means of promoting a wine and cheese event there that I was co-hosting when in walked an extraordinarily well dressed woman, even by the standards of a nabe where low six figures puts you toward the bottom of the local income strata. It turns out she was a VP at a well known fashion company, and I wouldn’t say she looked like she stepped off the runway, because her magnificent ensemble spoke of both taste and battles fought and won, battles fought to a draw and either won later or de-emphasized and battles confidently in progress. In other words, her appearance expressed a celebration of decades of success, not the mere good fortune of a teenager with high cheekbones and very little body fat.

She politely declined the cheese samples, walked straight to the fridge, pulled out a bottle of the cheapest California Chardonnay in the store, paid for it, chatted amiably with the owner for a moment and left. After the door closed, he told me of her position, and I wondered if she was cooking something with the wine. My brow furrowed a little when he told me that the cheap bottle was her go to selection; I would have thought something a tad more upscale, a Chablis, for instance, might have been more appropriate. He told me that if she can’t taste the difference between cheap and expensive wines, then cheaper ones were the way to go.

It made perfect sense, but I have struggled in the years since to apply it to my own life, because I can taste the difference, and the bolder and more nuanced flavors have become a necessity. I thought of it on a recent weekend, when a cashflow crunch reduced me to only a few dollars until Monday. I could afford one beer, and my choice was a double IPA from Lone Pine, a brewer in Maine whose cans are new to NYC. I could have bought twice as much Modelo for the price, but I didn’t consider it; the bright, intense, citrusy flavors of the Lone Pine would keep me from numbing, which was essential.

Numbing has been an important coping mechanism—a reflex even—during the last two decades as I descended from middle class to the semi-bohemian working poor strata I now occupy. It’s a way of stemming the pain when I can’t even think of attending a friend’s 60^th birthday party because it’s out of town, or I can’t make rent because a writing client is late, or because my landlord just served me court papers or because I can’t remember the last time I took a vacation (it was more than a decade ago) or simply because the weekend is lost to a cashflow crunch because a direct deposit didn’t hit on time. It combats stress, but it also combats sadness anytime I bond with a woman of interest and then she cools because I’m broke and too old. Essentially, it’s narrowing the range of possible outcomes because most of them are not good, and it’s especially essential for someone who spends three days a week interacting with the public

All this numbing seems quite savvy (I strongly suspect it’s my version of “chilling,” i.e. not letting anything bother me or even better an emotional equivalent of opioids), but my current goal is to lose the capacity or at least the reflex. I’m looking to return to a headspace of my earlier days.

I’m fond of saying that I discovered my inner dancer in my mid to late 30s, and that began my happiest time as an adult. Besides biking and a variety of yoga classes, fitness back then often meant the most complex, funky dance classes at my gym, and the skill of moving to beats and reflecting the spirit of the music, enabled me to feel the energy of the world around me much more intensely when I was merely executing the choreography of moving through Manhattan. But then the dotcoms crashed. journalism work, my primary income back then, began to evaporate, then the Great Recession happened, and my culinary work also became dicey. The energy of the world around me became much less inviting, and at times, it was simply menacing. My body began to show signs of age and frailty, so dancing became out of the question. Flavor, be it in a double ipa, a slice of pizza with pecorino, prosciutto and pineapple, or an affordable variation on scallops that I cooked annually for my mother, became my escape from numbville. I would feel the energy of the world in a positive way for at least a few moments.

Things are different now. I’ve abandoned my one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan for a share of a nice place in Brooklyn’s Prospect Lefferts Gardens. The view outside my bedroom window is no longer the gray, grimy airshaft of my building but a sunny, green courtyard. I’ve added steady, interesting regular writing work at a branch of CUNY. I’ve resumed doing yoga albeit a self-practice for about a half hour a day and one hour on weekends. What I haven’t done is roll back the numbing reflex. I’d like to. Even if my world lacks the sunny optimism of the dotcom days; for the first time since then—yes, we’re literally talking two decades, a third of my life and half of my adulthood– I’m absolutely certain that I’m moving in the right direction. Yet the emotional responses of a far more fraught time still exist, practically hard wired into my psyche. I think this is what people mean when they talk of economic PTSD.

I’ve thought of several ways to transition out of this mindspace, but many of them like spending five minutes dancing to a song from those classes in the 90s or some music I feel comparably close to (oh say, Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill, or Meg Meyers version of it) feel too ambitious for my current fitness level. Meditation is another good idea but quieting a mind that has been standing-near-the- speakers-at-a-death-metal-concert loud also won’t come easy. Instead, I’ve settled on daily agenda making (once the weather warms a little, I’ll try and do it in the courtyard). It will be a way of enforcing that my personal glasnost is in full effect. The big picture task is how to progress further and faster rather than how not to fall backwards into the abyss.

And of course, one of the agenda items will be to cook more and more interesting foods. I drink good stuff as a professional necessity but surrounding myself with flavor will become a celebration of the progress rather than a pushback against the numbing.

20190302_113713 — Even on a cold, wintry day, the view outside my window is pretty cheery

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like, Episode 24, Five Years!

a95eb-1f7ahq0ixuz_rb3aq_sz0cq — What was supposed to be a way station has become a destination.

Reflexively, when I’m on the aisle, I cite my experience. It’s mostly to keep people from thinking that the stock guy is chatty. I’ll preface my observations about the availability of this brewery or that beer with “in my three and half or four plus or so year as a buyer…” Recently I was in that exact sentence structure, when I realized it was my fifth anniversary as the craft beer buyer at the store. My thought process came to a screeching halt even though my mouth kept moving as I explained that I’d inquire about the beer that the customer was looking for.

Five years!! A David Bowie song took over the mental jukebox.

That took a minute to settle in. When I shook hands on the gig, I thought for sure it would be a two to three-year run. I’d need a year to get to know the New York City craft beer landscape, a year or so to build the program into a force, then a year finding my way into a gig at brewery or a distributorship. I nailed the first two, but clearly things had subsequently gone awry.

That isn’t new for me. Most of the last two decades have been spent in a scramble. Journalism income fluctuated wildly then ultimately failed to produce a living wage. I bumped up my work in the cheese business to a professional level. Then, suddenly that failed too. Looking ahead to a dire future, I shifted to craft beer and rebuilt some journalism income (now, fully aware that it would probably never fully support me again) and well, here I was. All that pivoting—sometimes changing directions in mid-air—looks savvy from a distance, but the desperation takes a toll. I wondered if I was still on the right path toward a sustainable solvency or had I chosen—albeit quite reasonably—to pause on a sturdy ledge with much more climbing ahead. I no longer had an unshakable faith that I knew what I was doing, yet I rarely paused to take stock. I typically call my Saturday afternoons, when I’m free from retail and stop journalism-ing around 2, my regroup and refocus time, but that only deals with short term matters like how will I pay the rent next month. Longer term issues don’t factor in.

With the year and the decade approaching conclusion, a reconsideration seemed overdue. When I tumbled down that rabbit hole, the first thing I considered was what went wrong with the most recent plan. This is something I’m bitterly tired of doing. I come from a family of dogged overachievers, and I fit in perfectly with them for 40 years. Why do things keep falling apart?

When my outlook cleared of past frustrations, I looked at the craft beer community. Who looked like me? Well, no one. The sales representatives, marketing people and brewers were not just younger (and whiter but that’s a barrier I’m well accustomed to overcoming) but they were MUCH younger. There were no “cool uncles” in the midst; in fact, there was only one cool aunt. That wasn’t enraging; rather it was relieving. I had built one of the best retail craft beer programs in New York City, but I was a unicorn, by definition a hard fit. Secondly, I had to look in context. When I pursued other craft beer work in 2016 or early 2017, I was just a couple of years removed from a three year stretch where knee issues resulted in needing a cane. While I thought of myself in the present tense as the guy who can do journalism from 9-1 on Fridays then a retail shift that is usually 2-12 but sometimes extends until one. Afterward, I spend ten minutes stretching to counter the toll of running cases of beer and well, yes, White Claw around an 18,000 square foot space. I finish the night with a quick beer at a nearby bar then I pick up Korean fried chicken and head home with a head of energy. I wake up at 9 on Saturday at get back at it. So, my reality probably conflicted with those of my potential allies, who probably remembered me as the overweight old dude hobbling around a store.

So I probably was an exile in bro-ville.

All of which was a great realization. I could stop my inner demons from pounding my self esteem to a pulp over my perceived lack of progress toward my goals. But the bigger question was where was I going, did I know how to get there? If I no longer trusted my ambition’s GPS, what could I do?

I make a better Sisyphus than Icarus. I never tire of rolling that rock up the hill, and even though I’ve had eight book proposals fail to get a deal, I was mostly undaunted when a new idea occurred to me and I began outlining the outline and plotting the research. The last few failed because of a lack of brand as a writer. I built the store a superb brand as an outlet for some of the finest craft beers available in NYC; I’ll have to use similar tactics for my writing career. Perhaps I’m letting the fact that I’ve written for most of the leading publications and presently write for one of the world’s leading newspapers speak for itself. I’ll have to devise a bullhorn.

I always feared opening a place of my own would be an Icarusian episode, but an idea for one in my new Brooklyn nabe occurred to me. I kept mulling it until I saw a way to make it profitable beyond simply attracting the beer enthusiasts of Flatbush Avenue to the venue.

I think I’ve figured out a way on the business (now, all I have to do is learn the rudiments of starting one) and I feel good about the book prospects despite so many great ideas lying in rubble near me. So maybe I reached a perch of stability and am looking toward sustainable solvency ahead. I think so. I’ve been wrong before, but I think this is the way. If it isn’t, I’ll shrug and figure out another path even if shrugging is hard.

***

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like, Episode 22: The White Claw Effect

White Claw BC 6 — Something like a phenomenon; by some estimates it outsold Bud this summer.

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like, Episode 22, The White Claw Effect

This blog parses the changes in my middle age and how I went from working as a columnist at a major daily newspaper and a leading cheesemonger to being a beer buyer at a fancy grocery store and how I maintain hope of finding happiness. It’s underpinned by an element of confusion fatigue, frustration fatigue and fatigue fatigue, but it’s about life and downward mobility in New York City 2018 and 2019, which is never dull.

The biggest story in the craft beer world this year isn’t about a beer at all. But because craft beer is largely misunderstood insufficiently understood, its impact is worth discussing. The “it” is White Claw, which is by far the industry leader in a fast-emerging sector known as hard seltzer; these are fermented beverages usually seasoned with fruit of some sort. They are light calorically and refreshing, sort of as if LaCroix or your favorite flavored Italian seltzer contained 5% ABV.

Sales are through the roof. Since its introduction in 2015, hard seltzer sales have soared with triple digit increases every year. By some estimates 2.5 billion dollars of the stuff was sold last year and yes, that number is may be on pace double this year; some contend that the stuff outsold Budweiser this summer. This rapid rise parallels craft beer which has gone from 8.7 billion dollar in sales in 2011 to 27.6 billion in 2018. Get in at the right time and an investment in the right sort of alcoholic beverage will pay off handsomely.

But White Claw and its ilk, principally Truly, which is owned by Boston Beer (the brewers of popular craft beer lines like Sam Adams and Dogfish Head) and both Bon & Viv and Natural Light Seltzer, which are owned by Anheuser-Busch, aren’t having a tangible effect on craft beer sales for one very important fact: their constituencies have minimal overlap. And in the long run, the trend could benefit craft beer.

First off, consider this scenario. Four young people walk into a bar with an especially well stocked selection of spirits. One person orders a single malt scotch, another orders a martini and specifies the gin, a third asks about the small batch bourbon and the fourth orders a vodka tonic. Right, the fourth person in general is the White Claw drinker, and no, that’s not intended as a disparagement. There are a lot of things in the world to get admirably geeky about. Obsessing about alcoholic beverages isn’t a necessity for sophistication. Low information drinkers should not be lumped into the same heap as low information voters! But, in that context, the beverages that White Claw is hurting are Angry Orchard, the cider produced by Boston Beer, Bud Light, Stella Artois, Mike’s Hard Lemonade, etc. Yes, the beer/cider equivalents of that vodka tonic. As sales of White Claw, et al have soared the sales at my store of those beverages have plateaued or declined.

It’s easy to taste why. White Claw (and its ilk, but…) is easy drinking and refreshing. And it has just enough ABV to take a load off without hurting you in the morning. To my observations on Aisle 2, the White Claw crowd is very, very young. The craft beer crowd has a reputation for being youthful, but that’s overplayed a little. You don’t put up numbers like those in craft beer without reaching all demographics. I have as many knowledgeable, enthusiastic middle-aged women among my avid craft beer constituents as I do young men.

Not that there’s anything wrong with having a very young constituency, that crowd has money and is eager to brand themselves by embracing the shiny new toy. It’s that spirit that fueled craft beer’s early rise as youngsters abandoned Miller or whatever for Brooklyn Brewery or Sierra Nevada, and the latest rise has been fueled in part by young adults abandoning those brands for super small local brewers like Other Half, Tree House and Monkish. But the shelf life of something as the shiny new toy isn’t long. This isn’t a dire prediction, hard seltzers–like Uggs and low-slung jeans–are here to stay, but their current moment and heat isn’t sustainable. Some of the drinkers will go elsewhere, and one of the destinations is likely to be, ahem, craft beer.

The two biggest trends in craft beer right now are hazy, fruit forward India Pale Ales, and oak aged, fruit forward sours. Notice the word repeat in that past sentence. People who think all beer is dry, grain forward in flavor and somewhat bitter, are in for a big surprise; the trend in craft beer is toward beverages that are lighter, food friendly and um, rather refreshing. Not only are these beers not vinegary or bitter like other brews in that category, most of the sours and many of the IPAs are also low alcohol and a short culinary move from the flavors of hard seltzers.

I’ve already had a few customers tell me that they are fans of Crooked Stave’s Sour Rose, St. Bretta and Wild Sage beers precisely because they are like a vodka tonic but with more flavor. When the inevitable fatigue arrives in the hard seltzer market, craft beer will probably absorb some of those customers. It will be more proof of the resilience of the craft beer market, which isn’t a bubble but a fundamental restructuring of American drinking habits, even if that isn’t a sexy story.

Martin Johnson is a freelance writer whose work on music, sports and cinema has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Newsday, New York, Vogue, Rolling Stone, The Root, Slate, The Atlantic, and numerous other publications and websites. He also blogs at Rotations, and he can be contacted at thejoyofcheese@gmail.com.

White Claw shipment — We were ready for the weekend. On Monday, we ordered more.

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like, Episode 21, The End of an Era

Dean and DeLuca Closing

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like, Episode 21: The End of an Era

After months of fearful and fraught reports of a business in steep decline, Dean and DeLuca has finally closed its flagship store in SoHo, and yes, this actually is the end of an era. The phrase is overused, but Dean and DeLuca is an important chapter in the history of American specialty food sales. And just like many other eras that end, the writing on the wall was apparent for a long time before the end came. The company had closed many of its other locations including an Upper East Side store and a midtown coffee bar.

This doesn’t mean I’m not sad about the situation. I worked at Dean and DeLuca briefly in 1984 and 2001 and applied again in 2010. My stints there informed a lot of my viewpoints about specialty food and how it should be sold. Also, even when I wasn’t working there, I just loved walking through the place, just to take it all in. It was the gold standard in so many ways, yet by the end it was far more tarnish than shine.

When I first worked at D&D in 1984, I didn’t really know what I was getting into. I had started my culinary career at Bloomingdales back when that specialty retailer had a food division to match its splendor elsewhere. In the late summer 1984, I moved from Washington Heights to the neighborhood now known as NoLIta, Prince Street, between Mott and Elizabeth, to be precise. Food was a part time job, a supplement to my nascent writing career, it seemed to make sense to have a part time job a few blocks away rather than a few subway stops.

I was pleased that being Black didn’t seem like an obstacle in the interview process, and when I arrived for my first day on the charcuterie counter, I was thrilled to see a woman of South Asian descent running the cheese counter. This edition of Dean and DeLuca was on Prince between Greene and Wooster, a much smaller, more intimate version of what would in a few years become an emporium a few blocks away at Prince and Broadway. Whereas at Bloomingdales, I was simply tossed behind the counter with no training on the product I was selling (I was an enthusiastic cook, but I had never seen prosciutto for instance), at Dean and DeLuca, my boss, a cherub of a guy named Nick who would later open his own place in Park Slope after Brooklyn became a thing, spent the entire morning teaching me the ins and outs of cured meats, pates, olives and caviar. In the early afternoon, Guy a tall thin and very proudly loudly gay man arrived to take over and while he regaled me with stories of gay orgies in the basement of my new home, he taught me how to slice smoked salmon. Both he and Nick went into great detail about the flavor differences of each item. It was a lot to absorb in a single day, but by late afternoon when I said hello to my first customer, I was as ready to be professorial as I was to be convivial.

That stuck with me, as well as a focus on presentation, throughout my food career. It wasn’t as simple as knowledge is power, but it was close. As my career progressed through many different stores, I found that knowing my shit and presenting it in a charming way was an equalizer to the income and privilege differences between me and the clientele. The foundation of my Liberal Arts degree had been validated.

For many years, I made weekly visits to Dean and DeLuca’s Prince and Broadway emporium, just to take in the magnificence and occasionally eavesdrop on a cheesemonger telling a customer about how soft ripened cheeses were made or one of my successors from long ago discussing the flavors of different olives. Then my life became more complicated and that sort of free time disappeared. I stopped in about five years ago and the place was largely the same, but that troubled me. It was as if no one told them that specialty food retailing had changed. Specialty had become commonplace. You could buy Extra Virgin Olive Oil or fresh pasta or Vidalia Onions from Associated or other grocery stores. Whole Foods had changed the landscape; fine foods weren’t a luxury that imbued its purchaser with the fantasy of class mobility, they were an emblem of self-care, an enlivened palate was of a piece with limber hamstrings and a good complexion.

Dean and Deluca was still a formidable brand name and they franchised it to coffee bars that were a cut above Starbucks and their ilk, with high ceilings and sort of refined vibe that was reminiscent of Soho circa 1984. A smarter company would have used that brand to become a state of the art sandwich and soup outfit, sort of an variation on Hale and Hearty. Perhaps the emblem of this change was Danny Meyer’s comments on moving the Union Square Cafe. He said the rent hike on the original location wouldn’t have been an issue for a Shake Shack, but not a fine dining palace.

By the time D&Ds outlook began to worsen, the food people had long left the building. Giorgio DeLuca and Joel Dean cashed out long ago; the last time I asked someone behind the counter about a product, I just got a blank stare in response. Then he told me that the manager would be back in 30 minutes; I could ask then. The Thai Real Estate company Pace Development bought “the brand” in 2014. Presumably the Prince and Broadway space will lie vacant as a tax write off. So much of Manhattan is about what used to be there anyway.

800px-NYC,_Dean_&_Deluca_in_SoHo_2