Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like, Episode 08, The Narrative

Episode 8: The Narrative

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, which is never dull.

A few days ago, a customer approached me and asked, “where’s the coffee?”

I asked him if he meant coffee by the cup, which we sell in the back corner, or coffee beans.

He repeated himself this time more bluntly. “I’m looking for coffee!”

I thought quickly about him and his delivery. It was inconceivable that he didn’t speak English fluently and therefore didn’t understand me. New York is an international city. Sometimes I discombobulate customers with simple requests like “may I help you find something.” When the response is a panicked look that says, “oh no, I have to speak English now!” I politely back away. This didn’t seem like that scenario. I figured the guy was a finance bro who couldn’t bring himself to contact a shopping service for one or two items.

“Indeed,” I responded, “we have coffee in three locations in the store, you’re looking to make coffee at home, right?”

The guy grew indignant, “do you even know what coffee is?”

“As a matter of fact, I do.” I said evenly. “It’s a beverage made from water and the ground beans that are typically grown in Central and South America, East Africa and Indonesia.”

Then I waved my hand to the shelf behind me. This entire dialogue was taking place three feet away from a shelf stocked with everything from bags of beans from Peets and MUD and other high end brands to cans of Folgers and bricks of Café Bustelo.

He uttered a shock of recognition and busied himself in choosing a bag of Starbucks brand coffee.

See, you can’t make this stuff up.

And it isn’t an isolated incident. The following day, I had a similarly exasperating exchange with a young man looking for “pasta salad.”

Anyway, my level-headed facility with such customers has earned me a nickname I don’t especially like, The Machine. I think it reflects the age difference or at least the understanding gap between me and my coworkers.

Yes, I am level headed in my conviviality toward these customers and toward the general public at large. Since I presently live three blocks away from the store, anytime I hit the street wearing store garb, I’m at the ready to chirp salutations and pleasantries toward anyone that recognizes me.

It’s not performative, or at least I don’t think of my approach in that way. Instead, it’s how I channel my frustration, aggravation (yes, they are two different if similar emotions), dismay, and self-hatred into a useful emotion. I also revel in controlling the narrative; in a way it’s my counterattack against a world that has messed up my career arc.

If you came to one of the cheese counters I worked at whether it was the place on Columbus Avenue or Bedford Cheese Shop and asked about Gruyere, I’d give you a taste of two different Gruyeres and maybe a Comte and explain about the Jura. This dialogue structure is replicated on the sales floor over more mundane products like coffee or pasta salad even if many customers would prefer to demand information and have it given to them promptly and submissively.

New Yorkers aren’t unaware of the importance of controlling the narrative. About half the time I ask a customer with a big question mark in his or her thought bubble if I can help them find something, they decline even if they are plainly lost amid our aisles. Some of that is not wanting to betray the notion that as a New Yorker they know everything they need to know whether it’s the likely result of Mueller investigation or the location of aluminum baking pans. But some of it is also not wanting to relinquish control of the narrative.

I first witnessed this phenomenon in my early days on the beer aisle. My strategy was to treat it as if it were my cheese counter, and I cheerfully approached customers offering assistance and knowledge. I immediately noticed a gender divide. Women were by and large interested in discussing beers whether they were sour enthusiasts, IPA fans or just buying some cans for their boyfriends. Men, for the most part froze up when offered dialogue. They would just stand oozing confusion and shrugging off secondary offers to demystify the 400 choices we carry. Usually after a few minutes of aimless staring they’d grab a six pack of Sam Adams and head to register with a relieved look on their face.

I initially took umbrage until I noticed that many of the women bartenders I know dealt with the same phenomenon. Some guys just seem to feel that knowing beer is a social obligation like opening the door for their dates.

Sometimes I go too far in my interest in controlling the narrative. There was a customer, let’s call him J, who shops at the store frequently and we usually exchanged small talk. He was occasionally condescending (when I told him of a journalism fellowship I had enthusiastically applied for, he asked “why would they select someone like you?” forgetting that I’m both a buyer at a grocery store and an music critic at one of the world’s most respected newspapers), but I wrote that off. After the 2016 election we began discussing politics, which was a relief since the only other two politically minded sorts in the store that I spoke with, a Dominican counterman and a regular who sold baseball hats to the employees, were both avid Trump supporters.

I made the mistake of forwarding J a Ta-Nehisi Coates article, which he enjoyed, and he decided to reciprocate by sending me a onslaught of bland “Trump is bad” articles from the New York Times and other mainstream outlets. I responded with my own flurry of articles by Rebecca Traister and Rebecca Solnit and tweet threads of Seth Abramson, Brian Kassentein and others. I read and critiqued one article he sent me from Newsweek. I had obviously overstepped, and one afternoon, he stopped and lectured me for a solid fifteen minutes telling me I was just as bad as Trump and John Kelly. He was apoplectic and began involuntarily spitting on me and he ranted. I decided to let him have his say, which went on longer than I anticipated, before excusing myself from his attention telling him that I had work to do.

I went to the back, cleaned up, checked my fantasy baseball team’s stats, and went back to stocking the shelves and chatting with customers. Maybe I do deserve the “Machine” nickname, but I prefer to think of it as channeling Mr. Spock, my favorite Star Trek character. The encounter persuaded me to limit my control of the narrative to the items of the store. The narrative in everyone else’s life seems to be as fragile as it is in mine. No sense is applying more stress.

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.

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like, Episode 7, Owning It

Episode 7: Owning It

I relish getting together with friends for drinks, yet there are occasional cringeworthy moments. It happens once every few months and usually not on the first or even second drink. Somewhere around the middle of the third, a pal will pipe up and say, “Martin I know what you should do!”

And the cringing begins. It’s not because I don’t think my friends don’t have good ideas; in fact, most of my friends have GREAT ideas, it’s why I enjoy their company so much. And my friends are not likely to dwell on why I’m 58 and single (my pat answer is that I’m the son of two workaholics, I’m been married to the concept of hard work for all of my adult life and some of my childhood too). Instead, my pals will pipe up and announce as if this is the cure for cancer, “Martin you should own your own place.”

It’s certainly not a BAD idea. But it gets me riled up. I realize right there and then that this evening is certainly going to a fourth drink and possibly a fifth or sixth while I explain that while I know enough about cheese and craft beer to operate a potentially profitable establishment, I don’t see it in my future.

I don’t run in circles where there are people with deep pockets just dying to invest in a new New York City endeavor. I know those people and those circles exist. This spring, I often passed a new business opening a block away from me. It’s called Sauce Pizzeria, and it will soon open on 12th Street between First and Second Avenue. When I saw the sign go up in the window, I thought that was ambitious (and I like ambition). The location is just a couple of doors west of Motorino, and a short walk from Bruno’s, Bakers, Stromboli, and Artichoke pizza. Also, Two Boots and Gruppo have to count as competitors for the delivery business. Opening a pizza place in that location struck me as ambition that may have dribbled over into territory that is better coded as foolish waste of money.

One afternoon on my way to the store, I passed by the place as one of the principals was leaving so I inquired about the angle on his pizza. I mentioned that this was an area with loads of renowned pizza already and was told it was going to be “good pizza!”

Those are the kinds of people I don’t have beers with often enough.

I’ve had some reservations about whether an artisanal cheese shop would succeed in the city, and those concerns have heightened in 2018 as both Lucy’s Whey, a boutique featuring artisanal cheese and East Village Cheese, a discount shop, have both closed up. Meanwhile, my alma mater of sorts, Bedford Cheese Shop features significantly less cheese than before. My suspicion is that artisanal cheese isn’t marked up enough, but that if it were priced to reflect that time, attention and care it requires, the market would vanish. The typical strategy is to double the wholesale price, which is fine for a can of beans or a roll of paper towels. Both of those are stuck on a shelf and they sell when they sell. Cheese, especially great cheese, requires much more care: daily unwrapping and trimming, careful storage and unlike that can of beans, it needs a cheesemonger, essentially an expert in dairy bliss, to sell, cut and wrap the fromage. It’s asking a lot for New Yorkers, $4K monthly rents and all, to pay $30/lb for clothbound English cheddars. Will they pay $45? I don’t want to be the business owner that finds out they won’t. My guess is that the difference between what the crap cheese that most Americans grew up on and the mid-level stuff, Grafton Cheddar, Piave, Petit Basque, is great enough that most foodies don’t feel an urgent need to push further into higher end territory. What’s worse I don’t see a social media push to make foodies feel crucially uninformed if they aren’t having the latest affineur aged wonder from Neal’s Yard Dairy, Caroline Hostettler or Casa Madaio.

That push exists in the craft beer world and it has created an obsessive passion — dare I say a borderline unquenchable thirst — for beers that are far beyond Lagunitas, Sam Adams and Harpoon, the craft beer brands that are the malt and hops equivalent of Piave. That push is making brews from local New York breweries like Other Half, Singlecut, KCBC, Greenpoint, Finback and Grimm into cherished nectar. The price point difference is somewhat parallel too. A six pack of Harpoon at my store goes for $10.99; a single 16 oz can of a beer from one of the new local breweries typically retails for $6 or $7, and the cans sometimes outsell the routine craft six packs.

So, would a business based on craft beer plus a cheese component work? Probably. There are three places in the city, Milk and Hops, Malt and Mold, and Alphabet City Beer Company, that feature cheese as a Robin to the craft beer Batman. All have expanded to open new locations (though both Malt and Mold and Milk and Hops have each closed one of their spots). When I was working on Columbus Avenue, one of my regular customers owned a wine bar in the East Village, and he visited ABC one evening and came to the shop the next day with his eyes bulging. His eyes got wider when I told him that I’d set up the cheese for Alphabet City.

“Do you think a place like that would work up here?” he asked, excitement practically oozing from his pores.

I began writing business plans and he began searching for space. One key difference was the concept of “up here.” The place on Columbus was on 84th. It was around the corner from Jacob’s a nice beer place on Amsterdam. I set my sights on Morningside Heights. As a Columbia alum, I felt an affinity to the place and figured out marketing schemes. There are literally dozens of craft beer bars serving the NYU area. To be one of the few such bars and the only one with a specialty cheese component for Columbia had me thinking franchises and celebrity. For the first time in more than a decade I could see retirement as something other than what my friends did.

The wine bar owner was thinking the 90s, which was not far from where he lived. Escalating real estate prices kept pushing his aim further uptown. My daydreams got longer. Then he told me one day that he’d found a place on 107th Street, a little east of Amsterdam. I began thinking of giving notice on Columbus.

The next time I saw him, a few days later, he told me he’d turned the place down. He had just been booked for a reality TV show and he had proposed to his longtime girlfriend. I smiled through the pain as I congratulated him. Lots of my daydreams have gone up in smoke but rarely were the fumes so acrid.

A few months later, I took the gig at the store I work at presently. Sometimes on my way home, I’d stop at his bar and regale him with stories about our rapidly improving sales, the embrace of the local craft beer community and the well, plethora of great beer being brewed in New York City.

One day, he announced to me, “you should open your own place.” I scanned for sarcasm and finding none, I showed him my resting bitch face.

He closed his bar shortly thereafter citing boredom, another reminder that I really didn’t want to be in business with him.

I’ve seen the investors at businesses run by my friends, and they are typically either shady or impatient (one guy at a bar in Brooklyn was stunned that the bar hadn’t turned a profit a mere six months after it opened).

Usually by the time we get to the fifth drink, I explain all of this. Sometimes my friends nod in understanding. Sometimes, they’ll say, “well maybe Bed-Stuy or Hudson Valley.”

I typically roll my eyes and wish I was conversant in Game of Thrones or some other subject with which I could derail the conversation.

I need to have drinks with their investors

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like, Episode 6, The Kids are Alright

Episode 6: The Kids are Alright

There’s still little room in the East Village for the ordinary as this now closed establishment attests

I learned to cook at an early age and by that I don’t mean my early 20s or my teens; I was probably seven. And no, I don’t mean I learned how to shove something in the microwave and press the button for a one-minute cooking time. My first specialty was hot dogs, and if that sounds mundane, then you don’t know my siblings very well, and you definitely didn’t know them as teenagers

My recollection is that I went into the dining room of our apartment where my sibs were hanging out. I have a sister and two brothers, each a decade or more my senior. I announced I was hungry. One of them grabbed a napkin and sketched a quick map to the kitchen and warned me not to burn the place down.

I was thrilled. My siblings made food for themselves when they were hungry. This was my chance to join the big kids club. I admired my siblings (and still do) and one of my ambitions was to be as adult as they were as soon as possible. This seemed like an important step. I found the frankfurters in the fridge and read the cooking instructions (this is before the age of microwave ovens as standard equipment in every kitchen). I boiled some water, tossed two in, and by the time my siblings came to check on me, I was spreading mustard on a hot dog bun and wondering if this qualified me to vote in the upcoming election.

My eldest brother immediately realized I need further challenges at this hot dog stuff, so upon his suggestion, I began broiling the dogs instead, though the close proximity of the flame initially daunted me. Then I began stuffing them with shredded cheddar and diced sweet onions (yes, I developed knife skills long before I had algebra skills). And at my other brother’s suggestion I began wrapping them in bacon. In other words, by the time I was 10, I had developed an alternative to the classic Chicago hot dog. I didn’t think I was unique. I thought all kids were getting busy in their parent’s kitchens. It felt natural to me. As my siblings moved out to their own apartments, I inherited all of their chores, so being adept at cooking felt of a piece with dishwashing, ironing and cleaning — it was stuff big kids did. And since grocery shopping was something my Dad and I did together, it all fit well.

My delusion continued into college when four pals and I dropped off the meal plan and began our own five night a week cooking group. There was a branch of the store I work at now near campus and I did a lot of my shopping for my cooking night there.

This comes to mind a lot as the store I work at now is near at least four NYU dorms and one for students at the New School. It gives me a good view of how kids culinary habits have changed. On the one hand, today’s 20-year old grown up in a world where hunger could be slaked with a few keystrokes on a smart phone. Those keystrokes could result in anything from a fast food burger or a beef short rib ramen being delivered to your door in minutes. On the other hand, today’s 20-year old has also grown up with Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma, the writings of and about Mark Bittman and Alice Waters, and catch phrases like Farm to Table as cornerstones of the intellectual landscape. In other words, while their parents may have regarded sun-dried tomatoes as the latest “thing,” these kids would either likely be more concerned with how and where the tomatoes were grown and then how they were dried or they would want them at their door immediately.

When I began working in the New York City specialty food business in the mid ’80s, gourmet was the new disco. Fairway, Balducci’s and Dean DeLuca were places where one danced to the new hip deejays of the moment: chevre, fresh pasta, and sushi. As chefs became celebrities in the ’90s, the fat free wave swept across upscale shoppers. Shortly before I took a hiatus from cheese counters, I had to explain to a customer that fat free Parmigiano Reggiano doesn’t exist despite the fact that she thought she heard mention of it on the Food Network.

In the new millennium, food became less a trend and more part of the intellectual firmament. Food Studies programs took root at NYU and other schools. In 2011, when I was hiring to launch a place on Columbus Avenue, I had two NYU Food Studies students in my first interview pool and one of my first hires was a Barnard grad who had written her thesis on the rise of food trucks in New York City.

The students who are the store’s customers are the younger siblings of that crowd. These days priorities about food divide neatly into sustainability and convenience. The layout of the store makes it easy to identify the camps as readily as if they were wearing contrasting jerseys. Upon entering the store most customers either turn right toward the produce or they veer left toward the prepared foods.

The majority of the kids play for the Prepared Foods team, eagerly lining up for meal specials, a protein and two veggies for $12.99, but a few times a day and often on Friday and Sunday, I see student aged kids with baskets full of leeks, cauliflower and other goodies that can’t just be shoved into a microwave.

I’m interested in knowing if these kids are duplicating the experience of my pals in college, but that feels like prying. Instead, I create my own narrative for them that they grew up in families where convenience triumphed over sustainability and that this is their rebellion. I don’t get to pursue dialogue with this crowd much because they seem to know their way around a grocery store. This is in stark contrast to many young professionals. Almost daily I have to explain some well-meaning but confused young man in a suit that the fresh vegetables are in the produce section, not next to their canned equivalents on Aisle 6. I doubt that crowd has ever heard of Farmer’s Markets.

The craft beer section is where all of these various cohorts meet. The craft beer drinkers of the ’90s and ’00s were in some ways rebelling against their elder’s tendency to be brand loyal to a big beer brand (Bud, Miller, Coors Heineken, etc.). Now, it’s gone another step. Instead of a loyalty to Harpoon or Sam Adams or Lagunitas, some of the mainstays of the first wave of craft beer, the new customers are more curious. I find myself practically giving lectures on the growth of craft beer in the name of recommending the latest IPAs. There’s also groups that seem to hold their own informal tastings. About twice a month about a half dozen young women will crowd the aisle deliberating over Maine Beer Company pale ales and large format sours before selecting a few and then grabbing a six pack or two of something less high end to enjoy afterward.

Lastly about once a month, a kid will approach me somewhat shyly. He or she will pull out their driver’s license and announce, it’s their birthday. Indeed, the card holder has just turned 21; they want to make their first legal beer purchase. Without exception, these cats are initially shocked when I ask what they like to drink but regain their footing when I ask about their budget. The resulting purchase is almost always a selection high end sours, stouts and IPAs, usually totaling $30 or $40.

When it comes to cooking, these kids may be catching up to where I was when I was their age, but in terms of drinking, they are light years ahead. At their age, I was drinking whatever cheap beer was on sale at the campus co-op.

The view up the street from the store. New York is interesting even when it isn’t trying to be.

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like, Episode 5, It’s Service not Subservience

Episode 5: It’s Service, Not Subservience.

See, it’s not a metaphor, there really is an Aisle 2, though the wine part is misleading and I wish the beer adjective was “craft.”

I’ve worked in the New York City specialty food business for more than 30 years, but I feared I wasn’t going to survive my first 30 minutes.

My first gig was at Bloomingdales, which back in 1984 had a fancy food section. I was hired to work on their cheese and prepared food counter after discovering an office job at a small but rapidly growing market research business didn’t leave me time to develop a writing career. 25 hours a week at Bloomies would cover my rent on Prince Street (see why people are so damned nostalgic for those days? It isn’t just an urban grit fetish). I figured I’d get a writing career up and running (and I did).

I had worked in the Deli section of a North Dallas Supermarket called Tom Thumb when I was in high school, and I loved to cook. This gig seemed like a perfect fit. My first warning sign that things might not be so easy was the training. I spent three days in five-hour sessions learning to suck up to and acknowledge the privilege of the Bloomingdales customer. On the third day, for half an hour, we were sent to our stations to learn the merchandise. Whatever, I figured. I’d worked with food before; this should be easy. I was wrong.

On my first full day on the counter, right after I’d met my new coworkers and chatted for a moment with my supervisor, I spied a customer and raced to her eager to show off that I could do this job. My first customer was a black woman; she had a thick Caribbean accent, and it sounded like she asked for a piece of New York Cheddar. I smiled, pulled out a big yellow brick of cheese and confidently placed knife on it. In response, she stared at me, discontent rising on her brow. Within milliseconds the discontent turned to chagrin and anger. She began shouting that if I didn’t know what I was doing, I should get off the counter. I began to shrink, not just from the task, but I began to feel as if I was physically shrinking. Her words stopped making sense; it was as if she was an adult in a Peanuts cartoon, and I was being reduced to a Lilliputian in record time. North Dallas customers were entitled, but this scenario was well beyond my experience.

“Excuse me,” I heard a voice from just beyond my peripheral vision to my right. It was Tony, I had spent my half hour the day before with him in his corner of the station. “Madam, perhaps you mean SHEV, right?” He cocked an inquisitive eyebrow. “The ‘R’ in chevre is silent.” With that, he pulled out a smart little white mound of cheese from a tray in a nearby refrigerated case — a lowboy in the parlance — plopped it into a container and sent the now quiet customer on her way. I looked at him admiringly. He gave me two bits of advice that have enabled my endurance in this business. Knowledge expressed confidently triumphs over entitlement, and this business is about service, not subservience.

I grasped the first point enthusiastically; I was a product of a liberal arts education. I wasn’t quite sold on the second one. He saw that and walked me through the reasoning. The customers are hungry, he explained. We have access to the food, delicious food that tickles their imagination. He smiled, looked me in the eye and said, “so Mr. Political Science Major, who has the power in that situation.”

I didn’t even bother to correct him that I was a poli sci minor. I just nodded.

During the following three decades, I did my best to internalize that advice, which I often reduced to “know your shit,” and “you’re not as good as these people, you’re better,” and it helped me broaden my culinary horizons, and it usually kept my most capricious self esteem issues at bay. That was vital as my work as a freelance writer has had extraordinary ups and downs. The upside of working from home was offset by many factors. There was the sense that I didn’t belong among the main group of people who were writing the paper or website (not that I didn’t try, dozens of resumes were sent out and I had many interviews, usually the decision was made not to hire at all). I felt far more connected to editors whose door I could knock on and chew the fat as well as discuss assignments than ones that I just repeatedly email in hopes of a favorable response. And of course, there’s the expendability factor. With alarming suddenness, I could go from earning hundreds of dollars a week at a paper or website to little or nothing at all, in the stroke of a single email. Thus, retail became a safe space, a place where I could regain and even fortify my equilibrium.

And in some ways, the two professional skill sets overlapped substantially. On the counter, I would try and strike up a conversation with the customers, probing into the how and why they were attracted to this particular cheese, salad or cured meat. Then I’d try to engage in critical dialogue about where it fit in the fast-growing culinary panoply. “Sheep cheese is on the rise, a lot like that new downtown neighborhood, Tribeca, I said to one of my customers at Petak’s, the next stop in my brilliant career in the late ‘80s. The comparison elicited guffaws from my coworker who reminded me that I didn’t have to pseudo intellectualize everything.

I knew that, but I wanted to use my sophistication to keep their sense of privilege in check. Overall, I knew that the assumption was that I was taking orders all day and superficially that was true, what I was really doing was allying myself with my customers in the quest for culinary bliss. And that is hard work, since New Yorkers typically think we know everything about everything.

Developing my conversational technique on the counter made me a better interviewer; I was able to establish common ground faster, and this proved essential as interview times shrunk in the new millennium, from half an hour to fifteen minutes to the speed dating model of five minutes or less.

The syn-estheticization approach helped me in reviewing. It was always useful when writing for a New York City based newspaper to compare a piece of music or a segment within to something in the culinary world or in the ever-changing geography of the city.

This convivial approach did have a drawback. Some of the customers embraced our dialogues far more than I did. Several years after leaving Petak’s, I was on line at Paragon Sporting Goods near Union Square and encountered a woman who remembered me from there. She recalled that I explained the sweetly sprawling flavor of the French goat’s milk cheese Cornilly was like the challenge a young parent keeping up with young twins, which in fact, she was. Until that moment, I had taken her for an egotistical Upper East Side Mom. I still didn’t particularly care that both of her boys were now at Dalton, but I did smile and savor the memories of simpler times.

This is what we mean when we say beer; it’s probably different than Justice Kavanaugh’s idea.

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like, Episode 04, On Beer

Episode 4: On Beer

Your next beer might not be from a six pack

The concept of “jumping the shark” goes beyond the concept of television shows that have lost their dramatic relevance. Jobs jump the shark too. It happens when employers become hopelessly clueless about your performance. For instance, when I worked on Columbus Avenue, I was called on the carpet about two months before I left in autumn 2014. It was August and they wanted to know why beer sales were down from their levels in spring.

When I pointed out that the store in general was down and the cause was the city emptying out during the warmest months, they tried hard not to hear me. “No, it’s summer,” they exclaimed. In their minds people should be streaming in to buy beer to take to the park or the beach. To that point we had been open for almost 30 months, and I’d explained from Day 1, that our beer program was going to focus on connoisseur level brews. Our case featured bottles from Maine Beer Company, Mikkeller, Evil Twin, Stillwater and Omnipollo. The great New York City craft beer boom had just begun, but I had my sights on beers from the new local breweries as soon as they became available. Furthermore, we didn’t have a clientele that spent their weekends away in cooler places because, well, we didn’t have a clientele period! Not for nothing is that place out of business now.

A few months later, my next gig jumped the shark too, but in a similar but different way. I was busily diversifying the selection beyond the usual suspects of craft beer (Lagunitas, Sierra Nevada, Harpoon, Sam Adams, etc.) when my biggest supporter at the store came to me and said he’d looked at the numbers. I brightened. Then he told me that since six packs sell best, he thought I should abandon my interest in four packs, single bottles and cans and bring in more six packs.

My heart fell. Sometimes when you change jobs in the same sector, you fall prey to thinking that everything that was wrong with your former employer will be better at the new one. I did, and this was my “forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown” moment.

Those employers didn’t grasp that today’s craft beer drinker is different than yesteryear’s Bud Man (or the “taste great” advocates from Mller Lite decade ago). The drinker isn’t so much *brand* loyal as he or she is caliber loyal. And he and she (yes, according to some statistics upwards of 40% of all craft beer drinkers are women so let’s lose the stereotype of the paunchy young man with a beard) also crave variety. Even the most casual craft beer drinker today knows that there is more new beer being brewed daily in America, hell, in EACH region of America, than even the most devoted obsessive could ever drink and stay somewhat upright. So, craft beer enthusiasts usually prefer to buy single beers rather than six packs, and many of them (yes, men and women alike) track their drinking history with apps. It’s commonplace to see shoppers in the beer aisle pouring over their phones to check what they’ve had from this brewer or that one and what others in that app’s community think of the beers we offer.

To this end, I think it fits the concept that beer is the new wine. In 2011 and 2012, I worked Sundays and Mondays at Alphabet City Wine Company, an awesome little boutique on Avenue C (and yes, that’s another datapoint in the changing East Village). It was a laid back, funky little place with a generous case discount. I couldn’t help but notice that the case buyers rarely bought 12 bottles of their favorite vino. Instead, he or she typically bought two bottles each of their favorite red and white then eight single bottles. I lent a hand in opening their sibling shop, Alphabet City Beer Company, and noticed that almost all beers were sold individually.

My current employers must have been in the loop on that memo. We’ve always sold single beers; hell, you can grab a bottle out of a six pack if necessary. I joke that we know we’re next door to a movie theater, but that is the aim of some customers. I am sometimes asked for a can of IPA that will go will with the new Deadpool movie. I have no idea what I would have said if someone asked me what beer is popular on Wakanda.

This paradigmatic shift owes to a revolutionary change in the flavor of the beers that are available. The first wave of craft beer offered lagers that improved substantially on the traditional mainstream options, and India Pale Ales that were as noteworthy for their bitterness as they were for their smoky, piney and grapefruit zest overtones. The new wave features styles like farmhouse ales, which are lighter and crisper and often have floral overtones; sours, ales typically brewed with wild yeast strains and feature big fruity flavors, and a new breed of India Pale Ales, that are more softly carbonated, fruit forward and hazy — they look like a mimosa and some taste a little like one too.

This isn’t to suggest that the six pack of 12 oz bottles has jumped the shark. It hasn’t. Beer at its root is a convivial beverage and six beers is an ideal format for a group of people having a good time. However, the six pack’s dominance as the iconic form of beer is eroding and likely to continue to decline as four packs and single cans, especially in 16 oz and 19.2 oz proliferate.

Beer was always a social drink, but now it has become recognized as a culinary experience. This 2014 New Yorker cover which depicts a beer being served with the pomp and circumstance of a wine gets most of the details correctly, except in its trafficking in racial and gender stereotypes. It’s just as likely that the woman ordered the beer or that she’s as interested in evaluating it.

It’s not as if my current gig isn’t without petty annoyances, but they are strikingly different than the other jobs. For instance, about once a season — yes, beer is seasonal — my boss, who shares some of the purchasing duties on the beer program will buy a case of $40 a bottle sours that leave me rolling my eyes (“can’t you promote on Instagram” Is his usual plea to my skeptical look). Or on a Sunday night, when I’m eager to hit the door, and go hear music or watch an NBA or NFL game, one of the supervisors who is interested in beer will want to hang out for a minute and go over some video he just watched about pouring beer and about matching styles of beer to appropriate glassware. I’ll sit and talk flutes versus pint glasses, and yes, our Cascade sours are on are Instagram feed all the time. After all, these are good problems to have.

When I moved onto my block, it cost me $795 a month. New residents are paying over a million

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like, Episode 03 These are My Neighbors

This blog parses the changes in my middle age and how I went from a columnist at a major daily newspaper and a leading cheesemonger to 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 dull.

When I moved into my current apartment in 1992, it was the last of my “post collegiate” moves. In other words, rather than calling a moving company, I rang up some old pals, and they came over, rolled up their sleeves, carried my furniture, books, music (music mostly involved objects like LPs and CDs back then), and miscellany down a floor from my old apartment and up two to the new place, which was just around the corner. It was my third move in four years and about half of my friends were enthusiastically suggesting I get comfortable in my digs for a change (advice I took). The other half openly worried about my new building. There was a bullet hole in the vestibule door.

I shrugged it off. It’s the East Village, I explained to an array of furrowed brows before buzzing the pizza deliveryman in. My comments weren’t intended as snark. In my first East Village apartment, which was near Avenue B, flanked by and across the street from some abandoned buildings, things were sometimes, well, interesting. One afternoon, I had to call out as late to my food job. The crackheads — yes, it was 1989 or so — had gotten their hands on some guns and were playing cops and robbers. The real cops were waiting at the corner for the ammunition to run out before moving in. After about a half hour, it did, and I hurried off to the store, which was on the Upper East Side. Upon my arrival, my coworkers pressed me for details. I heaved a sigh and told them that the block used to be better; until a few months before then, the drug of choice was heroin, and that cohort was much more chill.

Many of my coworkers at my current store weren’t born yet or were barely out of diapers when Avenue B and crack den was an obvious formulation if not an implicit one, and they respond to that story with the same incredulity of my Upper East Side colleagues from the Bush 1 era. Today, the neighborhood is served by two Whole Foods, two Trader Joe’s, a Union Market and the store I work at. There is at least one high end restaurant, one upscale fast casual place, and one artisan (i.e. better than Starbucks) coffee house on almost every block. It seems like the crack dealers from the late 80s might struggle to make rent in the new East Village.

In my 34 years in the New York City specialty food biz, I’ve worked on the Upper East Side, Kips Bay, the Union Square area, Williamsburg and the Upper West Side. When I took my current gig, it was my first time having my neighbors as my clientele. I wasn’t sure what to expect.

Well before working there became a possibility, I had thought that the store’s arrival showed some serious intelligence on the part of ownership. When Whole Foods opened their Union Square store in 2004, many of the smaller grocery stores in a mile range of it, used the arrival as an excuse to jack their prices. Suddenly the fifty cent lemons were 89 cents, the same price as WF. Nevermind that the WF lemons were big and juicy and sweet and the small grocery store ones looked like they’d been whacked around a golf course a bit. People decided that if they were going to pay Whole Foods prices, they might as well shop at the real thing rather than the weak imitation. Our store offers that level quality at a price that usually compares well with that national chain. And we’re closer to the East Village by two blocks. It seemed like a good idea.

To my delight, my neighbors got it. I heard only a little grousing about the prices, which may be the reflect some gentrification fatigue among them. We’ve grown accustomed to the idea that a great beer in a bar might run nine dollars, a glass wine in a similar establishment goes for $14 and a latte might set you back five. It also reflects that my neighbors have grown accustomed to fancy food.

Fancy food shopping has existed in New York City for more than a century, but fancy grocery stores, where you can buy fresh morels or bottles of house squeezed pomegranate/blueberry juice on one aisle then two aisles over you can get half gallons of Tropicana orange juice or two-liter bottles of Coke, are a more recent phenomenon. At some level they represent the merger of the neighborhood market and the gourmand’s emporium. These sorts of stores combine both extremes of retailing. Supermarket shopping is generally pretty utilitarian; it’s rare to see someone stand in front of boxes of Cheerios fantasizing about class or sophistication mobility. OTOH it happens all the time in front of more exotic and expensive items. It’s the point of shopping rather than contracting a service to do it for you. The tactile act of hunting and gathering your own nutrition often hints at transformative possibility, so do those nine-dollar beers and fourteen-dollar glasses of wine.

Since people could pretty much tell by looking at me that I spoke English as a first language, I quickly expanded my “Mr. Peabody of malt and hops” routine into being a floor supervisor, happily directing customers to the odd nooks and crannies where they might find, tahini, bread crumbs, pita chips or microwavable popcorn. In the process, a nice rapport developed both with the clientele and with my coworkers since they could steer any customer my way. The old timers in the neighborhood recognized me as a kindred spirit. The usual mix of young professionals that now inhabit the sleek new buildings in the neighborhood liked me for my food savvy and other interests; it makes a good impression when some twentysomething asks if I’m watching the World Series and I mention the article I’d written on it for Slate.

Even though the store is spacious, it still gets congested as a midtown side street at rush hour, and it brings out the worst in the Manhattanites. About once a month, I’ll be in the way of a woman with a shopping cart, usually explaining to another customer a product location or something relevant to the proceedings like that. The shopping cart woman will bump me as a means of getting me to move. When I was on the Upper East or Westside, I might slide to the side and apologize. Here, I throw a shady look back at the shopping cart woman. You’re in my house in my ‘hood. Courtesy will be maintained.

***

A few weeks after the crack house cops-and-robbers incident, I was at Vazac, a bar on Avenue B, with two coworkers from the Upper East Side store. One of them, a college student who lived in the East Village and played bass in a thrash metal band, reflected on the contrasts between where we work and where we live. He said that our Upper East Side shoppers and our crack head neighbors weren’t really that different; the uptown drug of choice was legal, though. It’s an association that someone can only make when Hegel or Nietzsche are in season, but it was charming nonetheless.

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like, Episode 02: The Shitheads Aren’t Gonna Stop Me

May 30

This blog parses the changes in my middle age and how I went from a columnist at a major daily newspaper and a leading cheesemonger to a beer buyer at a fancy grocery store and how why 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 in New York City 2018, which is never dull.

When I took the job as craft beer buyer at the fancy grocery store near me, I knew a lot would change in my work life.

For one, I was leaving the cheesemonger bubble. My coworkers on cheese counters typically included aspiring restaurant managers, future cheesemakers, chefs, sommeliers, and other varieties of food business professionals. In other words, they were people who still believed that their passion could and would become their livelihoods. At the fancy grocery store, I’d have a different coworker. Some of them would be foodies, though because of class and race they wouldn’t be what the food press leads to you think of as foodies. And many were doggedly pursuing middle class aspirations; they talked investments with the finance bros and the like; they scouted real estate. They were passionate and ambitious, but their pursuit was a variation on the Fifty Cent classic, to them it was Get Middle Class or Die Trying. As a former member of that strata, I related well.

Some of the people I worked with were nice but completely uninformed about where I was coming from. During my early months at the store, I routinely sampled beer and cheese pairings to the clientele. I had a license to hand out alcoholic beverages thanks to some work I did for the Brooklyn Brewery, and it was an easy way of making the point that craft beer embodied a far greater range of flavors than the stereotypical grains driven flavor and bready overtones of many lagers and pilsners. The store carried about a dozen cheeses that would have made it into the inventory of the cheeses case I ran on Columbus Avenue or the one I worked with at Bedford Cheese Shop for seven years, so I focused on those. Occasionally, I would have to gently explain to a coworker that I didn’t want to sample Jarlsberg or cheap yellow cheddar with the Stillwater or Oxbow Farmhouse Ale on my tray.

For the most part, I fit right in right away. I could talk sports with the deli guys, photography with some of my other coworkers and fashion with many of the cashiers. The easy rapport proved essential for two reasons. For one, my health failed me again. When I was at the store on Columbus Avenue from late 2011 to autumn 2014, I suffered a series of cascading lower body injuries, i.e. my left knee would stiffen and by the time it healed my right hip would be sore, followed by left ankle issues and so on and so forth. The root cause was working 50 hours a week on my feet with insufficiently supported arches. If that store had offered reasonable health benefits (the plan there involved a $200 a week paycheck deduction so….), I might have fixed that with custom made orthotics. Anyway, it seemed like the issues were subsiding, but they made one more visit, and I spent the first few months of 2015 on a cane. Since I spent much of my early 40s practicing ashtanga yoga and dancing in fitness center videos in my spare time, struggling to walk was a severe blow to my happiness and confidence. Fortunately, I was already an integral member of the team by then and allowed to hobble around the store.

The other major issue came from some of my closest coworkers. The craft beer department consists of me and my boss — we buy the beer and set the merchandising and marketing priorities for it — and a stock guy. My boss and I get along great. He wasn’t an avid beer drinker when I interviewed for the gig — in fact, in our first meeting, he described himself as an occasional Blue Moon drinker, but I knew from subsequent conversations that he had a discerning palate and he was eager to learn about craft beer. My first order came from one of our boutique distributors; it was mostly farmhouse ales and imperial stouts. I wanted to recommend the former to him. Yet the day after their arrival, I was walking to the time clock and he intercepted me to tell me that he had tried one of the imperial stouts. My heart fell, and my stomach knotted. I thought that it would be beyond his appreciation. As I punched in, I nervously asked him what he thought of it. In my mind, I was already updating my resume.

“It was great, probably the best beer I’ve ever tasted,” he said. “Before you dive in, can you show me some other beers like that and order a few similar ones too,” he continued. “I want to tell the beer customers about these.”

In the coming months, I turned my boss into such a beer fanatic, that he now has a beer cellar in his home; however, I was under no illusion that I would have some budding beer geek happy to work six days a week at minimum wage stocking beer. Still, I wasn’t prepared for who occupied the position. The first guy was openly hostile to the new product I was bringing in. To him the only beers necessary in the world were Corona and Budweiser. I was making his life unnecessarily complicated by carrying so many exotic brews. I simply worked around him stocking my four packs of Evil Twin, Pipeworks and Off Color after he left for the day.

The second guy was more of a problem. He stocked the case conscientiously, but he was unreliable. He would disappear for days on end. This often left *all* the stock work for me. I enjoy a good challenge and his tenure overlapped with my improving health. Furthermore, I was determined that nothing, NOTHING, was going to get in the way of making this job a success. I had failed in journalism; I had failed in cheese (and yes, I know that I’m being too harsh on myself, but competitive people often are); I wasn’t going to fail at craft beer, and I certainly wasn’t going to fail because of someone else dropping the ball. Finally, the stock guy played himself. He disappeared for two weeks and claimed he was in the ICU the previous day.

Then I met the new stock guy. All thoughts that the problems were solved began to wither in our first conversation. He told me I looked like a real man (uh oh), then he explained that I would understand his predicament. He owed his baby’s mother child support but the new Jordans had just come out, and a man has to be a man and get the new kicks, right.

Toto, I guess we’re not on a cheese counter evaluating wheels of Rolf Beeler Gruyere anymore!

By the time he was fired (and by the way, the current stock guy is great; he takes pride in the look of the case and won’t hesitate to text me with questions), I had truly forgotten the Jordans lover’s name. I just called him Shithead to my coworkers. He usually left upon my arrival dumping his responsibilities into my lap. I didn’t care. I’d rather spend a few hours stocking the case right rather than five hours fixing his errors. In doing that, my 8pm departure time stretched to 9 or 10 as I also needed time to update the Instagram and Beer Menus pages. It gave me an opportunity to get to know the clientele better. These were my neighbors; I figured this would be some of the real fun of the gig. I was right.

To be continued.

Many of our beers taste nothing like the stereotype

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like, Episode 01: Well, How Did I Get Here

Episode 1: Well, How Did I Get Here?

Aisle 2 of a fancy grocery store in Manhattan is my domain and it makes me very happy to be there. The back half of the aisle is devoted to craft beer, and I’m the buyer. Many of my customers — and yes, I think of them as mine — think that the selection is one of the best in the city. Some of them think it is the best. I welcome people to the section as if they were guests in my home. I run an Instagram page for the aisle.

It’s my little obsession, but it’s a total surprise in some ways. Not the success, I expect to make anything I work hard on into a big success, but that this is part of my life at all continually surprises me. This isn’t what I planned.

20 years ago, I thought I had it all figured out. It didn’t seem like a pretense then, nor does it now. It had been 16 years since I graduated college, enough time in the real world to figure that I knew how the things work. At the time, I had a solid freelance writing career. I wrote for several leading publications and websites and I even managed a community at an online service. In addition, I had a weekend job in the food business where I was a cheesemonger and counterman for a fancy grocery store. I lived in the East Village, arguably New York City’s hippest neighborhood and yes, New York City is always expensive, but I had enough revenue flowing through both of my steams that I actually saved money.

I loved my life at the turn of the 21st Century. Work was good; love life was promising. I was fit and routinely attended yoga and dance classes that enraptured me. Then change happened and my sophistication was challenged. First the dotcoms crashed and then while I was still crawling from that wreckage, 9/11 occurred. I went from breezing along to feeling like I was clinging to my lifestyle by my fingernails. Lots of New Yorkers did, so I was in good company. What’s crazy is how often my sophistication has been challenged in the years since then and what a workout my fingernails have received. Sometimes the clinging was temporary, a moment until I found a new place to write or a new store to work at. I initially survived the Great Recession even though a newspaper I wrote for, The NY Sun, went out of business, which meant that $500 a week for columns about the NBA vanished with it. Yet in 2011, when the Wall Street Journal trimmed its freelance budget, it set off a crisis. I spent months feeling like I was freefalling into an abyss of who knows what. Finally, as I approached my third hearing with my landlord in housing court, pretty much willing to concede the fight and accept eviction, a food gig fell from the sky, and suddenly I was solvent again.

The next crisis came in 2014. The food gig — it was at a place on Columbus Avenue — wasn’t working out. I had built a fantastic cheese counter with an even more fantastic crew of cheesemongers that won raves from the NY Timesand New York Magazine and in various issues of Wine Spectator. The owner’s response was to cut my pay by 40% and twist the knife by saying that I was never worth what she was paying me. Whatever. I had gone into the gig intent of stabilizing my finances and building my til then somewhat dormant brand in the artisanal cheese world (during a previous stint in business back in the ’80s The Times and 7 Days raved about my cheese cases, but few of my cheesemonger peers were out of elementary school back then). I was astonished to discover that when I looked for new work in the cheese biz that a few of my colleagues suggested I take a $10/hour gig and work my way up again. Others recommended me to gigs that paid 35 to 40K for 60-hour workweeks. I guess they agreed with Columbus Avenue employer. Another potential employer put a fine point on it. When I called in for my initial, phone interview, I was told that the gig had been given to a friend of theirs that morning. They wanted to talk to me though because I was so not the type. Right, I was older, African American and overweight, I hung up. Bye bye cheese world. It felt like a bad break up too; I’d worked for 30 years in the business. I thought I deserved better.

The bitterness I felt was similar to my raging horror as I watched the demise of my journalism career, but it was worse. I felt as if journalism’s demise was more industry wide and caused by market forces well beyond my editor’s control. The cheese world felt like it was choosing to be insular, and I didn’t belong anymore.

I revised my resume to reflect that I had run the craft beer program on Columbus Avenue. Within weeks I had a consultancy at a small chain of fancy grocery stores upscaling their beer program. I relished the challenge. Much of the place reeked of the NYC food world circa 1997. Here was a chance to bring the stores into the 21st Century. I bumped sales in craft beer up a little and began plotting conquests of other departments. Then I got a strange letter explaining that although sales had indeed increased and the new product was great, the chain was going to go in a different direction without me.

Yeah, after that I was pretty certain that I had absolutely no idea how the world worked anymore. Journalism income was still a trace compared to where it was in 2010. Now, the food biz was unreliable.

A Facebook post about my despair led to a tip about a new, fancy grocery store three blocks away from my apartment. Five minutes into the interview, one of the owners said he hoped I would work with them even though they weren’t offering partnership stakes. The next day, I was doing my tryout shift by cutting and wrapping cheese. A week later they asked me to run their craft beer program. There was one very big caveat, though. The job was part time, initially no health benefits (though that has changed), no vacation and more importantly, I’d need to revive the journalism career in order to pay my rent.

Yet, as I wandered around my new retail home, gazing happily at six packs from the first wave of American craft brewers, four packs from a new wave of gypsy brewers and a smattering of tall boy cans from the latest wave of breweries, I felt a palpable sense of relief. I didn’t know if I reeked of desperation (in my mind, I certainly did), but I didn’t care. I was halfway to pulling myself out of the abyss and I’d done it via social media. I felt thoroughly modern. And things were about to get really interesting.

Yes, we sell very fancy beer at a grocery store

The Journey Begins

Thanks for joining me! Read the episodes and you’ll get the idea

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton

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