Daily Bread
Well, after a rocky start, the "café-pâtisserie" in Mayville opened about an hour ago. No, I'm not there; I go in this afternoon. Despite all the exciteable talk about it and the presence of an actual French chef in the administrative staff, this is the extent of the shop's Frenchness: it uses French words, albeit mundane ones, in its name: "Bonjour Café & Patisserie" (dropping the circumflex to avoid spooking people, I guess), a name so abysmally unoriginal that it has to be an American bastardisation. I'm pretty sure that two colons in one sentence like that is bad grammar.
Apart from a handful of items, coffees, quiches, baguettes, and lemon tarts, there is no resemblance between our menu and that of an actual French shop. No beignets, no réligieuses, no millefeuilles, not even any flans. I think, however, that that isn't entirely the fault of our baker, a guy named Joe who never sits down, as he is pastry chef to no less than five different restaurants between Mayville and Jamestown all owned by the same guy, and our kitchen is his headquarters. We sell mostly cheesecake, danish, sandwiches and salads. Don't get me wrong: it's a nice shop, and I stand by my original statement that even as a complete failure to replicate a pâtisserie, it's still a big improvement for Mayville.
The other day, when we ideally should have been closing up for our second day of business by our original schedule, I spent the afternoon hanging fake ivy vines from a lattice on the ceiling of our main dining room, which is open to the street. Hanging the vines took longer than I had expected, and I was the only one left there when I was done. All the time I had been hanging them, I kept saying to myself that I had to bring in the hanging baskets that we had hung from the awning of the shop that morning. Cindy, our manager, had doubted that removing the baskets would be necessary; after all, what could happen to them? It's hardly as though anyone would want to steal one, right?
Well, that kind of logic might work in the real world, but Mayville is different. This is a village where seven high school kids went to jail for planting bombs in mailboxes a couple summers ago. So, I came back to the shop early yesterday morning to straighten the tables and chairs that I had strewn about to move my ladder around, and I saw that one of the baskets had indeed been stolen. Cindy was there, quite unimpressed, but fortunately, nobody blamed me for it. I'm wondering how long it'll take for them to start stealing the tables and chairs; Joe has mentioned putting up some kind of gate or chaining down the furniture, but nothing's happened yet.
Apart from a handful of items, coffees, quiches, baguettes, and lemon tarts, there is no resemblance between our menu and that of an actual French shop. No beignets, no réligieuses, no millefeuilles, not even any flans. I think, however, that that isn't entirely the fault of our baker, a guy named Joe who never sits down, as he is pastry chef to no less than five different restaurants between Mayville and Jamestown all owned by the same guy, and our kitchen is his headquarters. We sell mostly cheesecake, danish, sandwiches and salads. Don't get me wrong: it's a nice shop, and I stand by my original statement that even as a complete failure to replicate a pâtisserie, it's still a big improvement for Mayville.
The other day, when we ideally should have been closing up for our second day of business by our original schedule, I spent the afternoon hanging fake ivy vines from a lattice on the ceiling of our main dining room, which is open to the street. Hanging the vines took longer than I had expected, and I was the only one left there when I was done. All the time I had been hanging them, I kept saying to myself that I had to bring in the hanging baskets that we had hung from the awning of the shop that morning. Cindy, our manager, had doubted that removing the baskets would be necessary; after all, what could happen to them? It's hardly as though anyone would want to steal one, right?
Well, that kind of logic might work in the real world, but Mayville is different. This is a village where seven high school kids went to jail for planting bombs in mailboxes a couple summers ago. So, I came back to the shop early yesterday morning to straighten the tables and chairs that I had strewn about to move my ladder around, and I saw that one of the baskets had indeed been stolen. Cindy was there, quite unimpressed, but fortunately, nobody blamed me for it. I'm wondering how long it'll take for them to start stealing the tables and chairs; Joe has mentioned putting up some kind of gate or chaining down the furniture, but nothing's happened yet.