Romancing the Food Service Industry

Since the DC Blogosphere seems especially enamoured with coffee-talk this week I thought I'd take this opportunity to share with you all the story of the time I dated my barista (or baristo if that's an acceptable masculine form). I couple of years ago when I worked in downtown DC, I made it a semi-regular habit to get a cappuccino mid afternoon to accompany my mid afternoon cigarette. I always frequented the same pricey vendor, as it was half a block from my office. Seven times out of ten I was waited on by an extremely attentive, attractive young man several years my junior. I was 26 or 27 at the time and I figured he was probably in college. We never exchanged names but we did work up to a consistently friendly level of banter that eventually crossed over to a light flirtation. As I was truly miserable at my own job at the time, I started to look forward to my coffee breaks and the positive attention I received during them, even if it was really just part of his job to be nice to me. I never tipped him, basically because I was already getting great service, and when the line crosses from friendly to flirtatious, tipping feels a little, well, smarmy. One day my baristo disappeared and I figured I'd never see him again, which was just as well because I had started to feel a little silly flirting with the 20 year old who made my coffee.

Skip ahead two years. I'm at the Pour House on a typical Friday. I'm waiting for Claude to hurry up with my Jager shots and out of the corner of my eye I catch some guy giving me the once over. I turn to find a pleasantly attractive young man who obviously thinks that the way to get girls is to stare them into submission. It's a bit unnerving but since I am bored and mildly intrigued by his hipster togs (the Pour House is so not a hipster bar) I motion for him to come over. He obediently scampers over. He mentions that I look familiar and starts listing off a battery of small liberal arts colleges and did I attend any of them (yes I did attend one, but none of the ones he mentioned). He can't figure out how he knows me but I can. He's my old baristo and he's clearly hitting on me. He claims to not remember me from his halcyon days as an espresso slinger. Whatever, it hardly mattered with his hands practically down my pants. Long story short, I ended up dating my old baristo until he grew boring, distant, probably dating somebody else besides me, and he dumped me (6 weeks from start to end, about, not counting the time we hooked up after randomly running into one another at a house party).

If you were wondering what the point of that story is, I'm sorry to inform you that there wasn't one. I just felt like adding my own coffee story to the week's blogging fodder. Shortly after my last paramour with the baristo, I had a whole other set of adventures with a bartender. Now my friends like to tease me about my apparent penchant for food service industry workers. I had never considered it that way, but maybe they have a point. Perhaps I should aspire for a chef next. They're pretty badass and I happen to know a wickedly hot one.