"I’m a Bored Bartender at a Soulless Cafe. I Want to Quit But Can’t Just Yet"

From today.com/food

Anonymous Server, as told to Joseph Lamour

For our series “Server Diaries,” TODAY asks anonymous servers, bartenders and other hospitality workers to record their innermost thoughts while on the job.

Here, we follow a barista/bartender in Long Island City, New York through three shifts.

This transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Shift 1: Riding Dirty to the Medium Place

3:01 p.m. It’s hot as balls out.

3:04 p.m. I have a bad habit of waiting till the absolute last moment to get ready and leave for work because I really don’t want to be there.

3:06 p.m. I rush, washing the pits, tits and bits in my sink, smearing deodorant in the former and rushing out the door. I ride my motorcycle there and am still late, walking in the door with my helmet and gloves on.

3:20 p.m. I work in Long Island City at a cafe/wine bar, and it has a nondescript, trust-fund-corporate-bro-investment kind of vibe. Grey isn’t just in the walls — it designed my purgatory.

You’d think we’d have much more foot traffic in a newly-built, fat-cat, fancy-feast-ass tower near the subway, but we’re camouflaged by minimal design and millennial grey aesthetics. It’s slow.

3:31 p.m. I’m greeted by the morning-shift girl, and she looks bored. She glances at me momentarily to say “hey” before continuing to stare into space. She’s summer-job young, and her shock-pink hair looks more excited to see me.

3:33 p.m. No one’s tipped since she got here at 7 a.m., she tells me. I look in our till, and there is a $5 bill, a quarter and somehow, a couple of now-illegal pennies. F--- this s---.

3:45 p.m. My life’s dream is not to serve coffee and low-ABV drinks inside of a hotel lobby business centre designed by a sentient pair of Allbirds. I work in advertising, but freelance jobs have been vampired by AI. Who needs Don Draper when you can make your compu-slave push out endless slop?

3:55 p.m. A friend got me this job. She was like, “You may as well pick up some shifts.” So, now, I’m making money while I’m pitching bigger fish. Ad jobs are infrequent, but cortado-thirsty people are not.

4:45 p.m. I want to be back in the game, working with annoying marketing clients who don’t know s--- about s---, trying to convince them that the bold creative idea is better than the blob-monster drivel their nepo-hire stepson used Midjourney to “paint.” Who knew I would miss making a logo bigger?

5:19 p.m. Basically, the only useful purpose of this gig is to spend my time studying Spanish, writing prose and applying to jobs I actually want.

10 p.m. I served an average number of people today, and yet I still smell and sweat like a roofer in Albuquerque. How, Sway?

10:05 p.m. Walking to my bike, I do a lil’ lesson. “Quiero que mi sueño se haga realidad,” a green, nocturnal animal says to me on my phone. “Quiero que mi sueño se haga realidad (I want my dream to become reality),” I say back. I think a vacation would be fun, but I’m not in a place financially right now. Even for a hostel.

Shift 2: Boredom, Even When I’m Busy

3 p.m. I say out loud, “Well, it’s a hot one,” and immediately sing the next line of that song as I make my way uptown.

3:30 p.m.. The usual scattering of young people greets my eyes as I enter my bar-fé; some on laptops listening to headphones and others silently nursing sweaty, half-finished matcha lattes.

4:19 p.m. Another start-of-shift mistake: There’s a person today who is probably walking around tweaking out of their skull because I used regular beans instead of decaf. Oops.

5:07 p.m. A couple of girls are actually speaking to one another out loud with nary an electronic in sight. Laughter and human connection? In here? Rare.

6:04 p.m. A mother with a Goyard bag — every well-to-do subway mom in New York seems to have one — remarks on how quiet it is in here, but it sounds like an insult. Her toddler is playing with her sludge-coloured skirt. Probably cost more than half my paycheck.

6:05 p.m. She orders a “SMALL cold brew with LIGHT ICE,” said like there is a sign on my head that says “idiot.” She watches me like a hawk to make sure the ice is light. I prepare for her to complain about how the cup isn’t full.

When you order light ice, you get a less potent drink in many cases. Maybe it’s what she wants, judging by her “busy but successful mom of two in yogurt commercial”-ass fit.

I don’t care enough about protecting the financial interests of the ownership class, so I just fill the empty part with more milk.

7:05 p.m. It’s so empty in here I’m learning Spanish out loud. The green bird teaches: “No me gustan los hosteles; son poco elegantes.”

“No me gustan los hosteles; son poco elegantes (I don’t like hostels; they are not elegant),” I say back.

9:33 p.m. A guy and his girlfriend come in hesitantly, looking around. “Is this … the same place as during the day?” he asks. “Or is this a different thing, a speakeasy?” she asks. I am f---ing elated.

Shift 3: My Pal, the Green Owl

3:07 p.m. Another hot-ass day. Temps in the 90s, maybe past 100.

3:19 p.m. As with any toxic relationship, I experience complicated feelings every time I walk through the front door.

4:30 p.m. This is a hobby business for the wealthy. Six people own it — more Injustice Society than Superman investing with Diana Prince.

4:32 p.m. The owners create inherent hypocrisies. It sucks. It’s slow here, so they only want to pay for one person to work the bar but then get pissed when they get a Google review saying the lines are too long. Vandal Savage behaviour.

4:35 p.m. I met one owner, an older woman, months ago. She was notable because she apparently does not know anything about coffee, wine or business. Once I saw her strut behind the bar to pour herself a wine from the tap. She sprayed liquid all over the bar — and herself — because she didn’t realize there was a stopper in the spout that needed to be taken out first.

7:50 p.m. Oh God, 10 people came in at once. Must be a museum field trip. A group order with significantly varying drinks can really throw me.

8:03 p.m. I realized I forgot to add caramel to one of the big group’s cappuccinos. F---.

I thought about running after them, but ennui is heavier than my compassion. Also, I don’t give a s--- about this job.

8:19 p.m. I turn back to the green, spectacled animal in my phone. “Tomas demasiado café,” it says. “Tomas demasiado café (You drink too much coffee),” I say back, adding, “Y vino.” I realize I haven’t learned from the bird how to say “wine” yet. This is irony.

https://www.today.com/food/restaurants/server-diaries-bored-bartender-wants-to-quit-rcna593804

‘We Would Pile Into the Convertible and Head to Chinatown’

From nytimes.com

The writer Jean Hanff Korelitz, the comedian Roy Wood Jr. and other notable friends of Metropolitan Diary share their New York City stories as the column marks its 50th anniversary 

Their Chinatown

Dear Diary:

When I was growing up on the Upper East Side in the 1960s and ’70s, Manhattan’s Chinatown was a faraway place offering highly exotic food.

American palates had by then had a couple of decades to get used to what we called “Chinese food,” but for many people, my family included, spare ribs, egg rolls and chicken chow mein were the outer limit of what we were brave enough to order.

Every few weeks, we would pile into the convertible and head to Chinatown. There, we ate only and always at a restaurant called Lin’s Garden. In time, I came to realize that every uptown family had “their” Chinese restaurant.

When I moved to South Street Seaport in 2024, the first thing I did was time the walk to Chinatown: 11 minutes.

With such variety nearby, I decided to eat in every Chinatown restaurant, and for the past two years I’ve been working my way through a spreadsheet of nearly 200, from hole-in-the-wall dumpling shops to dim sum palaces.

It’s an illogical project, given my still very American palate and inability to eat spicy food. But I want to resist the temptation to return, Lin’s Garden-style, only to familiar places.

New York City, consumed as it is by its own forward motion, will always decline to respect our individual nostalgias, so it’s up to us to do the remembering. Lin’s Garden is long gone, but recently I unearthed the address, 53 Bayard Street.

Now, when I’m on the block, I make a point of looking inside, and into the back corner where the four of us — my parents, my sister and me — once adventurously ate those spare ribs and egg rolls, so far from the Upper East Side.

Today, the restaurant is called Yunnan Rice Noodle House, and it’s No. 65 on my Chinatown spreadsheet. I’ll get to it eventually.

— Jean Hanff Korelitz

Ms. Korelitz is a writer. Her most recent book is “The Sequel.”

Coney Island in Mind

Dear Diary:

My daughter returned home to New York from college in Michigan for summer break. Her three roommates came along for a weeklong stay.

Sitting around the kitchen table one morning, they were eagerly planning things to do in the city. They mentioned a nightclub.

“There’s a really good diner around the corner for afterward,” I said.

Marisa, born and raised in Michigan, looked confused.

“Diner?” she said. “What do you mean ‘diner?’”

“Huh?” I replied. “What do you mean?”

“What’s a diner?”

“What?”

Marisa’s eyes darted around to the other Michigan girls. They also looked confused.

I was confused too.

“It’s a casual restaurant, open 24 hours,” I said. “You can get breakfast any time, burgers, fries. You sit in a booth.”

“Oh,” Marisa said. “You mean a Coney Island.”

“What?” I said.

“Yeah,” Marisa said. “In Michigan, we call those Coney Islands.”

“Why?!”

“I don’t know. That’s just what they’re called.”

This annoyed me. You can’t just name stuff in other states after our New York City icons without our New York City permission, right? I mean, who approved this?

I needed to get to the bottom of this ridiculousness, and I learned that, yes, diners in Michigan are called Coney Islands.

Apparently, Greek immigrants who came through Ellis Island on their way to Michigan sampled Coney Island hot dogs and liked them so much they named the restaurants they eventually opened after them: Lafayette Coney Island, Jackson Coney Island, American Coney Island and on and on, all over Michigan.

These hard-working immigrants were paying homage to our famous hot dogs. There’s no boardwalk, no ocean, no roller coasters — just a lot of love for a Brooklyn icon.

— Darlene Rodriguez

Ms. Rodriguez is a co-anchor of “Today in New York” on WNBC.

On the Radio

Dear Diary:

My first time in New York City was in 1993, a life-changing year for me. I was from Atlanta and had real pride in my home town. But the saying “If you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere” has always been a thing, and at that point in my life I wanted to make it.

I was 17, still in high school and part of a girl group called Xscape. We were starting our careers, excited to see the world, excited to have hit records. To get those hit records, we were told we had to be accepted in New York City.

Jermaine Dupri had signed us to his label; our first single, “Just Kickin’ It,” was being released; and the label had decided that we should go to New York first to promote it.

As a group, LaTocha, Tamika, Tiny and I were excited to make the trip. I knew nothing about New York except what I had seen in movies and on TV.

The thing that stood out to me was the Manhattan traffic. So many cars, so many taxis, so many bike riders. And nobody cared about lanes.

The four of us were split between two cars. As we were riding, the radio was set to Hot 97, I believe, one of the hottest radio stations in the country at the time.

“Just Kickin’ It” came on. We screamed and had the two cars ride side-by-side with the windows down so we could scream to one another to make sure we all heard the song playing.

It was our first time hearing our song on the radio, and it happened in New York City before our hometown stations even started playing it.

It was like being welcomed with a warm hug.

— Kandi Burruss

Ms. Burruss, who appeared on “The Real Housewives of Atlanta,” is a singer, songwriter and actor.

New School Pitch

Dear Diary:

I was being interviewed for the British publication The Spectator. We settled into a communal table in the lobby of the Marlton Hotel on Eighth Street because my apartment was undergoing some renovation.

My interlocutor, Anne Margaret Daniel, is a literary scholar who was extremely knowledgeable about my work and about American literature in general, and the conversation was lively.

I couldn’t help noticing that a gentleman at the table seemed to be paying attention, and it occurred to me that we might be annoying him. But he didn’t say anything until we were wrapping up.

At that point, he introduced himself and said it was an honour to meet me, which made me only slightly uncomfortable, and that he was a writer himself.

Ms. Daniel and I had finished the interview by talking about my experiences in Hollywood. The gentleman who had just introduced himself said that his family had been involved in the early days of motion pictures and that he was a descendant of an early movie star named Blanche Walsh.

He said he was planning to name a projected humanistic studies centre for her and hoped the New School would finance it to the tune of $100 million.

Ms. Daniel, who teaches at the New School, raised her eyebrows when she heard this.

“I suspect that before the New School would give $100 million for the humanities these days,” she said, “the whole campus would collapse and sink into the Greenwich Village mud like the House of Usher into the tarn.”

Nonetheless, we wished him success in his venture before exiting onto the chilly street.

— Jay McInerney

Mr. McInerney is a writer. His most recent book is “See You on the Other Side.”

Hardcore Fan

Dear Diary:

It wasn’t until I lived in the city that I realized how dedicated New Yorkers are to their teams.

When I moved here, I lived in a fourth-floor apartment. I arranged the living room so that my television was positioned on the side wall so that you could look directly into the room and see it while my couch remained hidden.

On the fourth floor, you’re not completely removed from what’s happening outside. You hear the rattle of a fire truck’s suspension as it ploughs through a pothole. You hear the one defiant wheel rattling on someone’s hand truck or laundry cart.

I also remember once hearing someone yell, “You know what you did. You better not come back over here,” with expletives added in the usual places.

It wasn’t evident to me just how clearly someone could see my TV until one night I had the Yankees game on. I’m a Cubs fan, but I love baseball above all and can watch pretty much any team any night.

It was a close game, but I did what I sometimes do: record the rest to watch in the morning while getting ready for work.

I had just picked up the remote to peruse what else was on when I heard a man’s voice from outside.

“There’s no way,” he said, interjecting the same expletive, then adding: “Turn it back to the game please.”

I didn’t even go to the window to see who had barked this command. I simply complied. Whatever was going on in that man’s life, watching Yankees games from a TV four floors up was his only peaceful moment of the day.

Also, I’m pretty sure he was the guy I heard yell, “You know what you did.” The last thing I want is that guy coming for me.

— Roy Wood Jr.

Mr. Wood is a comedian, actor and writer. He is the host of CNN’s “Have I Got News for You.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/19/nyregion/metropolitan-diary.html