There and back again

My last few posts have covered a lot of ground on the early years and more recent events, but there's a messy middle.

I could start this story with COVID, a bad investor, cold brew in offices growing fast, but I don't think that's actually where my burnout started.

I know now it started when I bought somebody else's café.

I'm not going to tell the story of that café or the people behind it. Their internal struggles aren't really my story to tell. I can tell my part.

I did something then that I did a lot when I was younger, in that I overcommitted. I saw somebody struggling and I tried to help. I got involved in something I think a lot of entrepreneurs probably would have looked at and walked away from. I took on a struggling company and tried to give it a soft landing.

Don't get me wrong. I hoped there was an outside chance I could make it work. I thought maybe we could stabilize the café, change some things and keep that location going.

I understand why that was never going to happen now.

Some cafés are built around a community, and sometimes at the center of that community is a person. A person absorbs an incredible amount of the stress, the struggles, the conflicts and even the emotional well-being of the people around them. A person who deeply cares about the café, its meaning, its customers and their staff, to the point of sacrificing their mental and physical health to be there for everyone. They smooth over the stress and anxiety of staff and take on the heart of the café for their customers.

Take that person out of the mix and the whole thing can fall apart.

You can rename the café. You can change the coffee. You can change the processes and put your own systems into it. You can't necessarily recreate the thing that made people love the place in the first place.

Take out the longtime staff and the longtime center of the café and sometimes you just have a room where a café used to be.

I don't actually feel bad now about having tried. I absorbed somebody else's loss and got tagged with it, but it was going to fail. That's something I could probably approach very differently today, but I don't regret doing it.

The lesson I did take from it is something I've repeated ever since: a good landlord is worth their weight in gold; a bad one will sink you.

A building owner who actually wants you there changes everything. Steve and Sylvia wanted me to open in Cambridge. Tom and Sue want me to continue operating in Arlington. When the people who own the building want a small business to succeed there, there is a relationship and a flexibility that makes an enormous difference.

Corporate landlords are probably great for corporate clients.

I'm not a corporate client.

That experience took so much out of me. I don't think I recognized that at the time because I did what I usually did.

I kept going.

There were other projects. Cold brew got bigger. Office coffee got bigger, and the market got really competitive and cutthroat quickly. Maybe that's its own story someday.

The cafés were busy. There were always new things happening. For a while it felt like having a bunch of plates spinning on sticks and running around trying to make sure none of them fell.

Then COVID happened.

Like everyone else operating a café in 2020, we had no idea what was going to happen. I think I could have handled the business part of it. Give me a process problem and eventually I can usually figure out a process. Give me a broken system and I'll start pulling at it until I understand what is broken.

COVID left me dealing with many upset customers while trying to figure out how to protect my family and staff.

But almost right as things began leveling out, I had a lot of disruption at home. The place where I could shut everything down and recover from work became another place of conflict and disruption for my family that put me under a high mental load pursuing a resolution.

That took the better part of three years to resolve and is a story I can't tell.

It is resolved now. And I think one of the reasons I can finally see all of this clearly is that I can go home now.

I can stop.

I can rest.

I didn't really understand how important that was until I couldn't do it for a very long time.

Somewhere along the way during all of that, I started losing access to things.

Not just energy.

Skills. Memory. Perspective.

I could still run the business. I could mostly deal with whatever problem was directly in front of me. I could make decisions because decisions had to be made, but I was drifting. There were days I would be in one of my own cafés and avoid the bar and customers because I could barely engage.

That's a strange thing when you've spent most of your adult life doing this and feeling connected by it.

At a certain point, I had actually forgotten how to roast coffee, how to think abstractly about the processes, and I forgot all the purpose of the business that I had set out. I leaned on the longtime staff around me to cover.

I kid you not, I've written endlessly about roast development. I've built profiles, cupped thousands of coffees and spent an absurd amount of my life thinking about the processes in coffee.

So when I got back onto the roaster and couldn't access it, the relationships between things that had once been almost automatic weren't automatic anymore.

I had to pull up old profiles. I went back through my own notes, blogs and journals. I started reading things I had written years earlier to remind myself. Then I started getting involved in roasting again.

It was the first step in dragging myself an inch at a time back into this.

The strange thing was that I still knew it. It was all still in there.

I just hadn't been able to get at it for a long time.

I think that's one of the things people don't always understand when they talk about burnout. At least it wasn't what I understood about it. I thought burnout meant being exhausted. Maybe hating your job. Maybe needing to take a vacation or step away for a while.

For me it was more like slowly losing access to myself.

When you've been doing something for a long time and it was a hyperfocus that regenerated you, that's scary to lose. You remember being good at it. You just can't quite remember how you did it.

The way back has been equally strange because it hasn't happened through some grand plan.

It has mostly happened by doing.

I started hiring some new people recently, and I've been lucky to find a few really talented people who don't need me to pour all of my energy into them just to get them moving. They're interested. They ask questions. They have ideas. They want to be here.

Seeing that spark in somebody else started reminding me of a spark I used to have.

Earlier this year, I did an event at WBUR and decided, somewhat impractically, to pull out the siphons again. I hadn't really thought about it this way at the time. I just wanted to do something interesting.

Interesting to me.

Someone there remembered a little flow restrictor I had designed for Hario kettles almost twenty years ago. That sent me back through old memories.

Then I rolled out some single-origin espresso. People were excited and talking fast and, for a minute, I had to catch up to the fact that people still care.

Then I realized I did too.

I started writing about some of these things. Siphons. Kettles. Old espresso events. Luminaire. Pour'd. Toast. Projects I had worked on and people I had worked with that I hadn't thought seriously about in years.

I started working on the Cambridge sign and touching up paint and tuning grinders. I started looking around Arlington and thinking again about what I wanted the room to look and feel like instead of just seeing another maintenance problem.

One thing started connecting to another.

Then Simon's closed.

Going back through that history forced me to spend some time with the person I was more than twenty years ago. It reminded me how curious I was and how that curiosity was my way of connecting to people.

I had forgotten how important that was.

Writing about Simon's also reminded me what a gift it is when people actually show up for a place. Good employees. Regular customers. People who ask questions. People who hang around. People who let you try new ideas with them. People who make the room something more than the business that happens to occupy it.

I've spent a lot of my career thinking about coffee shops as systems. Coffee. Equipment. Workflow. Training. Products. Design.

All of those things matter.

But they aren't the whole thing.

I'm starting to understand that again.

A few months ago I was still sometimes hiding from the bar. This week I found myself talking with some of our newer staff about hosting a barista throwdown.

Except I don't really want to do a throwdown the way we used to. I don't particularly care who can pour the best rosetta or design, partly because it's rare to meet people who are deep into latte art who are nice.

What I talked about was maybe doing a barista social. Get a bunch of baristas into a room. Let them meet each other. Network. Hang out. Talk about coffee if they want to.

Have fun.

I couldn't have imagined volunteering to host a room full of baristas two months ago.

Now I'm excited about it.

I'm not completely back.

I'm nearly back.

But I can feel the difference. I'm comfortable on the bar again. I'm leading again. I'm making decisions and trusting them. I'm interested in things. I'm around some talented people who are interested in things too, and instead of their needs feeling like something else I have to carry, their energy is helping pull me along.

Twenty years ago, when I was working at Simon's, I wrote something about coffee being the medium and the point being having fun and making friends.

I don't think I understood then how important that sentence would eventually become to me.

For a long time I kept waiting to feel like the person I had been before burnout.

I don't think that's how it works.

I'm not that person anymore. I've got twenty more years of experience. I've made mistakes. I've built things. I've watched things fail. I've had some success. I've overcommitted. I've learned that I don't have to absorb every problem just because I think I might be able to solve it.

But the curiosity is coming back.

The skills are coming back.

The memories are coming back.

And I'm realizing they were never really gone. I just couldn't access them for a while.

It's weird to wake up one day and feel like yourself at work, and it makes work fun again. The difference now is I have a team hustling with me, excited to clear out the clutter and reestablish a sense of place and purpose. I still have a lot of things to do to feel caught up, but that's another post.

Previous location of Simon's being demolished

More than 20 years ago, at the beginning of my coffee career, I worked at Simon’s Coffee Shop at 1736 Mass ave in Cambridge.

I got my start there in coffee by taking that part-time job. I began blogging there. I found friends and customers there. It was what proved to me that I could eventually build my own space with barismo.

Just not in the way you might think.

You may think this is a sad post about a closing or a nod to a store owner, but stay with me to the end.

When I began working for Simon, he told me he'd had a not-so-successful café on the North Shore before this and worked at Kmart before that. He was hesitant, and really quite risk-averse. To me, he was timid but pleasant.

I was not, at that time, timid or pleasant.

I was headstrong and latched onto something I saw in the potential of such a space. This led me to constantly push him to change, to update, to be more than the shop he'd bought.

Simon hadn't built that space from scratch.

When he took it over, the café had previously been owned by the indie video rental store downstairs and was essentially modeled after 1369 in Central. The owner, George, must have liked the model being next door in Central and wanted his own version in Porter.

The Hollywood Espresso Cafe came complete with colorful orange tones and movie-themed posters clear-coated onto different cabinets. Some were probably still there on the walls if you looked up high carefully. The café served really dark-roast Rao coffee with no roast dates and had this massive chalkboard menu common to cafés of its time, but with a handful of odd themed drinks like the Casa Blanca, a white chocolate au lait I absolutely detested.

When I arrived in Boston in the early 2000s, I worked there part time while also working part time at a bubble tea shop on JFK Street.

Simon had three managers in that one small shop. That led to constant crossed wires and over-ordering. There was clutter everywhere. Extra paper cups were stored under a trap door to the basement, which required moving customers and tables while making sure nobody came out of the bathroom and fell straight down the open stairs.

That made rushes almost comical at times.

We each had chalk anime-style caricatures on the cabinets behind the counter. Angry Andy had his CD placed on the counter because he hated being asked what music was playing. There were relics of the video-store ownership, but they gave the place an oddly charming feel.

So many customers had special drinks that the register had what felt like an entire screen of drinks named after individual people.

And those customers, more than anything, were what made Simon's a unique place.

I remember them well. Bringing a haiku to the counter every day, a particular drink order, a shared interest. At the time, I thought it was special, but now I realize that's what a third space truly is.

I came into that shop, in my own way, as an antagonist to Simon's. In 2006, I wrote about those early days in "Going full circle".

I was stubborn and difficult, naive and idealistic. I cleaned and organized. I chuffed at the expansive menu, suggested changes and lobbied for new gear. I irritated two of the three managers enough that they eventually left.

Colleen, though, stayed on as a manager for a while, and she allowed me to keep plugging along with near-constant incremental changes. I argued for better coffee, better gear, better training and events. I even learned latte art from a picture in a magazine and brought it into the café to teach others.

I represented the shop in competitions and pushed for a place at the table during the third-wave trend as we rotated through a who's who of coffee brands.

One of those who noticed this was Adam, a young regular who came in five days a week.

Adam had this wonderfully dry way of supporting me and was friends with Colleen. When I started doing latte art, he pointed out that he'd been to Seattle and had already seen people doing it there. But it wasn't dismissive, even though he had a way of saying pithy things like that.

Adam was one of the earliest supportive customers who said out loud that I was leaving a fingerprint on the place.

There were a lot of customers like that. They weren't always polite, but they were direct, supportive and kind.

That's why one of the first espresso blends I created when I began my roastery was Linnaean St. Espresso.

That neighborhood watched me figure things out in real time. We tested things together and tried things out. They encouraged me to change the café program, came to my weird events, drank whatever new guest roaster I was excited about and gave me a reason to keep pushing.

Not long after I was on the path to becoming manager, though, Adam died suddenly.

His coworkers at Paper Source arranged a wake at Simon's. Maybe Simon had been told, but I hadn't.

So there I was, working through a rush with Colleen, making and serving drinks, when Adam's coworkers started flowing into the café to mourn him.

It was surreal. I didn't handle finding out in real time very well.

I've never forgotten that, even now, 20 years on.

Since then, I've gone on to host wakes and wedding proposals in my own café, and I understand much better now the importance these spaces can have for a community.

Back then, though, I was still trying to figure out how to make Simon's into the café I thought it could be.

At some point I became a manager, more or less in name only. Colleen left to become a nurse, and I was working a lot due to the level of press and attention the space was getting.

To remedy my constant discussions about the pay side of things, I was offered a percentage of revenue growth over the shop's historical numbers. Simon said: grow the business and get a percentage revenue share in what I was creating.

I took it because it was the only game in town.

And because I believed. I really believed.

The problem was, the business grew a lot.

The surprise was, in the end, the pay didn't.

When those numbers showed up, it was abruptly communicated to me that there wasn't enough money to pay me that percentage because how much I'd grown the business made it unsustainable.

That pretty much sucked.

Future me would've raised hell. Back then I didn't have the context to know better.

I didn't feel good, but I kept going for a while anyway. A few more incidents came up involving clashes with the roaster being used at the café, and eventually I'd had my fill.

But by then something much more important had happened.

I'd built a network of friends, customers and eventually some investors. Many of the people who had watched me learn and cheered on what I was trying to do at Simon's would become customers of barismo for years afterward.

So I left and built barismo. A small roaster in a tiny space in Arlington, just roasting bags and wholesale.

That was what I wrote then and this is what the more complete history looks like to me now, nearly two decades further down the road after some success, some burnout and real distance.

And leaving wasn't actually the end of my relationship with Simon's.

Later, I circled back and tried to get Simon's as a wholesale account. Even getting a small piece of the coffee program as a guest roaster took a huge push. A few years in, barismo eventually supplied most of the program.

I supported that coffee program, promoted the shop and its place in the community, organized events there and provided equipment. I took Simon with me to visit coffee farms in Guatemala. At one point I even offered to partner with Simon and merge our businesses.

He had cold feet, I guess. At the time, with him owning one shop and me having two cafés plus wholesale, the slice wasn't big enough for him.

So we stayed separate and kept doing business together.

And when Simon nearly died, we were there too.

He had a severe reaction to penicillin, developed sepsis and spent weeks at Spaulding recovering. While he was gone, we kept the coffee coming. We worked with his staff, coordinated what needed coordinating and helped keep things moving.

Whatever my history with Simon was, in my mind the shop was still full of people I'd known for years, and the place meant something to me.

Eventually Simon opened another location off Harvard Square. I supported that location too and tried to promote it, but it struggled and the vibe never really developed. The manager there later partnered with Simon to open 9 Bar in Davis Square, where they chose to use another startup roaster.

That was their business and their choice.

The problem for me came afterward.

When the Davis Square shop over-ordered coffee, more and more of that other roaster's coffee made its way back to Simon's to be used up. That meant Simon's was increasingly serving another roaster's coffee while using equipment I'd loaned to support our wholesale relationship.

I raised it several times, but it continued. Eventually barismo's volume at Simon's had dropped enough that the relationship no longer made sense to me.

So I pulled the equipment and barismo stopped supplying Simon's.

That was a long time ago.

Which brings me to Simon's closing now.

I'm not nostalgic about Simon Yu. And I'm not sad in the way you're supposed to be when an old café closes.

Because looking back, Simon wasn't really what made Simon's important to me.

The customers and the coworkers did.

They were the people who let me experiment in front of them. They drank the coffee. They showed up for events. They teased me when I got ahead of myself and encouraged me when I was onto something. They gave me an audience when I started writing. They became friends and supporters, investors and an audience.

A snapshot of humanity I was in need of at the time to help me believe in myself.

Some of them followed me when I left and became customers of barismo for years. Some have been part of my life in one way or another for more than two decades now.

I spent a lot of those early years thinking I was fighting to turn Simon's into the coffee shop I thought it could be.

I guess I wasn't.

I was actually figuring out who I was and learning to find my own version of authentic.

I still am, really. After several years of burnout, I'm slowly remembering that passion and refinding those skills, realizing that connection and that authenticity.

And those customers gave me the first space to do it.

Spaces can hold our hearts.

Maybe that's why I can feel something about Simon's closing now without feeling nostalgic about Simon.

The place held Adam.

It held all those regulars and their drinks programmed into the register. It held my weird events and early experiments. It held friendships, arguments, bad ideas and good ones. It held the person I was becoming before I knew what barismo would be, before I had a family, and before I found a home.

And before any of us, that same space held an indie video store below it that held a place in people's hearts.

When Mike and Virginia moved on and closed Irish Imports, or Linda closed Joie de Vivre, it closed an era in the neighborhood as well. I still think of them as regular customers and of the spaces that captured moments in time for me.

Buying a cape for my daughter that she wore daily until I passed it on to one of my regulars. Finding a vintage toy I included in a coffee swap with James Hoffmann.

The spaces were so deeply memorable in a neighborhood filled with them.

Not because of who owned them, but because of who we were when we went there, the people we met, and what those spaces allowed us to discover.

A lot of shop owners talk about giving back to the community or how coffee saved their lives, among many overly trodden marketing narratives.

For me, it's the spaces themselves that can be breathed to life by the cast of characters in them, not just the owner or a dedicated store manager building a program.

That's what I'll remember about Simon's the space.

The colors and design didn't change. The space barely changed over 20 years from the first day it changed owners. New gear, changing faces behind the bar, customers aging and families expanding.

People fell in love there. People mourned there. People grew up there. People hung out. People moved on.

These spaces hold all of it.

You can't bring that back because once it's gone, it will never be the same.

That's the bitter truth: you can open another coffee shop in the same room.

But more often than not, it will never be the same place.