Columnists / Secret Barista
The Secret Barista: ‘You got a Tripadvisor, love?’
It’s Friday. It’s been a long week. Everyone behind the bar is in good spirits. Good tunes. Good brews.
Then my colleague spots him. “Incoming,” they call. Everyone visibly deflates. Then, for the fifth morning in a row, in he trundles through the door.
He parks himself on the seat directly in front of the bar and loudly declares, to no one in particular, that he would like an extra milky latte and a bacon sandwich.
is needed now More than ever
This is not the first time we have explained to him that he needs to come pay at the bar. But resistance is futile. I take the card machine over to him. He dangles his card near me as he hits answer on an incoming phone call. Here we go.
And so begins the loud, obnoxious and unpleasant to overhear litany of abuse this man likes to bark down the phone at whatever poor soul he has managed to trap at the other end.
Veering from sexist to angry to just straight nonsense, we have been listening to this man rant for more than two hours already this week.
I crack.
As politely as I have ever managed to speak to a customer, I suggest that he would be more comfortable eating his sandwich and taking his phone call at a much bigger table by the window and manage to re-seat him out of ear shot.
He does not break his phone tirade for even a second. I am not even sure he is aware of what I am saying to him.
Forty minutes later, he heaves himself up from his table and, still on the phone, heads out the door.
Just as he reaches the threshold, he pauses, both conversation and movement and turns every so slightly towards me.
“You got a Tripadvisor, love?” he shouts at me, with the exact intended amount of threat in his voice.
I smile painfully. “Sure.”
The Secret Barista works in a Bristol city centre cafe
Main photo: Martin Booth
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