Last summer, I decided to stay on my college’s campus to have a beautiful Boston summer, instead of returning home to my quaint town about an hour away. I was curled up in my dorm bed searching for new employment opportunities when my cursor dotted across a page I hadn’t seen before. It was a description for a newly-hiring barista job at a Japanese-inspired cafe about 15 minutes from my campus. I had never worked for an establishment such as this, nevertheless been a barista before, and decided to take a leap out of my comfort zone and give this job a try.
After a couple of weeks of training, I became more accustomed to the drink recipes, as well as the people who order them. Due to the cafe being Japanese-inspired, many customers either come in knowing exactly what they’re looking for or not knowing anything at all. Most of the time, a standard customer will order a variation of one of our iced matcha lattes (either regular, strawberry, or lavender). The drinks contain a shot of matcha, milk of your choosing, ice, sugar, and sometimes syrup, depending on which drink you get. All great choices for newcomers as well as seasoned matcha enthusiasts. It’s important to note that many of the people who order these drinks tend to be local to the area of Boston and college-aged. Whenever a young, Boston local comes into the cafe, I can usually guess they’ll choose one of the prior options.
They almost always know exactly what they want and how they want it; maybe this also speaks to how they go about their daily lives.
Depending on the drink, you’ll get a different type of person who goes along with it. Our hot teas are usually bought by older gentlemen who have more than enough time in the world to sit and admire the beauty of Boston while sipping these delicious hot drinks. Slushes and non-caffeinated drinks are usually bought by teenagers with crumpled-up money in their pockets. And our iced green teas are usually bought by college-aged girls who always smile at me so sweetly. But nothing causes as much variety as the people who come in and order our ice cream.
Our soft-serve ice cream consists of four flavors. Every month we offer matcha, milk (vanilla), hojicha (roasted matcha), and our flavor of the month, which changes consistently. In the past, we’ve offered chocolate, mango, ube, and black sesame, with the black sesame being my personal favorite. The people who order the ice cream are never the same. People, young and old, whether they’re from Boston or not, will come in, ask for samples, and more often than not will love whatever flavor they tried and come back for more. Milk is the only flavor that flocks two types of people. Milk is often gotten by young children who can’t have our caffeinated ice cream, matcha and hojicha, or older men and women who’ve discovered us for the first time and enjoy sticking to the classics. Sometimes, folks decorated with Red Sox merch come in after games have finished, curiously looking around for something to try, to which I always recommend the milk ice cream. They always leave with smiles on their faces and ice cream dripping down their chins.
Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash.
