THE ROAD LESS TRAVELED: PART 3
MEMORIES OF BEANS N' BAGELS | CHICAGO, IL.
The first time I walked into Beans N' Bagels on the Montrose stop of the Brown Line in Chicago, I was just looking for a good coffee. I found a lot more.
It was a Tuesday.
Waiting in line, I checked out the scene and liked what I saw. I'd just come back from a month-long trip to the Dominican Republic and wintered over in Thomas, WV, cooking at the Purple Fiddle. Surveying the setting and the characters at Beans, this, I thought, is a place I could work. So when I got my coffee, I also asked for an application.
The coffee was great. I brought the application back the next morning and got another coffee while I was at it. Handing it in, I said something like, "Here's my application; you can see I have experience. I'd like the rest of today off, and I should probably start tomorrow so I can get trained up for the weekend."
The first person I talked to, on that Tuesday, was Will. He's now the owner of what Beans on Montrose eventually became. The second person, the one I actually handed my application to, was Jen. We ended up as roommates for a while after that. The third person I met, on my third day in a row hanging around Beans, was Meghan, and her portrait hangs in my restaurant today. More on all that in a minute.
By Thursday I was starting to get a little irate. Will had told me his brother Ashley had left for Colorado. I'd told Jen I had experience. And when I finally cornered Meghan, I was basically like, what's the deal? I need to start working.
Meghan had a part for an espresso machine that needed to get to the other store, over on Rockwell. Two stops away. She said I could take the El. "Take this to Darren. He's the owner, he's the one you really need to talk to." I told her I didn't have money for the fare, so she handed me a card good for the trip and told me Darren already knew to expect me.
At the time I had no idea how ridiculous I was being. The nerve it takes to walk into a place in Chicago and basically demand a job is impressive, in hindsight.
But it worked.
Darren was busy in that frantic way I now understand completely as a business owner myself. I handed him the part, told him I wanted to start immediately, and that I wanted all the hours he could give me. Training started that same day. I also mentioned, almost as an afterthought, that I'd be leaving in six weeks to spend a month working in the Utah desert, but that I'd be back after that to keep working. Looking back, I was a piece of work.
Cooking at Beans wasn't particularly ambitious at the time. Paninis, salads, soup, and, you guessed it, bagels. We made our own hummus and flavored cream cheeses too. My time split between the counter and the kitchen, and it was my first real taste of proper line work, getting a full rail of tickets and actually getting weeded.
I split my time between both locations and different stations at each, which taught me a lot about how the same business could run differently just a couple stops apart on the train. My coffee knowledge expanded fast, and I learned to move quicker, to actually be efficient under pressure.
That job is also where I started developing my palate for real. At first I scoffed at all the different roasts we carried. We always brewed a dark and a light, rotating daily, so over time I sampled every one of the thirty-some roasts that came through. And somewhere along the way I realized something: I had preferences. I liked medium roasts over dark. I really liked South American and African roasts, and never cared much for the darker Italian and French ones. I even started picking out the flavors behind all those ridiculous tasting descriptions: a hint of blueberry, a lemongrass finish, nutty chocolate notes. Holy crap, I could actually taste those things. I could drink a coffee blind and identify the roast. It was revelatory.
Alongside educating my tongue, I was learning about culture, music, and life in a real city. I'd visited New York and Chicago before, but this was my first time actually living somewhere, and even for a traveler, living in a place hits different than passing through one.
This was 2006. First time I ever heard the word hipster, and even though everyone I worked with claimed to hate them, we were all proto-hipsters ourselves. Fixed-gear bikes, ridden and built by hand. Esoteric indie bands I'd never heard of, Neutral Milk Hotel, The Postal Service. A couple hippies mixed in, more than a few punk rockers, but honestly we all got lumped into the same hipster bucket eventually. We were working in an independent coffee shop in Chicago, for crying out loud, listening to Manu Chao https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manu_Chao
Darren was the hardest-working guy I'd met up to that point in my life. Harder than the farmers I grew up around, and that's saying something. I don't think he slept. We opened early and stayed open all day, and Darren would be in by 3:30 in the morning. I know because for a couple of months I was homeless and slept on the couch in the shop at the Rockwell location.
Some of the people I met there changed my life. First and foremost: Meghan.
I remember her as aggressively sweet, wry, matter-of-fact, punk rock, and quietly driven. She'd kick your ass if you needed it, but she wouldn't get worked up about it, and she'd absolutely buy you a beer afterward. She played in a punk rock band called 8 Inch Betsy
and if you've never heard them, you should go find them. Their music's still out there on YouTube, and it still comes up in my Girl Power radio station on Pandora.
For me, like so many other people, Meghan showed what was possible when you actually put your whole self into something, without ever letting the wins go to her head. She got excited about everything, all the time, and it never had to be some big deal. Maybe a new album dropped, maybe she was opening for Amy Ray on tour, maybe a customer handed her a little plastic dinosaur. Didn't matter. Same level of excitement either way.
We kept in touch over the years, and whenever I made it back to Chicago we'd try to get together. A couple of those visits fell through because she was "sick." I had no real idea how sick. She died in January of 2015 https://chicagoreader.com/music/huge-heart-8-inch-betsy-remembering-meghan-galbraith/
It's still hard to believe someone who lived that hard and that fully could ever actually be gone.
A couple years back, Will made a print of Meghan and sent me a copy. It hangs at Vagabond Kitchen now. I think about her almost every day. She packed a lifetime of living into the years she got. We should all be so lucky.
After eleven years, Will ended up buying Beans on Montrose from Darren outright. It's rebranded now as Spoken Café, and that's a story for another post.
-- Chef Matt
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