"Order up in this motherfucker!"
Peter Mumford
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Beth's Cafe 7311 Aurora Ave. N., 782-5588, bethscafe.com. Open 24 hours, 363 days a year.
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That's the call that comes back from the overloaded, overworked, overstressed short-order cook working the slit trench of a line at Beth's Cafe during the Saturday-night bar rush. There is no kind bell, no white-jacketed expeditor enjoying a sweatless split-shift, no quiet, breathy, "Service, please..."
There is just one man in a T-shirt, its bottom ringed with grease like cheap laurels, and jeans seasoned shiny and black, working the wheel completely alone—just hanging it out there on the edge of something, working to weird rhythms and music playing in his head alone. He is buried in checks, in egg orders and bacon sides and cakes stacked up and stretching 'til morning. He spins like a top—reaching and grabbing and turning and flipping and folding—and seems to have been gifted, maybe just for this moment, with more arms than the standard complement. A Shiva of toast and hotcakes. A midnight apparition that speaks deeply to anyone who has ever stood a shift on the hot side of any kitchen.
But when he calls for a pickup of the plates stacked precariously on what passes for his rail, on the countertop, on what I think is a bend of one of the ventilation ducts that suck all that grill char and smoke and sweet, waffle-scented air up and out into the Green Lake night, he says it almost sweetly, singing it in a high, clear, and mocking voice like music: "O'duh upinthis mutha-fuckaaahhh..."
And the waitresses descend like clockwork, like bangbangbang—stacking plates up their arms and weaving like Balinese dancers past the jammed host's position where drunken kids and blue-haired punk-rock angels and douchebags in motorcycle leathers and jittery night creatures with blown-out methedrine eyes all fight and beg and whine and shout for tables; out onto the shattered floor awash in 2 a.m. refugees, swinging through and around knots of bodies like they were straddling a greased pole mounted hip-high as they walked; then down again at the heads of tables already a wreck of coffee spoons and wet napkins, paper, crayons, hand stamps, cell phones, car keys, and the heads of those no longer capable of keeping up the fight against liquor and gravity—bringing pancakes and bagel sandwiches and bacon to the shitfaced masses.
The servers here take no crap off anybody. Can't. No time, less patience. They are sweet as hummingbirds most of the time. Right up until they aren't anymore. And then they might just kill you. Or want to, anyway. Real bad. So you come in, wait for your seat, take it, sit, order what you want, eat what you're given, pay at the door, and get the fuck out. Those are the rules, simple and plain. Beth's is home to some reasonably bad behavior on a good night—a kind of late-night repository for libertines of every stripe. It's the kind of place where you can show up in a bathrobe and bedroom slippers like The Dude on the back end of a Caucasian bender, and no one gives you more than a third quizzical glance. But there is a line. You cross it at your peril.
"Sit THE FUCK down!"
Everyone hears the yelling and bends to look. One of the waitresses was only gently cajoling a group of tiny girls into maybe not dancing in the narrow aisle between tables just at the moment, to maybe take their shiny happy attitudes out-fucking-side and shake it where there's space.
And the girls, they listen. They sit the fuck down. The waitress comes back to the service end of the short-order line, looking for plates, talking to no one in particular.
"What are you doing being vegan in a place like this anyway..."
Last week I wrote about watching the hammer of the church rush come down at the Silver Fork. This week it's the crushing, line-out-the-door, last-call hit as bars all over the city disgorge their moths into the night and Beth's, like a flame, draws them in. Last week I listened to a woman with a voice like honey and iron sing about love and Jesus while the breakfast crowd sat stunned. This week I sat in a half booth under a speaker, something from the weird end of the Tubeway Army's playlist pounding into my soft spot, and watched the chastened dancers bend like reeds and slip, giggling, back into their seats.
The Silver Fork and Beth's Cafe are related across a strange helix of culinary DNA. Both are diners. Their menus, at their cores, are essentially identical, and uniquely American in their influence. Both have history like Coke and Pepsi do, and serve unique, irreplaceable roles in their disparate neighborhoods. To a grubnik, the Silver Fork is where you go to atone for the sins you committed the night before at Beth's. Both places are vital. Both serve very different purposes.
The Silver Fork is all soulful sweetness, Southern hospitality, and gospel-fired breakfast rushes full of eggs and waffles and biscuits with gravy. Beth's is its darkside cousin, operating 24/7, 363 days a year (it's closed on Christmas and Thanksgiving, never otherwise), and catering to a somewhat less wholesome aspect of the human character. It is best after the sun goes down, even better in those soft, magical moments just before dawn. You can eat at Beth's in daylight, but I'm not sure why anyone ever would. To step inside the cramped space while the sun is up is kind of like seeing your favorite dive bar with natural light streaming through the windows or a tranny hooker on the morning after—disturbing, and revelatory in ways discomfiting to the spirit. Beth's in daylight makes you wonder what you ever found charming about it in the first place, why you have spent so many nights and so many hours slumped in this weird hole, the walls covered with layers of customer art flapping in the fitful breeze, the blackened and battered galley, corners and rails and flat surfaces all stuck with taped-up bits of headlines clipped from magazines, like the lair of a hyperactive ransom-note writer.
