A Very Short Story About Waiting Tables at a Downtown Coffee Shop

In my upcoming food memoir, I talk about waiting tables at a downtown street-level coffee-shop in Des Moines, Iowa, the summer between my freshman and sophomore year in college.

It was called the Parkade Pantry, and it was part of the long-gone Younkers family of restaurants. Everyone, it seems, remembers the famous Tea Room, the elegant restaurant on the top floor of Younkers. Some people remember the basement “Coffee Shop” restaurant. But for some reason, few people remember the Parkade Pantry.

The Parkade Pantry in about 1964, during a blackout. I worked there many years later—the layout had changed, but the feel of the place remained much the same.

But me, I think of it often.

The restaurant opened at 7:30 for short-order breakfasts—everything from “eggs any way” to pancakes and waffles. Our lunches included the lovely Rarebit Burgers, plus all kinds of sandwiches, plus Younkers famous chicken salad and a few other specialties. We closed at 4:30.

I worked from 7:30 to 4:30, five days a week. Often, I would work the counter, and it was here that I first encountered the kinds of down-and-out men that would be called “unhoused” today. These men looked hungrier than anyone I’d ever seen in my life.

The people at the Parkade Pantry were kind to these men. I would see cooks pile on more food than was customary onto their plates (when they would spot the men through the short-order window). I would see a waitress, Toni, slip a few dollars from her pocket of hard-earned tips towards a man. And if I suspected of someone being poor, I would charge them for something less expensive than what they ordered as I wrote up their ticket.

Once, our boss Melanie caught me doing this. I thought she’d be livid. But she took me aside, into the dish room, and she said, “We all do it. We are here to feed everyone who walks through our doors.”

Nobody ever talked about this; it was just something we all did. Part of the air we breathed.

Now available for pre-order. Learn more about my memoir in a recent post.