WELCOME IN — Part One

by Cat Kerr

This is the first of three parts in a series of short memoirs about the year I spent working in a matcha café.

The genre of memoir is imperfect in its accuracy, as it relies on faulty human memory to reconstruct events of the past. I have done my best to remember conversations as close to reality as possible, and I’ve applied the words, phrases, vernacular, and perspective that each person was most likely to have used. Some quotations are exact because I recorded them during interviews, but much of the dialogue is not as precise. Some conversations have been written compositely, combining related topics that were discussed across scattered instances.

These stories are centred on opportunities I had to learn from my coworkers and friends about how they have experienced the world as immigrants or Asian Americans. My aim is to demonstrate appreciation for their experiences while allowing you, the reader, to develop empathy along with me. As one example, a common challenge for many immigrants is learning the language of a new place. Minh, the owner of the matcha café that is the focus of this story, speaks Vietnamese as her first language and English as her second. With her permission, I’ve quoted her in English exactly how she speaks.

Part 1: The Doors Open

An email in my inbox offered me a job, from a woman I had met in a 10-minute interview a few weeks prior — if you can even call it an interview. The matcha café was her first venture as a business owner, and our introductory meeting was the first time she had ever interviewed anyone. Surrounded by paint cans and miscellaneous hardware, we sat at a marble-topped bistro table in the almost-finished café. Minh asked me a question or two; then she paused, smiled shyly, and turned around to call for help.

“Kelvin!”

“Yeah?” Minh’s partner popped up from behind the service counter. He had been keeping himself busy with finishing touches on the construction. He probably sensed it was best not to get involved in the awkward interview, but there would be no escaping it.

“I don’t know. What should I ask her?” Minh was at a loss. I held back a giggle.
“Whatever you want to know!”

“Well, I can tell you about my relevant experience and what I’m doing now,” I offered. Somehow this key information hadn’t come up yet.

“I’ve been working full-time at NGOs for about six years. Before that, I was in grad school, and before that, I worked for a newspaper. But a few years ago, I worked part-time as a barista at a coffee shop on the weekends in addition to my full-time NGO job. I was at the coffee shop for a year, but then I had to leave because they changed their shift schedule and it wasn’t compatible with my other work anymore.”

“I see. So why you want to work here?” Minh’s nerves softened and curiosity replaced them.

“Working at the coffee shop changed my life,” I said. “It made me feel like I belonged to a community and gave me a creative outlet. I think this job would be similar. It would be nice to have something like that again.”

With a slow nod, Minh considered my story, evaluating whether it was compelling enough for her. I’d later find out she was a year younger than me and, also like me, had grown up without siblings — but in Vietnam. We had grown up together in parallel, just unaware of each other’s existence on the other side of the world. And we would eventually become close, our friendship far outlasting my time at the café. But in this moment, she was a potential manager I knew almost nothing about, and she was the one holding the power in the room.

“I’m here for the matcha, too,” I added. “I’m actually more interested in tea than coffee. And also, maybe I’ll have a chance to practise my Japanese with some of the customers.”

I don’t know which part of my jumbled pitch appealed to Minh, but it worked, and a few days later, the job offer landed in my inbox. I was about to put on the apron again and serve tea at a matcha café.

———

The night before the café would finally open in the Little Saigon district of Orlando, Florida — nearly two years after Minh had first dreamed it up — the new team assembled for training. It started with a tour.

The café space was a narrow rectangle, with the front entrance for customers at one end and the back entrance for staff at the other. Two digital menu screens took up a wall near the front door. And next to that was the register where we would take orders.

In addition to the register, the front prep area and kitchen made up the staff side of the café, with a noren obscuring the kitchen view from customers. The kitchen was where we would boil mochi, bake sponge cake and honeycomb candy, pressure-cook red beans and boba, whip drinks and ice cream mixes in commercial-sized buckets, build mounds of shaved ice, and wash load after load of dishes. It would also become our safe space for impromptu breaks, enjoying snacks together with a side of customer gossip.

On the other side, where customers would enjoy their teas, lattes, and matcha desserts, the tables, chairs, and benches were light-coloured wood, green, or white. To enhance the natural aesthetic, Minh had stationed potted plants of all sizes wherever she could find space and light for them. Monstera, snake plants, pothos — but not a single cactus or succulent, because according to her, those were bad luck.  

The 5-pound bags of matcha, straight from Kyoto, were kept in the freezer. I’d never seen that amount of matcha in my life — it usually comes in grams, not pounds. Minh emphasised the importance of all of our matcha being ceremonial grade, not the lower grade they used “down the street” at a competing café that sold matcha desserts. We were better than that here. We took our tea seriously. 

During the orientation, once we learned the basics of whisking matcha, swirling soft serve, operating the shaved ice machine, and using the point-of-sale system, we took a few minutes for introductions.

The youngest of our group, Katie, had turned 19 a few months before. She was on the dance team at school and had the slim silhouette to fit the role, plus long hair dyed blonde, flawless makeup, and professionally manicured nails. Her crop top revealed a long mark on her abdomen that might have been some kind of scar (I was never brave enough to ask her about it), and paired with skin-hugging leggings, it would be one of her typical looks for work at the café.

“Nhi, you’re Viet, right?” Katie asked the part-timer next to her.

Nhi nodded and elaborated: Her family had come to Florida from Vietnam when she was a toddler. At just around 5 feet, Nhi was pretty much at eye level with me. Nhi’s oversized sweater was looser and cosier than Katie’s outfit, but her hair and makeup were just as perfect. I felt self-conscious about my frizzy auburn ponytail, the hints of incoming crows’ feet on my bare face, and the jagged edges on my nails where I anxiously picked at them. 

“I was born here, but I’m Viet too,” Katie told Nhi warmly. Then she turned to the only guy among us part-timers, who hadn’t said a word yet since we arrived. “What about you, Lance?”

“What?” Lance had been standing a little outside of our circle, swaying back and forth and shifting his weight from one foot to the other. He towered over me, with intense eyes and shoulder-length black hair that he frequently pushed back from his forehead. We assumed he had been following our conversation, but his reply betrayed him, all at once spacey, urgent, and disengaged.  

Katie tried again, with a giggle. “Nhi and I are both Viet, and I asked, ‘What about you?’”

“No, I’m Chinese,” Lance said. The rest of us nodded, waiting for him to say anything else, but that was all that came. 

Minh broke the awkward silence when she emerged from the kitchen with a large shaved ice creation that we all recognised from Instagram.

“This the kakigōri. It have matcha syrup and condense milk,” she said. With her other hand, she held out a box of plastic spoons. “Here, everyone try.”

Everyone except me grabbed a spoon and dug into the shaved ice. Minh noticed I was holding back. 

“Go ahead, Cat, try!” she encouraged me.

“Oh, no, I’m okay on this one! I’m vegan, so I can’t do dairy.”

“Wait, Cat, you’re vegan?” Nhi asked. “I’ve been vegetarian for a little while, but I don’t know — it’s hard! Like, how do you get enough protein?”

After feeling like the odd one out — the only person on the team who wasn’t Asian American, and by far the oldest among the part-timers, who were otherwise all university students — I felt relieved to discover I had something in common with someone. So I wasn’t even bothered by the protein question, which countless others before Nhi had asked. And I could already tell Nhi was a genuine and innocent type of person, presenting her true self even while we were still strangers.

———

The plan had been to have a quiet soft opening for the first weekend so we’d have a chance to practise and figure out our workflow, and then we’d announce the grand opening a week later. But then Minh’s Instagram ads generated more interest than expected, and a few local blogs had gotten word of our soft opening and published the details. So by the time we arrived at the café on a Friday morning to get ready to open at noon, word had spread enough that a line of eager customers were already waiting at our door.

When I walked in, the three who had arrived before me were already busy. 

“Hi, I’m here! What should I help with?” I yelled to Minh over the whirring of an immersion blender she was using to prepare a batch of cold matcha latte in a bucket.

“Umm …” She considered my question for a few seconds until the toaster oven started beeping to announce her matcha sponge cake was done. She turned off the blender and rushed over to pull out the cake. I watched her and waited, but then realised she did not intend to come back and answer my question. It was up to me to figure out where to start.

Lance was cleaning the windows at the front entrance — a task I wasn’t really tall enough to help with — so I looked next to Kelvin for guidance. He was tinkering with the soft serve machine, which was beeping as its fans kicked on. His black hair was tied up in a bun, which flopped side to side as he shook his head in frustration at the machine. As the oldest among us and the only one with experience in restaurant management, the commercial appliances were his realm until the rest of us had time to figure them out. But he hadn’t gotten the settings quite right on this one yet.

“Hey Kelvin, need help with anything?”
He looked around to see what I could do. “Here, take the spoons and straws,” he suggested, pointing to a mountain of supplies that hadn’t been unpacked from their shipping boxes yet, “and you can fill those containers on the counter with them.”

We’re supposed to open in 30 minutes and none of this has even been opened yet?!, I thought. I tried not to become overwhelmed. 

I excavated the spoons and straws from the many boxes of cups, lids, napkins, and other supplies. After I had filled the tray on the customers’ side of the counter with the spoons and straws, I noticed Katie had arrived too, so we had everyone except Nhi. I asked Minh if she knew where Nhi was.

“She still have one more week of class, so she starting next week,” she explained.

“Do we have enough people without her?” I wondered, not yet realising that with the five of us, plus a few of Minh’s family members who would arrive later to pitch in for the first few days, it would already be elbow-to-elbow in the tiny workspace.

“Mm, it’s okay, I think today gonna be slower,” Minh mused. I looked outside and noticed the throng of customers at the door was starting to wrap around the block. “And tomorrow we have Johnny here too,” she added.

Who is Johnny? But before I could ask, the immersion blender was screaming again, and I didn’t feel like fighting its volume.

A few minutes before 12:00, Kelvin got the house speakers connected and asked us all if we had any music recommendations. No one seemed brave enough to reveal their tastes yet, so I put mine forward.

“We could put on the Japanese playlist I used to play at the coffee shop,” I offered, which seemed acceptable to everyone. We got the music up and running, and the morning’s frazzled mood melted away as the familiar, jazzy melodies from some of my favourite artists brought me back to the creative and clear headspace of the barista version of me. 

Minh’s cousin, who had offered to help out at the café just for that week while she was home from school for winter break, had just come in and pushed open the noren to join us at the front of the shop. She ripped open the package of a fresh green apron and threw it on to match the rest of us, then stepped up to the register, where Minh had assigned her for the day. I shuffled into place at the prep station with Katie and Lance, and Kelvin unlocked the door to let in our first customers. 

“Welcome in!” We all called out in unison. Orlando’s matcha café was open for business.